I’ve long thought that the greatest thing about my country was this simple fact: the only thing that you need to truly be American is an ardent desire to be American.  And it was really that simple.  True, if you are a foreigner seeking citizenship, residency, or even asylum, it might have taken a combination of contacts, money, influence, ability to navigate a byzantine bureaucracy, or simply luck.  But once you cleared certain administrative hurdles (sadly made increasingly difficult in the last few years), you didn’t need to spend a requisite amount of time in our country, nor craft a perfect American accent,[1]or even fully assimilate.  You just had to appreciate what our country stood for, support our broad historical values of inclusion, progress, and expansion, like displaying our flag on certain holidays, and you were in the club.  Tragically, in the era of Trump, that great pillar of American history and cornerstone of our collective identity—that anyone could be American—has been called into question.  And make no mistake, the answer to the question “who is American?” has always defined us, has set us apart from other nations in a positive way (when other aspects of our history were necessarily more difficult and tarnished), and made us exceptional.  Calling this collective sense of belonging into question is decidedly unpatriotic to the core and reveals a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation about the best part of our history and traditions.

To be blunt, it is unequivocally racist to question someone’s Americanism based on their skin color.  It just is.  And that is what the president did.  And does. Racism and division are his bread and butter.  It’s his brand.  It says it on the fucking hat.  Make America Great Again, to anyone paying attention, really means Make America White Again.  To go back to a supposedly better and purer era. But when was it really white?  Yes, it has often (or always) been dominated by whites, but never has it been defined as such.  Our culture was never a purely white culture.  When were these halcyon days when the country was best to which we can harken back?  During what era were we truly great? Was it during our founding, when we kicked Native Americans off of their land, and slaves were considered 3/5 of a human but not accorded even those rights or that dignity?  Was it the 1800s, when the Irish and Italian (the former of which were dubbed “the blacks of Europe” by Protestant Americans) immigrated en masse and were routinely discriminated against and tarred with a racist brush?  Was it the 1900s, when Jim Crow and segregation were the law of the land, and blacks and women were second-class citizens?  We have a proud past and have accomplished many great things over the course of our 243- year history (defeating fascism and communism in the 20thcentury, among other notable feats), but that doesn’t erase the deep, indelible stains that persist.  Recognizing that America has always been simultaneously great but deeply flawed is to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance of our difficult history; it is part of our identity and our national fiber.  And it is of this dissonance that Ilhan Omar speaks when she rightly criticizes our country for the faults she sees while still praising the opportunity and asylum that it offers to so many.

While I don’t agree with everything that Representative Omar believes, I don’t have to in order to believe that she has the best interests of the country at heart, wants to work for a better America, and, most importantly, is a true American in every sense of the word.  What is more American than arriving on our shores from a war-torn country, struggling to improve yourself through education and hard work, and representing your fellow citizens in the halls of power.  To question Ilhan Omar’s Americanness is to question all of ours. Who, other than Native Americans, does not have an immigrant story?  Some are more recent than others, but does that somehow confer a higher degree of Americanness?  Should we get tattoos when we enter the country, with a barcode stamped on us to show our credentials and prove our identity.  Should this be the litmus test for true citizenship?  Are first-generation Americans of Mexican, Somali, or Pakistani descent somehow less American by virtue of having chosen this country, rather than simply being born it in?  These are absurd questions, but that’s where we are as a result of the president’s hateful, myopic, and ahistorical rhetoric.

Many pundits and friends of mine have claimed that this latest Tweet abomination is merely a distraction and should simply be ignored. They claim that we have bigger fish to fry.  On one level, they have a point.  The most immediate problem that Trump poses is the fundamental challenge to our democracy; he continues to erode our institutions (the independence of the judiciary, the non-partisan stance of the military), traditions (meritocracy chief among them—never forget that his family is in the White House in positions for which they are patently unqualified), and the rule of law (lying, fraud, and treason simply don’t apply to the president or his staff).  All of these developments would be horrifying by themselves, and collectively, they represent a constitutional scholar’s worst nightmare. But the long-term, irreparable damage of trying to narrowly define the identity of America as white and nativist, I would argue, remains impossible to ignore.  We have to fight this fight.  We cannot let Trump define the terms of what it means to be American because his definition is narrow and bigoted and ugly and wrong.  We are an immigrant country.  Have been an immigrant country since our founding.  And God willing, we will continue to be an immigrant country well into the future.  This means, and has always meant, that our collective identity is fluid and changing and not defined by one simple myopic man and his base prejudices.

I can’t claim to be the broadest minded or most tolerant person on the spectrum of race or ethnicity.  I’ve had my own struggles and when it comes to relying on outdated tropes or falling back on lazy stereotypes.  This happened to me when I lived in China, when I often treated people less kindly than I should have and thought unkind things about my neighbors or fellow Shanghai residents.  I recalled one particular episode yesterday on a long run and cringed.  We all make mistakes, we all have instances of weakness of which we’re not proud.  But ideally, we process these episodes, realize the hurt that they cause, learn from them, and ultimately try to be better.  I’ve tried and I’m still trying.  Maybe that’s why (among many other reasons) I shouldn’t be president.  Because our president should be better than us.  Not faultless or perfect.  But an example.  I want someone better than me, smarter than me, more ethical than me to be president.  Our current president fails this test on every measure.  He is among the worst of us.  The basest of us.  The least ethical of us.  And we should not want him representing us.  We also should not allow this base man to define who we are.

Anyone who knows me knows that I did not like Ronald Reagan.  I think that his administration was one of the worst presidencies (though that metric is rapidly being redefined) in our history.  And yet he was capable of moments of brilliant elocution, as when he said this at the end of his second term:

“America represents something universal in the human spirit. I received a letter not long ago from a man who said, ‘You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk.’ But then he added, ‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American’ …

This I believe is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world … Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge; always leading the world to the next frontier …”[2]

The American identity is a sacred cow.  It is at the very core of what has made us great and made us exceptional.  We have often fallen short of this ideal, both at home and abroad.  But this ideal has always been a beacon for the world, in theory if not always in practice.  To abandon the notion that anyone can be American is heretical.  It is blasphemous and should be treated as such.  It is hate speech.  There are many fights that we must fight, on numerous fronts.  But the fight for our collective identity, and the belief that all it takes to be American is the ardent desire to simply be American, is at the root of everything for which we collectively stand. And we can’t sit by and let some poor facsimile of a human define it for us.  It is the fight of our lives.  So let’s get in the ring and defend all of our fellow Americans.  Those that are and those that will be.  It’s too important to let someone else define who we are and who we’re going to continue to be.

[1]Whatever that sounds like—I default to mid-Atlantic as the quintessential American accent, but I’m notably biased.

[2]https://relevantmagazine.com/current/watch-ronald-reagans-moving-pro-immigrant-final-speech/