Is our motto ‘Out of many, one’ or ‘Out of many, none’?

There are so many prisms through which to view the tectonic events taking place on America’s streets since the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but to my mind the most important is that our country is in the process of renegotiating its founding motto, carried on the seal of the United States: “E pluribus unum,” or “Out of many, one.”

I’d say that our motto used to be “Out of many, one,” but it’s now heading for “Out of many, none.” I fear it could become “Out of many, me.” But I am certain that if we’re to thrive in the 21st century it needs to be “Out of many, we.”

I was born in 1953 and raised in Minneapolis’ Northside, and I have come to realize how much its good sides and ugly sides are a microcosm of the broad national struggle over what exactly our motto should be today. The Northside was basically a ghetto of mostly Jews and blacks, who were not integrated there but isolated together by walls of racism and anti-Semitism.

After World War II, much of the Northside Jewish community made an exodus, en masse, to one suburb — St. Louis Park, because it did not have restrictions on home sales to Jews and had enough housing stock to take them all.

Meanwhile, the African Americans, weighed down by structural racism — with its bad schools, zoning restrictions, polluting highway and factories, all reinforcing multigenerational poverty — mostly could not escape the Northside, which exploded in riots in 1967.

I also had an aunt and uncle who had moved to the small town of Willmar, in west central Minnesota, and I spent summers visiting them. For many years they, and two other Jewish families there, constituted “diversity” in the virtually all-white, largely Protestant/Catholic Willmar.

I returned to Minnesota some 40 years later and found that St. Louis Park High School had become 58% white, 27% black, 9% Latinx, 5% Asian and 1% Native American. I visited Willmar High School in 2019 to research a column about its transformation and found that its student body comprised young people from some 30 countries across Latin America, the Middle East and Asia — and nearly half the town of 21,000 was made up of Latinx, Somali and other East African and Asian immigrants.

Have no illusions; necessity was the mother of inclusion. Willmar, like so many Minnesota towns, needed workers at all skill levels. Towns in Minnesota today that cannot manage diversity know that they will most likely wither.

Unfortunately, this new level of diversity, rather than being a source of our strength, has lately become a source of paralysis.

Donald Trump believes that he can simply cut through the paralysis by seizing more executive power, the Constitution be damned, but he is not alone in this view.

This is a fantasy. The only way we are going to remain America is if our motto becomes “Out of many, we.”

“Out of many, we” summons us all — people of every color — to a deeper commitment to pluralism: a robust appreciation of the distinctive contribution of every community and a commitment beyond rhetoric to make sure that each one has the schools, governance and policing that enables that contribution.

It is clearly the fear of living in such a diverse America that has brought a hard core of whites to stick with Trump no matter what he does.

That is not a sustainable strategy for sustaining America. We need a healthy conservative party in America — one that embraces diversity but offers conservative principles for how to get the most out of it. The GOP can’t just keep trying to hold the presidency through maneuvers while losing the national vote by big margins.

If that continues, America, this great experiment, will eventually just blow apart. And then our tombstone will read: “Out of many — just bits, pieces and fragments.” We can’t let that happen. Thomas L. Friedman is a New York Times columnist.