Re-imagined nation

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities argues that communities exist only with their imagining. We imagine ourselves to be Americans, Christians, Southerners, etc., and pledges of allegiance, myths, and symbols follow to make the imagined community a reality.

Colonists imagined their community in relation to Indians who occupied the land for which they lusted and Africans whose labor they exploited. White supremacy was basic to the formation of an imagined “American” community.

In the industrializing era following the Civil War, the North affirmed white supremacy in the West by relegating Indians to reservations, while the South subordinated freedmen to the laws of Jim Crow. Yet industrialization in the North led to an influx of European populations that barely touched the South. The North had to begin re-imagining who belonged to the “American” community. (Irish Catholics? East European Jews?) The South didn’t.

During two world wars, Southern blacks moved north to industrial centers, took advantage of new freedoms, laid the basis of high culture, served in the military and returned demanding liberty and justice for all. The North moved reluctantly toward re-imagining an “American” community that included blacks. The Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson effected the change, so the South moved to the Republican Party.

Ethnic tensions continue to rise because whites are slow to acknowledge that traditional “American” institutional and cultural forms affirm (and sustain) white supremacy. Someday we’ll have to begin the process of re-imagining “America” as multi-ethnic. As Einstein reportedly observed: We can’t solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.

DAVID SIXBEY

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