Americans are more than the divisions we inherited

Rod Wielkie

Submitted photo/Rod Wielkie

OPINION — America has an imperfect history. We should teach it honestly.

Native peoples suffered displacement. Slavery and segregation are part of our history. During World War II, Japanese Americans were incarcerated because of their ancestry. Those aren’t comfortable facts, but history isn’t supposed to make us comfortable.

What concerns me is the tendency of public institutions to emphasize the ancestral, racial and cultural categories that separate us. Land acknowledgments are one example. Well-intentioned, they still ask us to look backward at inherited identities when civic responsibility should pull us together.

My experience shaped this view. My career took me around the world, including the Middle East, Near East and Bahamas. I saw societies where ethnicity, religion or family origin shaped how people were viewed. It made me appreciate what Americans sometimes take for granted.

Some describe me as a third-generation Arab American. That’s accurate; I’m proud of my history. But overseas, when asked where I was from, I never introduced myself that way. I said, “American.”

We can recognize injustice without making inherited grievance permanent in civic life. We can teach students about slavery, Native American displacement, Japanese American incarceration, Jim Crow and discrimination while also teaching immigration, civil rights, shared sacrifice and the idea that people from everywhere can belong to one country.

Our children should appreciate their heritage. They should understand that the student beside them, whatever their ancestry, has the same claim to America. Maybe institutions should spend less time reminding us what separates us and more time strengthening what we share.

We aren’t Americans because we’re the same. We’re Americans because we decided to belong to one another.

Rod Wielkie is a U.S. Navy veteran, retired federal law enforcement officer and former Arizona public school teacher. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.