The foundations of American nationalism

There are two traditions of nationalism in America. One is what I call civic nationalism, and the other is what I call racial nationalism.

Civic nationalism portrays America as a society open to all comers, irrespective of race, gender, ethnicity, religion or sexuality. Within this framework, America welcomes people from all over the world. Their only obligation is to obey the law, work hard, try and get ahead and live their lives without adversely affecting the lives of others. It's a profoundly diverse and democratic commitment that America has made, opening itself to the people of the world. And many Americans feel this civic tradition intensely.

At its beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the United States was a big land with much economic potential and too few people to develop it. America needed immigrants. Between the 1820s and 1920s, an estimated 35 million people came to the United States. They came into a society that in 1900 numbered only 76 million. Think of those numbers: 35 million over a century coming into a society that at the end of that century numbered only about 100 million. Now you begin to appreciate the immigrant density in American life.

There were no prohibitions on who could come. There was, however, a prohibition on who could become a citizen. The first citizenship law of the United States, passed by the first Congress in 1790, said that you had to be free and white to become a citizen of the United States. This was clearly meant to exclude Africans and people of African descent. After the Civil War, when African Americans were allowed to become citizens, this becomes directed mostly at immigrants of Asian descent, especially South and East Asia: Indians, Japanese and Chinese. And this law remained on the books until 1952. In other words, from 1790 to 1952, for three-quarters of the history of the United States, America's primary citizenship law said that to be a citizen of the United States, you had to be free and white. It's hard to imagine the aspiration to be a white nation being more clearly ascribed into law.

As a result of the Civil War, in which the North defeated the Confederacy’s slave states, there was an amendment passed to the Constitution that said any person born on the soil of the United States is a citizen of the United States. It doesn't matter where you come from, who your parents are, whether you're rich or poor, white or another colour. If you're born on the soil of the United States, you are a citizen of the United States. This is the affirmation of the civic nationalist tradition.

The United States is saying, on the one hand, that only someone who is white can become a citizen of the United States. But it's also saying that anyone born on the soil of the United States is a citizen upon birth. This is called birthright citizenship. America is one of the few societies in the world to have it.

There have been multiple waves of immigration to the United States. When a wave has gotten really large, as it did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and as it has again today, disputes arise about what America is and what it is meant to be.

Long-settled Americans tend to be from groups distinct from the immigrants who are coming in. Those long-settled groups regard the new immigrants as a threat, and as they become more and more numerous, they begin to say, as long as we let these newcomers in, I’m not sure we can trust their loyalty. I'm not sure they care enough about democratic practices. Maybe we have to shut them out or pass laws that will prevent them from entering the most important aspects of American life. Perhaps we need to keep them on the margins? Maybe we need to stop them from coming altogether?

These are moments, in other words, when a gap opens up between the image that long-settled groups of Americans have of their society and what their society begins to look like on a daily basis. And in the late 19th or early 20th centuries, those who are unsettled by immigration tended to be Protestant or old immigrants from the British Isles, Germany and Scandinavia. They saw their society filling up with Eastern and Southern Europeans, Poles, Eastern European Jews, Slavs, Greeks and Italians. And they began to say, this is not our America. It's not Protestant – it's Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish. We can't survive in this way.

There are battles and inflection points. And there are moments when America undergoes a counter-revolution of sorts against these immigrants to try and either shut them out or shut them down. This happened in the 1920s, and it is happening again in America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Now, the split is not between northwest Europe and southeastern Europe. The split is between those Americans who trace their ancestry to Europe and those immigrants who trace their ancestry to Latin America, Africa and Asia.

Black Lives Matter is one of these mass movements that arise every 50 to 70 years to address the legacies of slavery squarely. To try yet again to uproot the racial nationalist tradition and to put America on a less contradictory and less paradoxical foundation.

Like their predecessors in the civil rights movement of 70 years ago and the abolition movement of 170 years ago, the hope of Black Lives Matter is that the racism that has emerged and lingers from slavery can finally be abolished.

The only thing one can say for sure is that this will not be the last battle. But Black Lives Matter takes its place as a very important moment and movement in a long history of struggle to put America in a position to rectify racial wrongs and implant racial equality as a foundational element of American life.