Becoming an American

I recently became an American citizen, I thought I’d do my patriotic duty to try and cheer up my fellow citizens.

On Friday, at the oath ceremony, about 250 people became new citizens. Those 250 people came from 64 different countries, which means that more than a third of the world was represented. As we were informed, ceremonies like this take place 4 days a week, so that this Brooklyn courtroom swears in tens of thousands of new citizens a year. And nationally, this means that about three quarters of a million people become new citizens every year. And we all registered to vote. But what was most striking wasn’t that we became voters, it was that we became Americans.

I remember looking around the courtroom and thinking that what was happening here doesn’t really happen anywhere else in the world. It was unprecedented if for nothing other than its sheer diversity, which was not only a diversity of ethnicities but also of hopes and dreams, fears and tragedies, and the many other reasons, both idealistic and mundane, that brought people here. I remember thinking that you might also find such a courtroom in Canada too, as Canada is as diverse as the United States, and probably more integrated too. But being (or becoming) an American means something that being a Canadian doesn’t (at least not to me), even if being an American so often means being the very worst version of it.

If you asked me, I’m not sure I could say what being an American means – neither what it means to me nor what it might mean in general. But THAT it means something is really clear to me. And it occurred to me that maybe the nice thing is that it means something, but that its meaning is also unclear.

Being German means sharing in a particular culture (and often a lineage too), as does being French, or Japanese, or Brazilian, etc. But there isn’t one American culture, nor a single American lineage - there are many, and that’s always been the case, so that what it means to be an American is always something that’s contested. But that ambiguity and that contest is something we should celebrate. It means that those 250 new Americans can be American without having to abandon who they were (as if that’s even possible).

Coming from Canada, perhaps the country that’s most similar in this regard, we’ve always struggled with our lack of national identity. I do think being a Canadian means something, perhaps something much subtler and also kinder, but the ambiguity around Canadian identity isn’t the same. It’s not the American ambiguity, where multiple groups compete over what being American means. In Canada, it’s an ambiguity because we lack a strong national identity, so that maybe in a hundred years, with a little more history behind us, the sense of Canadian identity will grow.

In Canada, therefore you can retain much of your original culture, because we’re not only pretty tolerant, but also because it doesn’t conflict with any strong sense of national identity, as it might in a place like France. But in the United States, there is a strong sense of what it means to be an American, but this identity also doesn’t come at the cost of your past. And I don’t know if there’s any other place where this happens. Where being a hyphenated American doesn’t make you less of an American (at least to many people), but where being a hyphenated American means that you’re as much of an American as anyone else. Not all might welcome us new Americans, but many do, and they do it wholeheartedly.

It’s ironic, but this strikes me as a particularly intellectual take on identity, which is surprising in a country with such strong strains of anti-intellectualism (I can’t help getting in the digs). In places where identity is bound up with culture, you become that identity by uncritically accepting that culture. In France, you become French by speaking French, drinking wine, and eating croissants (lineage aside), while in Germany, you speak German, drink beer, and eat bratwurst. But in the United States, you can become American AND you can drink wine or beer while eating croissants or bratwurst, or in my case, maybe cabbage rolls and chopped liver (maybe double-doubles and maple syrup too). And it doesn’t make you any less an American. In fact, it might actually be a part of being an American. As the Judge at the ceremony noted, we are what makes America better.

And maybe part of the reason that it makes America better is that it adds more voices into the mix contesting what it means to be an American. Being an American doesn’t mean living by a static or uniform culture, it means inheriting a tradition that is contested, and in which anyone can play a role in that contest too. Being an American might mean supporting slavery and Jim Crow, but it also means standing up to them, just as it means many others things. And while it would be nice to have some of these issues settled already, the contest—being part of the struggle over what America should mean—seems to me to be pretty important too, and pretty central to what it means to be American.

Maybe this is why some call The Great Gatsby the quintessential American novel. Gatsby’s dreams of wealth might have been shallow, but it really is nice that we are, at least to some degree, the agents of our own identity here. Truth be told, it’s not like I was without ambivalence about my American citizenship, both before this last election and even more so afterwards. But when I moved here many years ago, it was liberating in a way. Granted, in some ways there’s much less freedom here than in Canada, such as the way we’re all prisoners of our jobs because our very healthcare depends on them (and I’ll save the rest of that rant for another time), but for all the racism, sexism, and xenophobia that’s particularly inflamed of late, I’ve also found the United States to be a very open place, a place where in some ways it’s possible to be many more different things than in my native Canada. I’m sure much of this has to do with living in NYC (and maybe it also has to do with coming from Toronto, which I find to be a particularly provincial town), but I have also found this to be true in many other parts of the country too. It’s maybe why I joke that I like being a Canadian in America (to insulate myself from the ugly parts of this country, which I suppose, now, are mine too), but that I like being an American in Canada. It’s liberating.

I’m not sure if this actually turned out to be the uplifting post that I had first imagined, but maybe I’ll end with this. Unless you’re like me, and a naturalized citizen rather than a citizen at birth, you’ll never get to see the inside of the courtroom where I was sworn in. But it was pretty amazing. As I mentioned, 250 people from 64 different countries became Americans. And unlike other places where I might have to abandon what I was or where becoming something new might not mean very much, becoming an American both means a lot and didn’t require that I stop being what I was. And it was clear that this was true for the 249 other new citizens too. Some of what being an American means is bad and ugly and some of it is good and beautiful, but it’s all open and contested. Which means (and sorry for the hackneyed expression) that America is what we make it. And that’s something I’m grateful to be a part of. Even now.

Which is all to say that in this moment when I’m sure many of you might be wishing you weren’t American (and I’m hardly a martyr - I’m not giving up my Canadian citizenship anytime soon), I am glad to be an American.

And now back to my non-stop critique of this shithole country. It’s my patriotic duty.