What Makes Us Great

I am an American citizen. I was fortunate enough to be born in the great state of North Carolina, I have an American passport, I vote in American elections – which I have to do, because, as a Republican state that has in recent years been just on the edge of voting Democratic, North Carolina desperately needs my Democratic vote. However, I’m similar to what I would imagine is the majority of Americans who choose to live abroad (expats, as we’re called) in that I am no patriot. I live here because I don’t want to live there. I don’t like the direction of American politics today – the politicians’ selfishness, the blatant disregard for the environment, the overblown presence of religion in American politics.

These problems, of course, are not fundamentally American. They’re products of the current political climate that are unfortunately now playing a large role in the governing of the country. Fundamentally, America is something more than that, or, rather, it has the potential to be. From the very beginning, we’ve had something that most European countries still don’t have even today, something that I believe is America’s greatest strength – diversity.

I grew up in Durham, North Carolina. With a population of 240,000, Durham is a relatively small city with a terrible reputation; there were enough drugs and gangs there to justify the filming of a documentary on the subject called “Welcome to Durham” (they’ve recently cleaned it up to the point where it’s even safe to walk around downtown at night, but the reputation persists). My high school was pretty big – about 2000 students – and although I hated most of it, talking about it over here makes me realize that I got something very important out of the whole experience. When we had lunch, you could practically see lines dividing the cafeteria into white, black, and Hispanic sections. Self-segregating, but diverse nonetheless. And never once did that appear to me to be anything but completely normal.

Next I moved to Chicago, where I went to school at Northwestern University. Northwestern didn’t seem particularly diverse to me (at the time, the student body was probably 60% white), but Chicago is another story. Since its founding in the mid-1800s, it’s been a magnet for immigrants from all over the world.

Thanks to that, there’s a different language spoken in every neighborhood and an amazing selection of ethnic food – Peruvian, Ethiopian, Czech (there were enough Czech immigrants coming over around the turn of the century that they had their own neighborhood, Pilsen – now it has the best Mexican food). Once, I went with friends to a Czech restaurant, unaware that Chinaski happened to be playing there that same night. Standing in the small concert venue surrounded by people speaking Czech, I might as well have been in Prague.

It was only later that I found out that Durham and Chicago are among the most diverse areas in the country, but that diversity still somehow symbolizes America for me. Anyone can be an American, even immigrants, because America isn’t a nation the way European nations are; we don’t have a national dress, we don’t have a long national history, we can actually remember who wrote our national songs. Instead, we’re a nation of immigrants, which I think is a very important thing to keep in mind. I’m an American citizen born in America, like my parents and grandparents, but my great-grandparents? They came from England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, and Estonia. For us, that’s completely normal.

Europe is missing that diversity, and where it’s starting to appear, people – and governments – are resisting it. Africans can’t be French, Turks can’t be German, Vietnamese people can’t be Czech, even if they’ve lived here for their whole lives. Now, obviously I can’t say that we’ve always welcomed immigrants to the States. Each wave of immigrants only became “white” and “American” when the next wave came to take their place as “the immigrants” – the Irish weren’t white until the Italians got there, then the Italians had to wait for the Jews to come, and so on.

We also resisted immigration, and we’re still resisting – just listen to the debates going on in Congress about immigration reform now. Still, even though no one is really American besides the American Indians, and even though it’s clear that our country is stronger because immigrants, from the first English settlers in the 1600s to the Latinos coming to Durham today, have always found a way to succeed.

Although I have nothing tangible to show from my experience with diversity, and I have no idea how I might think differently if I had grown up in a place besides Durham, I still know that it is an absolutely invaluable part of America. This opinion isn’t fundamentally American – but I have America to thank for it.

Autorka studuje český jazyk a politiku na univezitě v Glasgowě a je stážistkou Respektu