- 4 Integrating the American Nation
In the USA the most prominent, though not the only illustration of a new
nationalism, was the constitutional revolution brought about by the civil rights
movement. Its purpose was to eliminate the deeply held racism—legal, political,
economic, and social—of the American people. That negation had the positive
purpose of ‘‘making the nation more of a nation,’’ to cite the theme of my book,
To Make A Nation ( 1993 ). Some black spokesmen, on the contrary, likewise
demanded an equalization of rights, but so designed as to enable blacks to develop
and enjoy their own way of life separately from whites. Against these separatists
the mainstream of the civil rights movement, however, steadfastly favored inte-
gration on a nationwide scale, as Walter White had successfully contended against
W. E. B. Dubois in the 1930 s, as Thurgood Marshall had insisted against Stokely
Carmichael and Rap Brown in the 1950 s, and as Martin Luther King Jr. had
foreseen before an audience of a quarter of a million in front of the Lincoln
Memorial on August 28 , 1963 dreaming of a future when ‘‘the sons of former
slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will sit together at the table of
brotherhood.’’ That famous metaphor had a literal meaning: lunch counters had
been among the Wrst arenas of integration in the South. As a metaphor, it
envisioned American civilization nourished by the free and uncoerced commu-
nion of both races.
What actually happens? There is an interchange in which individuals come to
appreciate and to emulate one another’s virtues. Ideally, in this Americanpaideia,
the individuality of separate persons is enhanced and our union as a nation is made
less imperfect. These gifts of American pluralism are not skills or techniques, but
the human capacities that enable individuals to acquire and exercise skill and
knowledge. These capacities may properly be called ‘‘virtues’’ in the original
meaning of the term,areˆte, real powers of human achievement. As such they are
the gifts of individuality. But as elements in a social division of labor, they are also
complementary. They not only empower those who possess them; as items of social
interchange they also empower others. This process of social interchange is not like
economic exchange, in which what one gives one no longer has and what one
receives the other no longer has, leaving the parties as separate as before. In social
interchange, what the parties give one another they also keep. They do not have
something more; they have become something else. Therein their connection
becomes stronger and richer and more beautiful, in Whitman’s words, making
‘‘the united states... the greatest poem.’’
It is vital to sense what actually happens in the integrating process if the
institutions of social liberalism, such as aYrmative action, are to be properly
designed. These legal and moral institutions of civil rights reform provide the
opportunity and incentives for assimilation. But if assimilation is to continue as an
encounters with modernity 713