John Eng-Wong directs Brown's Office of Foreign Student, Faculty and Staff Services. He presented this commentary during Brown's "Celebration of Community" town meeting Jan. 21.
I hear this question "Can we be one America?" in a way that allows only one answer: "Yes!" So as a question intended to promote dialogue, it deserves a low mark. As a question meant to illuminate our history as a nation, it invites oversimplification.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt in my mind about the need for a national conversation about race. To begin this conversation, I'd like to share some thoughts inspired by a visit last July to Williamsburg and Washington.
In Williamsburg July 3rd, I spent most of the day listening to the narratives of the prelude to the American revolution. When we visited the colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, I was reminded that the ideas that led to war and separation from England were derived from the long period during which the colonists in fact had enjoyed the rights of being Englishmen; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness joined to notions of equal rights were, in the reckoning of 18th-century Virginians, not for everyone, but rather English prerogatives, reserved for those of English heritage. That afternoon a performance depicting the life of blacks in Colonial Williamsburg dramatically reinforced the realities of oppression that inevitably came with slavery. That evening in the handsome town square, an Air Force band played easy-listening versions of songs with big band origins mixed with a good sampling of patriotic tunes. While the band itself revealed in its makeup the multiracial aspect of U.S. armed forces of our time, I could not help remarking that the audience was overwhelmingly white. (I say this without censure, but as a simple witness to a memorable montage.)
The next morning, driving north through Virginia, we heard on NPR interviews about the subject of race in America and the work of the President's Initiative on Racial Dialogue. That I was covering ground that had been contested during the Civil War and territory that was meaningful in the Revolution made me feel as if I were inside a kind of documentary, traveling through historical time, across a historical space, and thinking about historical questions, with John Hope Franklin and others as commentators.
By the time we arrived at our destination, the Mall in the District of Columbia, the audience was as remarkably multiracial as the audience the night before had been remarkably white. Arrayed across the Mall were pavilions celebrating culture and song, a kind of diversity extravaganza produced by the Smithsonian. It felt as if we had traveled not only many miles, but many years from an ancient colonial capital, where the public's face was closer to its historical origins, to the head city of a new America with new demographics and a visibly different face.
My travelogue is meant to make real the notion that there is not one America. An observant traveler to this country will see local color, hear regional accents, encounter values that grew and survived in specific places. In large measure Americans live in racial enclaves separated by invisible gates.
But if that is the case, then how can we understand the very public and increasingly numerous displays of diversity in America? When in 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the Mall with monuments on every side and intoned the phrase "all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," he was uttering a phrase once uttered in colonial America, perhaps originally in Williamsburg. The context had changed and so had the meaning. Where once these words described rights fit only for Englishmen, two centuries later they were widely acknowledged as words meaningful for all Americans regardless of race. But as King was reminding us that day, for Americans of color, those words were written on an unredeemed promissory note.
Focusing on these words illustrates that while Americans of different color have lived separate lives over two centuries, it is also the case that these Americans have lived in constant encounter. We have, so to speak, become familiar with each other's languages, and shared a public discourse. There has been a conversation of sorts going on for all these many years. It has been a conversation that has been confounded by misunderstanding and mistrust. But it is also a conversation that, in our time, has come to be driven by a common commitment to fairness.
In my view, "fairness" is the central concept that needs reinterpretation. And as that reinterpretation moves forward, I believe it would be helpful to focus on the relationships that will emerge, on the spaces between and among us, rather than on the positions the We's and They's have come to adopt. As is the case in any relationship, each participant responds to the other, or the relationship is endangered. In thinking of America as a relationship, not as "one," and not as "many," I believe we create best a beginning for dialogue.