For some, America is a birthright appellation whose culture and substance is inherited via spiraling coils of DNA. In reality, culture is a living thing and one becomes part of a culture by being part of that culture… not by having sufficiently similar DNA to those in the past who did. As Edmund Burke noted:
It is a contact that people may join… or leave. Having an ancestor who participated that is indeed something to be proud of. Being a descendent of a “First Family” or eligible to the Sons/Daughters of the American Revolution ought to fill one with pride… but only if one keeps the meaning of that heritage and the idea that is the representational distillation thereof. As one if prideful of what came before, one should dedicate themselves to adding to it, and those without such a long genetic pedigree can become part and parcel of America by contributing to it and being part of it.
A third, or even second, generation American is just as much as an American as someone eligible for the DAR/SAR… or of the Irish, Italian, &c. that came after. Our heritage is not one of Blut oder Boden, but one that has transcended such trivial things. We have no ethnic heimat. That “different relationship” to the land is one of sentimentality that others can grow to love as well. “Go West young man” is far more American than some European style pining away for some sacred homeland. America as an “idea” is the distillation of that heritage of unparalleled resiliency and ability to assimilate.
This attack on “white liberals” who fear being called “racist” is a dead giveaway that one considers out American heritage to be either racially exclusive, or priority by primogeniture. That is why an American can’t go to China and become Chinese, but people can come to America and become American, with their decedents being as much of an inheritor of our great American pageant, if not sometimes more so, as descendants of some colonial “First Family”.
America is something far bigger, and far more wonderful, than all that.
