Jason D. Hill - We Have Overcome: An Immigrants Letter to the American People

A BOMBARDIER BOOKS BOOK

An Imprint of Post Hill Press

We Have Overcome:

An Immigrants Letter to the American People

2018 by Jason D. Hill

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-68261-730-4

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-731-1

Cover Design by Tricia Principe, principedesign.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

The idea for We Have Overcome is based on an article in the October 2017 issue of Commentary .

Post Hill Press

New York Nashville

posthillpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

To the American People
in the name of the best within you.

Contents

In Search of the Moral Meaning of America
and the Metaphysical Insignificance of Race

Racial Profiling, Police Brutality, and the Moral
Hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter

Redemption, Hope, and the Declining Significance
of Race in America

W e live in an era of deep resentment, envy, and hatred of our great and noble nation. It has become fashionable within certain circles in the United States of America to malign our republic as an imperialist, racist, and white supremacist country that exploits its racial minorities and keeps them outside the pantheon of the human community and the domain of the ethical.

Our celebrated writers and intellectuals pen books that receive accolades by critics who claim that America is ruled by majoritarian pigs, and that the American dream is the nefarious fabrication of white racists who have used it to exploit blacks. Some have claimed that the concept of The Dream itself is false, and that it is predicated on a specious hope that ought to be rejected by all Americans, but, more specifically, by black Americans.

We live in the age of militant Americaphobia!

We live in an era when the most benevolent and moral country on earth, along with her exceptional people with their amazing optimism, cheerfulness, and can-do forthrightness, are resented as crass, shoddy, xenophobic, and in inevitable decline. Americans as a group of people are good people. But, hatred of the good for being the good, hatred for the best and noblest of virtues that reside within you, has become a fashionable emotion among certain elitist groups who resent America and her people for such virtues. They resent America for the values forged in the crucibles of an unprecedented nation-state that has been a haven and a blessing for the talented, the strong, and the exceptional, but also for the poor, the benighted, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the dispossessed. This country could only have been such a haven because you, the American people, the most non-xenophobic and tolerant people in the world, have opened your home to the stranger and the foreigner time and time again. You have not forced the foreigner to make a self-abnegating Faustian bargain with his or her new country in the name of renouncing all roots and ancestral ties. You have only demanded that he or she pledge a thin and minimal political commitment to our great republic. You have only required that that allegiance take precedence over tribal loyalties. This is why an America in the 21st century is one essentially free of racial, ethnical, and religious clashes and violence among all her varied peoples.

These detractors of America despise the fact that America, in a fundamental sense, is like the emotion of love itself: It is a command to rise. Like the human soul, America is a moral phenomenon. These haters are the original incompetents and lazy nonachievers who would seek to reduce all around them to the lowest common denominator within themselves. These privileged haters are range-of-the moment, concrete-bound primitives who have never known what it is to yearn for that most American of identitiesnot an ethnic or racial one, but an aspirational one. It is an identity belonging to any man, woman, or child who longs to suffuse the world with an original assemblage of who he or she is. We, the continuously aspiring human beings, whether we are Americans, or Americans-in-the-making, hear and respond to the quintessential elegiac American voice. It is an enticing one, at once soothing and inspiring, and it says: I am an open canvas. Write and enact your script on me. Without you and your story and your narrative, the story of America is incomplete. This is America, where you can suffuse the nations vast landscape with who you are and partake in a dialogue of national becoming.

By constitutional design, America is a place of universal belonging. It is the prototype of what a benevolent universe looks like because it is the first country, and, a fortiori , a phenomenal social experiment that explicitly rejects lineage and blood as criteria for membership and belonging. It celebrates civic nationalism in place of ethnic or cultural nationalism as the political principle that would forge a common identity among strangers and foreigners from disparate parts of the globe.

You, the exceptional First People of this exceptional First Nation among all nations, you the co-creators of this, the most self-critical and reformed society on the face of the earth, have made these superlative achievements possible. The creation of your country and civilization is both a stupendous stylized work of art, as well as a work in scientific precision. Its sustainability and its inexorable progress over time are unmatched and unprecedented in the history of humanity.

When I try to tell detractors that the American Dream is a constitutive feature of America itself, made possible by the unbreakable spirit of the American people, they shore up a nefarious form of factionalism and appeal to an insidious cottage-industry of victimology often predicated on black suffering and white guilt, guilt for past transgressions that whites have long atoned for as a group. The detractors keep telling me that I am complicit in a beguiling narrative that hides a form of structural oppression against certain racial groups that forever keeps them outside the ambit of the American Dream and relegates them to an existential wasteland and eternal metaphysical anguish. This wasteland deliberately alienates blacks and other minorities from their own creative agency and renders them impotent against a system stacked against them from birth. I adduce my own life as evidence of the utter nonsense of this narrative. I am further told that I am either a fool or a deliberate player in the white supremacist construct that is a constitutive feature of American life and identity. I resist by stating that the current progressive nature of racial politics at work here in America proves that the United States is not, at this time, a white supremacist society because it does not have an official ideology of the supremacy of the white race as it once did. There are no laws explicitly preferring whites, or exclusionary or punitive of nonwhites simply on the grounds of race.

I am told off explicitly and given sundry journalistic minutiae ranging from fringe groups proclaiming the unassailability of white power, to lunatic psychotics who intermittently wage a spate of battles against blacks and other people of color. These are tragic occurrences that should arouse the anguish, anger, and indignation of all Americans, white, black, yellow, and all the shades in between. I sense a higher truth about my beloved adopted country, something that does not reside in any politician or in any administration that might be in power at the moment, something that transcends the pettiness of everyday life and the prejudices of cadres of individuals of many different groups. I sense a spirit, a Geist to the nation I love and the people whom Ive decided, after having traveled all over the world, are my favorite people in the whole world. Who are these people, the American people? What is the fundamental nature of this country and its profound moral meaning? How has my life as a black immigrant been shaped (or not) by the racial politics of the nation I have called home for the past thirty-two years?