American? At a Time When

¶ … American? At a time when the Republican Party of California had started an anti-immigrant crusade and bilingual education in the nation's schools, the author chose to provide a definition of American nationality, which was the main subject of fierce national debate. The fierce national debate was characterized by various significant events including fears that non-white immigration was destroying America's ethno-cultural community and the emergence of new social history that emphasized on diverse experiences of various groups in the American society.

This debate was also fueled by the loss of a sense of social unity and the disjointed national consciousness. In seeking to address the issue of American nationality, the author traced the underlying issues to the country's founding era and suggested that the disagreements and concerns about American identity were not new. Since the tensions between inclusive and limiting descriptions of national community have been in existence for long, there has never been a single solution to the issue of American identity.

The author's main argument is that American identity and citizenship has historically been defined by blood and political allegiance. This is evident in the fact that American nationality has practically involved the mixture of civic and ethnic definitions. This definition of American identity, nationality, and citizenship can be traced back to the initial days of the republic when the nation was not only committed to liberty but it also rested on slavery. In this case, slavery acted as a means of shaping the identity i.e.

The sense of self of every American, which gave nationhood a powerful exclusionary dimension from the onset. Due to the consideration of American identity from blood and political allegiance, it's difficult to obtain a single solution to inclusive and restrictive definitions of American identity. Therefore, the author suggests that American identity can be described from civic and ethnic considerations. The author uses various elements to support his argument since he begins the process of understanding American identity by examining the common themes of American history.

The author attributes the apparent lack of clarity about the issue to the fact that American's debates about nationality are a reflection of huge contradiction in the Western tradition. In this case, American scholars state that the United States is similar to the France because its nationality has been based on universal principles rather than parochial since independence. Therefore, for an individual to be an American, he/she had to commit to an ideology of equality, democracy, and liberty (Foner, p. 152).

The second aspect used by the author in support of his argument is slavery that helped in shaping American identity. Through slavery, the value of American citizenship was forced to partially rest on its denial of others. Since it made up the most impenetrable limit of American citizenship, slavery made all blacks invisible to the people who were imagining or crafting the American community. The third aspect that seemingly supports the author's argument about American identity is provisions of the original Constitution.

The original American Constitution did not have any provisions that defined who are citizens of the United States as well as the privileges and immunities they.