The Creedal Nature of American Identity

There’s a recent essay by Francis Fukuyama in which he contrasts two different notions of national identity, based respectively on ancestry and creed:

American citizenship and therefore American identity were initially based not simply on ideas, but on ascriptive characteristics like social class, race, and gender… The full promise of the Declaration’s assertion of human equality was not formally implemented until the Civil Rights era. In other words, American identity was made creedal over time, by stripping out those other qualifications based on ancestry. Getting to a creedal identity was therefore a huge achievement, one that required war, death, struggle, and nation-wide mobilization.

Creedal American identity has always been important to me personally… Anyone who has attended a naturalization ceremony can attest to how moving they are, and how seriously they are regarded. Once the naturalization oath is taken, a person born in Iran or Korea or Guatemala can proudly assert, as my grandfather once did, that they are genuine Americans. Acceptance into the American family should not depend on how many generations of ancestors you have buried in American soil, but on what you as an individual choose and believe. 

I have indeed attended a naturalization ceremony and can attest to how moving it was.

People from all corners of the globe and all walks of life were in line outside the Manhattan courthouse where the ceremony was held. I had spent days learning the answers to every single one of the hundred questions from which the civics test was to be drawn; we were required to answer just six of ten correctly but I wasn’t taking any chances. A woman from Trinidad was nervous about the test so I quizzed her as we stood in line, building up her confidence. By the time we were seated, a small crowd had gathered around us and a young man from the Dominican Republic asked me to quiz him too. He got every question right and it was immediately clear that there was absolutely no need for him to practice. Those watching the show broke into laughter.

I recall getting a brochure with photographs and brief biographies of naturalized Americans—Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Kenneth Clark, and S. Chandrasekhar among them. The atmosphere was celebratory, and a judge made brief remarks that were warm and welcoming. I registered to vote upon exit, and like Fukuyama’s grandfather, have considered myself genuinely American ever since.

One immigrant whose name was not in the booklet, but whose decision to move to the United States would turn out to be highly consequential, was G. Shyamala.¹ She came in 1958 at the age of 20, having just completed her undergraduate education at Lady Irwin College in Delhi. It just so happens that one of her classmates and acquaintances in college was my own mother.

Academically inclined women in India had few options available to them at the time—they could either study what was then called home science, or could look for opportunities abroad. My mother took the first option, eventually earning a doctorate, writing several books, and starting her own newsletter.² Meanwhile, her classmate Shyamala moved to Berkeley, became a biomedical scientist, married the Jamaican-born economist Donald Harris, and had two daughters.

One of these daughters could well be elected president of the United States this year.³

Fukuyama’s essay was a response to a speech given by JD Vance at the Republican National Convention this month in which the vice presidential nominee described a “cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky” where five generations of his family lie buried. Vance expressed the hope that he and his wife would also be laid to rest there some day, and eventually also their children, and so on into the future.⁴ His point was that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” In Vance’s telling, a nation cannot be based on an abstraction alone; shared ancestry is a critical component of American identity.

It is this claim, that the condition of being genuinely American is based on a quality “conferred by your progenitors” that Fukuyama found so troubling. It suggests a blood-and-soil notion of nationhood that would divide citizens based on ancestry, and fracture the creedal identity that was so hard to establish and entrench.

While Vance spoke of ancestors dating back to the Civil War, there are Americans whose lineages go back much further, and whose progenitors were denied full citizenship based on their ascriptive characteristics.

Consider, for example, Arthur Ashe.

The last chapter of Ashe’s gorgeous memoir Days of Grace is a letter to his daughter Camera in which he describes the richness of her roots:

You are part of a tree. On Grandpa’s—my father’s—side of our family, we proudly display our family tree carefully painted by Grandpa’s cousin Thelma, who lives in Maryland. On that side, we are descendants of the Blackwell clan. Your name, Camera Elizabeth Ashe, is one of the freshest leaves on this old tree. You are the daughter of a tenth-generation African American. You must never forget your place on that tree.

Mommy is a third-generation American. Like nearly all African Americans, Mommy is of mixed background. Her father’s father was born in Saint François, Guadeloupe, of East Indian heritage. He came to America through Louisiana, where he married a black American woman who was herself born in St. James Parish. She was the daughter of a man born a slave in 1840. Then Mommy’s grandparents moved to Chicago at the same time many other blacks in the South did, as part of what we now call “the Great Migration” that changed the North forever. They had children. One was Mommy’s father, John Warren Moutoussamy (“Boompa” to you, as you are “Miss Camera” to him). He is an architect, so you can see where Mommy gets her talents as an artist. Everyone asks her about her last name, Moutoussamy, which puzzles them. It is only an English version of the Indian name “Moutou-swami.”

Mommy’s mother, your grandmother, Elizabeth Hunt Moutoussamy (some people call her “Squeakie”), was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas. We gave you your middle name, Elizabeth, in her honor. Each of her parents was an only child. Her maternal grandfather was a Cherokee Indian whose ancestors were driven out of Virginia and North Carolina by white men pursuing an idea they called “Manifest Destiny,” which meant in effect their right to take whatever land they wanted from anyone who had it. Mommy’s grandmother is still with us. On March 17, 1993, she will be one hundred years old. Can you imagine living for one hundred years, and having your mind and memory still work very well? She has outlived three husbands and all but two of her eleven children. She is a living symbol to all of us of the strength of families in the face of unrelenting racial discrimination, as well as the other hardships of life.

Like Vance, Ashe took great pride in his ancestry. But were it not for the fact that American identity was made creedal over time, through “war, death, struggle, and nation-wide mobilization,” the fullness of citizenship would have been denied to him and his family.

I have written previously about the need in America for an inclusive patriotism that bonds together citizens with very different ancestral histories. A devotion to the creedal nature of American identity, rooted in our founding documents, and paired with an understanding that ours is a genuinely hybrid culture might one day lead us there.

Lady Irwin College, once attended by classmates G. Shyamala and Mohini Nakra

1. Shyamala was her given name, the G (for Gopalan) was a patronym based on the given name of her father. This is the traditional Tamil naming convention, which (like the Icelandic) has a memory of just one generation.

2. Along the way she married my father, a customs officer who handled a number of very interesting cases involving the smuggling of antiques and narcotics. I helped him publish these stories a few years ago, and described his brush with death during the pandemic in an earlier post.

3. Statistical models forecasting the election were suspended once Biden decided to withdraw from the race, but prediction markets were able to adjust instantaneously and now see the race as a toss-up.

4. I have no idea whether Usha Chilukuri Vance finds the idea of being buried in her husband’s ancestral plot appealing. Shyamala was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition, her ashes scattered in the Indian Ocean by her daughter Kamala.