I am not usually a fan of flooding the zone on the bad behavior of the rich and famous, but this story might have warranted it. Because while it lacks the cartoon-like buffoonery of Donald Sterling’s antics, the Levenson affair tells us a whole lot more about the serious racial challenges facing America today.

If nothing else, Levenson’s e-mail should remind us how old-fashioned racism—the belief in the innate inferiority of members of an entire race—isn’t the only source of racial conflict in America. Levenson didn’t use racist epithets in his e-mail to the team’s general manager. Nor did he articulate a disdain for African-Americans in general. What he did do, however, was express his belief that white fans were uncomfortable being outnumbered by black fans and that, given this assessment, he’d prefer a broader white fan base than a black one.

Did Levenson belittle the importance of African-American basketball fans? Absolutely. But ultimately his comments were about demographics, and the relative status and comfort implicit in being a member of a majority group.

When Americans refer to majority and minority populations, they are generally speaking of the demographics of the nation at large, which has always had a white Protestant majority. But since the founding of the republic, cities, towns, and states across the country have experienced dynamic population shifts that have turned local minorities into majorities and vice versa.

Germans became the majority in Milwaukee in the 1860s. Irish-Americans replaced white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the majority population in Boston around 1900. By 1980, blacks were the new majority in Baltimore. In 2001, whites became a minority in California. All of these demographic changes created intergroup tensions.

Now, I’m not arguing that ethnicity represents as deep a divide as race in America. The history of black-white relations reveals levels of cruelty and enmity that even the bitterest tensions between Massachusetts WASPs and the Irish never did. But the principle is the same. The relative size of ethnic and racial groups can influence how members of these groups get along with one another. That’s because in intergroup relations—as in basketball—size matters. The majority status of racial or ethnic groups in any given location carries with it enough benefits to induce competition and tension.

A 2007 study of Illinois residents found that living in a “higher percentage same-race neighborhood” can improve “the emotional well-being” of residents. This research strongly implies that residents of such neighborhoods are seeking emotional as well as economic benefits in togetherness. Presumably, the racial and ethnic kinship of majority group membership shores up identity, protects against discrimination by non-group members, and provides networks and support.

Similarly, a 2004 study out of Germany found that, particularly in the Western world, minority and majority memberships have “distinct effects on a variety of important social psychological phenomena.” Most importantly, newfound minority status can create “a state of uneasy mindfulness” in individuals because they are suddenly more aware of their group identity. Majority members “can take their existence for granted,” the German study concluded—and as a result, “they tend to forget their identity (without losing it).” Minority members, however, can feel obliged to expend greater amounts of emotional energy asserting their identities and making space for themselves in the world.

Perhaps because Levenson himself is Jewish, he seems to implicitly understand the burdens of being in the minority. His e-mail states explicitly that he thinks Southern whites “simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority.” But rather than find ways to make both groups—and ideally others—feel welcome and included in the culture of Hawks fandom, he sided with whites, in part because he had already concluded, as he wrote in the damning e-mail, that “there are simply not enough affluent blacks to build a significant season ticket base.”

The facts of the Levenson affair are very much specific to the universe of basketball fans in Atlanta, Georgia. But because demographers keep telling us that Anglos are projected to become a minority in the United States sometime around 2043, there is a broader, more far-reaching cautionary tale here.

Over the next several decades, how will whites react to losing their majority status in cities and counties across the country? How will prominent business owners and politicians seek to ease possible tensions? Will their long tenure as the historic majority make whites’ transition to minority status all the more difficult?

No, Levenson’s e-mail won’t get the same attention as Donald Sterling’s pathetic rants. But its content and twisted logic speak to a far more endemic problem facing a rapidly changing America.

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In one simple, 6’8” lesson, attentive students would grasp a fundamental tension that lies at the core of American history and culture: the conflict between the comfort of home and the lure of one’s dreams.

We Americans still like to think of our country as full of new beginnings, what sociologist Philip Slater once called “a culture of becoming.” Our uniqueness, as Slater put it, has always been “in our aptitude for change and our willingness to engage in continual self-creation.”

But a country that prides itself on its mobility—geographic, economic, and otherwise—is, by definition, built on a foundation of painful separations, discarded identities, and homesickness.

When James left Cleveland to win championships elsewhere, he was labeled a shallow, narcissistic ingrate who was turning his back on the people who had raised and nurtured him. Much of the country seemed to agree. But in his letter explaining why he’s returning to Cleveland, James took great pains to declare that home and family were more important to him now than professional success. He mused about the importance of raising his family in his hometown of Akron, 40 minutes south of Cleveland. “My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball,” he wrote.

I suppose all cultures sanctify the home, but Americans need to add that extra dose of schmaltz. If James’ experience tells us anything, it’s that—myths aside—following your dreams always has come at personal cost.

In our cultural imagination, home sweet home is where our genuine selves reside. Once we venture beyond its radius, beyond the roles ascribed to us by birth, we risk being accused of trying to be something that we’re not. We commonly employ terms like wannabe, poseur, social climber, and sellout to keep people in their place.

It turns out that the very concept of an authentic self is a product of modern mobility. The idea emerged in Europe in the 16th century with the end of feudalism and the emergence of a capitalist economy. Suddenly it became possible for more and more people to leave the place and class in which they were born. In new urban environments with mixed populations, people were no longer sure where they belonged in society or how they should relate to their neighbors. “The pleasures and possibilities of social mobility,” Boston University anthropologist Charles Lindholm has written, “coincided with potentials for guile and deceit.” In a world where former inferiors could pretend to outrank you, you put a premium on people’s ability to honestly declare who they really were.

For the longest time, Mexicans who chose to remain in their home country viewed emigrants to the U.S. with a mixture of admiration, resentment, and envy. They used a derogatory term for their U.S.-born cousins that meant something like “watered-down Mexican” and suggested these Americanized relatives had cashed in their culture for material possessions.

In her wonderful book The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson writes of the pressure many black migrants to the North felt when they made return visits to their family and friends who remained in the South. Her own mother worried about appearances as she drove back to her hometown of Rome, Georgia in her brand-new 1956 Pontiac. “No migrant could, none would dare let on that their new life was anything less than perfect,” she wrote. “They had to prove that their decision to go north was the superior and right thing to do.”

If the expectations and resentment of others weren’t enough, those who’ve gone off to seek better lives have always been susceptible to the scourge of loneliness. In the 18th and 19th centuries, American doctors widely acknowledged and took homesickness seriously, according to Weber State University historian Susan G. Matt. Newspapers published the tragic stories—and sometimes letters—of migrants who suffered from nostalgia, as homesickness was then called. In 1887, a 42-year-old Irish priest, J.M. McHale, reportedly fell ill not long after arriving in New York. “I cannot eat; my heart is breaking. … I am homesick,” he is quoted as saying. “My dear country, I will never set foot on your green shores again. Oh my mother how I long to see you.” Shortly after this proclamation, he lost consciousness and died. Nostalgia was listed as the cause of death.

Throughout the 20th century, scholars documented the psychological pressures of socioeconomic mobility. In 1956, University of Chicago sociologist Peter M. Blau concluded that the upwardly mobile can suffer from having to “choose between abandoning hope of translating his occupational success into social acceptance” by his new peer group and “sacrificing valued social ties and customs” of the peers he grew up with. In 1973, University of North Dakota sociologist Alfred M. Mirande found that “upwardly mobile persons are relatively isolated from kin and friends, while downwardly mobile person have the highest level of kinship participation and are not isolated from friends.”

Today, despite the triumph of global capitalism, individuals’ origins are still seen as the source of their authentic selves while their aspirational selves are vulnerable to accusations of phoniness.

The Pew Research Center’s 2008 study on American mobility found that most Americans have moved to a new community at least once. Jobs and business opportunities are the most frequently cited reasons people give for moving today. By contrast, three-quarters of those who have remained in their hometowns their entire lives cite the pull of family ties as the main reason for staying put.

LeBron James, while a whole lot wealthier than the rest of us, faced the same dilemma as millions of Americans, past and present. That excruciating tension between the tug of home and the allure of opportunity has been central to so many family dramas and the source of so much resentment and guilt. After more than two centuries of mobility, maybe what all Americans need are those T-shirts you see fans wearing in Cleveland. You know, the ones that say “Forgiven.”

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We need such jokes. Despite all our slogans to the contrary, diversity such as ours isn’t always easy to negotiate. Humor is just one of the ways Americans navigate, narrate, expose, and otherwise unburden ourselves of the absurdities and pitfalls of living in such a complicated place.

Eight years ago, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam released a now-famous study concluding that diversity lowers social trust. His massive survey of 30,000 Americans found that if you live in a more diverse community, you’re less likely to trust the people in it. Those of us living in ethnically diverse settings, the study found, “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity,” and to spend more time sitting in front of the television.

But Putnam didn’t explore the other side of that coin: how millions of us manage to overcome the social distrust that diversity can foster.

I have a very devout Nicaraguan-born friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She likes to say that practicing Catholicism would be so much easier had she stayed in the country of her birth. Here in the U.S., she’s a member of a diverse congregation made up of Filipinos, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and a few older Anglos and African-Americans. Recently, the priest asked the congregation to vote on which devotional figure they should install in the church first. Most Nicaraguan Catholics maintain a special devotion to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Mexicans are partial to the Virgin of Guadalupe, while Filipinos venerate the Holy Child of Atocha. My friend was obliged to sift through her feelings about her tradition and others, as well as to consider what she thought was fair and best for the common good. In the end, she voted for the Holy Child of Atocha, mostly because of how impressed she’s always been by the dedication of her congregation’s Filipinos, who show up even to services that compete with big sporting events.

Successful navigation of this country’s diversity has always required extra thought, and more brainpower. The more diverse the location, the more brainpower required by the people who live there.

In more homogenous parishes, towns, states, and countries, residents aren’t necessarily obliged to take that extra intellectual step. In places where the overwhelming majority of residents share a common background, they are more likely to maintain an unspoken consensus about the meaning of institutions and practices. That consensus, Dutch philosopher Bart van Leeuwen reminds us, is enforced “through sayings and jokes, in ways of speaking and moving, and in subtle facial expressions that betray surprise or recognition.” In other words, the way things are is so self-evident that they don’t require a second thought.

Diversity, however, requires second thoughts. When the consensus is challenged in a homogenous place by the presence of new people, things get interesting. The familiar signs and symbols that undergird our implicit understanding of the world can change in meaning. The presence of conflicting worldviews causes confusion, uncertainty, and alienation for holdovers and newcomers alike. These feelings can either cause people to draw back into themselves—or force them to articulate and justify themselves to those who don’t share their view of the world. Or both.

Because of our long history of immigration, the disruptions of diversity have been commonplace in American life. The late historian Timothy L. Smith famously called migration to the U.S. a “theologizing experience” that forced newcomers into the existential dilemma of having to “determine how to act in these new circumstances by reference not simply to a dominant ‘host’ culture but to a dozen competing subcultures, all of which were in the process of adjustment.”

This burden—of having to find your place in a landscape both shifting and unfamiliar—has played a powerful role in forging both the American character and our institutions. I’m no linguist, but I suspect it explains the very frank and direct manner of speech that Americans are known for around the world. Diversity and continuous migration—both foreign and domestic—make it difficult to forge a long-lived unspoken cultural consensus. In its absence, people must articulate their positions in as straightforward and assertive a way as possible to avoid misinterpretation.

Despite the fact that diversity is so central to the American condition, scholars who’ve studied the cognitive effects of diversity have long made the mistake of treating homogeneity as the norm. Only this year did a group of researchers from MIT, Columbia University, and Northwestern University publish a paper questioning the conventional wisdom that homogeneity represents some kind of objective baseline for comparison or “neutral indicator of the ideal response in a group setting.”

To bolster their argument, the researchers cite a previous study that found that members of homogenous groups tasked with solving a mystery tend to be more confident in their problem-solving skills than their performance actually merits. By contrast, the confidence level of individuals in diverse groups corresponds better with how well their group actually performs. The authors concluded that homogenous groups “were actually further than diverse groups from an objective index of accuracy.”

The researchers also refer to a 2006 experiment showing that homogenous juries made “more factually inaccurate statements and considered a narrower range of information” than racially diverse juries. What these and other findings suggest, wrote the researchers, is that people in diverse groups “are more likely to step outside their own perspective and less likely to instinctively impute their own knowledge onto others” than people in homogenous groups.

So it should follow that operating in a diverse environment makes you smarter. Not that that makes it any easier. Diversity doesn’t require us simply to learn how to celebrate our differences. It requires us to tax our brains by questioning our worldviews, our beliefs, and our institutions. American ingenuity isn’t simply born of the fusion of peoples into your favorite metaphor for mixture. Whether we realize it or not, it’s the good-humored hard work of living with people different from us that has always been the source of America’s genius.

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According to the most recent Pew Research Poll on political polarization, Americans are becoming more consistently liberal or conservative in their opinions, and ideological thinking is much more aligned with political party membership than before. This means that the overlap between the two parties that existed two decades ago—when there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans—is gone. And so we have fewer people—both political apostates and regular, moderate folks—who can bridge the gap between the competing ideologues and partisans.

Worse yet, the hardening of ideological and partisan positions is reflected in the way we choose to live our lives. Conservatives and liberals don’t even agree on the size of the houses they want to live in, the amenities they want to live near, or the kind of neighbors they prefer. More than 75 percent of people who describe themselves as “consistently liberal” want to live in a neighborhood where houses are smaller and closer to one another and schools, stores, and restaurants are within walking distance—while 75 percent of “consistently conservative” people want the opposite (larger houses with more space and amenities within driving distance).

What do they agree on? That they don’t want to have much to do with people with whom they disagree. Which doesn’t take much effort when they live a different lifestyle in a different zip code.

Once upon a time, political beliefs were loosely linked to class and status. But they increasingly define our entire cultural identities, and vice versa. Now, as University of Maryland political scientist James G. Gimpel has argued, you can easily guess a person’s political persuasion if you know the snack foods he eats or the music she downloads. (Talk about profiling! But if there were ever a reason to swear off kale chips, perhaps this is it.) It’s depressing to think that millions and millions of unique individuals spread across millions of square miles and tracing their backgrounds from all corners of the globe can be so easily reduced to just two rather narrow camps.

The Pew survey reminded me of a rather dreary dinner party I attended a few months ago in notoriously progressive West Los Angeles. It was one of those gatherings where everyone was of a type and agreed on all things—from what issues to support to what cars to buy. I found myself wandering in thought when an astute local politician caught my eye and asked if I was sad because I was the only moderate amidst a gaggle of lefties. Caught off guard, I blurted out the truth. I’m not used to so much certainty around one table, I told her. It bored me.

Social psychologists have long known that in uncertain times people often seek certainty and belonging in ideological groups. A tumultuous economy, profound demographic shifts, and fast-changing technology can leave individuals unsure of their place in the world. So by adhering to all-encompassing, ideological worldviews, people can quickly differentiate between friends and foes in a threatening landscape.

But certainty, while comforting, is bound to have long-term costs, including mind-numbing predictability and the diminishment of the chances of actually learning anything new.

As social media becomes our primary means of receiving news and information, the Internet echo chamber becomes complete. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm prioritizes the “news” shared by your friends based in part on your “affinity” with them. Search engines tailor their findings for the individual seeker; restaurant and music apps make recommendations based on what your friends like. All this, says MIT’s Ethan Zuckerman, means that we learn about the world through self-selected people who are just like us, which only reinforces our worldviews.

Zuckerman argues passionately against this state of affairs for two reasons. One, because he believes we can’t solve serious problems by just talking to people who are just like us. And two, because he thinks homophily—the fancy sociological term for birds of a feather flock together—is making us “stupid.”

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli agrees. He not only thinks certainty is overrated, but that uncertainty is “the first source of all knowledge.” He insists that the term “scientifically proven” is an oxymoron, and tells his colleagues that a good scientist is never certain, and always ready to shift views the moment better evidence emerges.

Sure, doubt can be debilitating. But the finality of certainty is ultimately limiting and unsatisfying, particularly in a country where more than 300 types of breakfast cereal are sold. The smartphone has already destroyed the bar bet; we don’t have to let a combination of technology and fear of the unknown and unfamiliar kill off wonder and imagination entirely.

Certainty also seems to be a rather naïve strategy for negotiating an increasingly complicated and interconnected world, one that would seem to require more flexibility, not less. In his 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” that great Yankee individualist Ralph Waldo Emerson warned against such lemming-like conformism. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” he wrote, “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Is that who we want to be?

Emerson encouraged us all to retain the right to change our minds. In this day and age, such advice isn’t likely to get you elected to higher office. But if you’re a person who can’t be reduced to a set of political beliefs, someone who relishes uncertainty and loves questions even more than answers—I’m hoping you’ll save a seat for me at the dinner party. You might even entertain me through dessert.

The post Are Politics Making Americans Boring? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s pretty bad considering that journalists like to consider themselves guardians of democracy. This chasm between vaunted self-regard and dismal public opinion suggests that journalists are out of touch with the public they claim to serve.

In other business enterprises, such public disdain would be a cause for alarm. But newspapers are different. Ethics codes emphasize the importance of journalists keeping their distance from the community—and from the sorts of conflicts of interest that arise from normal human interaction. Criticize journalistic professionalism, and you’re likely to hear a thing or two about the importance of the First Amendment, or my favorite catch-all self-justification: If people are unhappy with us, “we must be doing something right!” Really? Is that the only reason people might be unhappy with you?

Like most Americans, I understand the need for journalists as watchdogs. I absolutely see how vital it is to our democracy to make sure that the powers that be are upholding their sworn civic duty. But the unquestioned primacy of its watchdog duties has given serious journalism an air of self-righteous adolescent rebelliousness and sanctimony.

Veteran journalist James Fallows has written about this phenomenon in more polite terms. By falling “into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom,” he wrote in his 1996 book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, journalists foster greater public cynicism. This cynicism leads to more citizen disengagement, which, ironically, hurts the business of journalism. “If people thought there was no point even in hearing about public affairs—because the politicians were all crooks, because the outcome is always rigged, because ordinary people stood no chance, because everyone in power was looking out for himself—then newspapers and broadcast news operations might as well close up shop … If people have no interest in politics or public life, they have no reason to follow the news.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, former dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has made the same argument. “If you cover the world cynically and assume that everybody is Machiavellian and motivated by their own self-interest, you invite your readers and viewers to reject journalism as a mode of communication because it must be cynical, too.”

I’m less concerned with the fate of journalism than I am with the state of our democracy. If the press is to uphold its self-proclaimed duty to protect our system of governance, it has to envision itself as being more than an elite defender of the public interest removed from the social fabric.

Instead, journalism should fully embrace a more affirmative—and dare I say grown-up—role as the very connector of that fabric, the web of communication that defines the contours of our diverse society. As a practical matter, such a role would make journalism more central to our lives, making it harder to kill off newspapers. But the merits of such a shift go far beyond journalistic self-protection.

Nearly a century ago, philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey reminded us that “a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.” For democracy to function, he argued, citizens need to understand not only the inner workings of government, but also how our actions and opinions—as well as those of others—play out in society as a whole. In a nation as vast and varied as our own, journalism is the best device we have for introducing our countrymen to their own country.

Today’s journalists rarely refer to themselves as narrators, but that may be their most important societal function. The first newspapers let townsfolk know who their fellow townies were and what they were up to. As journalism shifted from mere organized gossip to art form and profession, it developed ways to give us a sense of community, nationhood, and place without recording the goings-on of every individual citizen.

In 1923, one-time journalist and University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park argued that this duty of narration is essential to making democracy work. “If we propose to maintain a democracy as Jefferson conceived it, the newspaper must continue to tell us about ourselves.” That remains true today. Democracy, like journalism, is a conversation among townsfolk magnified to the nth degree.

But these days Americans aren’t talking to one another, let alone exhibiting the civility that allows for the kind of compromise democracy requires. Sure, journalists still tell great stories about our country and its communities. But covering the news isn’t the same thing as making a concerted effort to give voice to our nation’s people and places. Too few Americans see themselves in daily journalism today. The magnificent complexity of our country rarely makes it into the pages of major newspapers.

If hiring statistics are any indication, professional journalism may not even care whether it reflects the nation. For all the talk of the ascension of Dean Baquet as the first black editor of The New York Times, he is part of a small minority of non-whites in U.S. newsrooms. Despite the fact that our country has gone through a major demographic shift over the past generation, the percentage of overall newspaper staffers and supervisors who are non-white has remained unchanged since 1994.

And opportunities for non-journalists to contribute to newspapers are increasingly narrow and meager. The op-ed pages of major newspapers have long since been given away to professional opinion makers, interest groups, and the powerful. The independent bloggers we like to think might rise up to fill this void are highly partisan and write to and for their own particular niche.

If American journalism ever wants to properly reflect the public it serves, it needs to discover new ways to bring regular people into the conversation. I’m not talking about more cheap social media tricks that ask people whether they agree with a court decision or what they plan to do over the long weekend. I’m referring to ongoing efforts to bring real people’s stories—with their conflicts of interest, their messiness, their refusal to be categorized in partisan terms—directly to the public.

The loss of thousands of journalism jobs in recent years has made journalists even more self-obsessed. This concern about the survival of their careers and their outlets is understandable but counter-productive. Journalists don’t look very useful when Americans constantly see them talking amongst themselves about themselves.

If you want to save journalism, make it more reflective of the public it strives to reach. Journalists, look beyond the next website redesign, the new business model. Think about being not just democracy’s watchdog but an active participant in its making.

The post Want to Save Newspapers? Then Journalists Need to Grow Up. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s not a bad thing to have such disparate takes on a day of remembrance. And don’t worry: You’re not a bad person if you choose to sit back and enjoy your day off. But sometimes it pays to think about why we get the day off in the first place and ponder the mysterious forces that bind hot dogs, tears, and flags all together.

Decoration Day, as the holiday was once known, arose in the years after the Civil War as a way to grieve for the 750,000 soldiers who had perished over four bloody years. Families who stifled their mourning during wartime sought public ways to pay tribute to the fallen in peacetime. Understandably, graves become a focus for the bereaved, and mourners took flowers to cemeteries to decorate them.

This practice first received semi-official sanction in 1868 when General John Alexander Logan, the head of a large fraternal organization of Union veterans, designated a day each year “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Southerners didn’t take too kindly to this initial effort, but by 1890 all the Northern states had recognized the holiday.

This emphasis on the Northern dead wasn’t just born of sectional spite. The ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of men to preserve the Union elevated the value of the nation to its citizens. Lacking the traditional building blocks of other nations (such as centuries of shared history on the land or ancient blood ties), the U.S. had long had a difficult time forging a unifying national culture. The idealistic nature of American nationhood left people hungry for a more flesh-and-blood connection to their country.

It was the Union dead who first seemed to prove that America was more than a mere idea. “Before the War our patriotism was a firework, a salute, a serenade for holidays and summer evenings,” wrote essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1864. “Now the deaths of thousands and the determination of millions of men and women show that it is real.”

James Russell Lowell, the first editor of The Atlantic Monthly, thought that the enormity of the Union Army’s sacrifice also proved something to condescending Europeans. “Till after our Civil War,” he wrote in 1869, “it never seemed to enter the head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that an American had what could be called a country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. ‘By Jove, you know, fellahs don’t fight like that for a shop-till!’”

The holiday overcame sectional tensions around World War I, when Southerners—though many still revered the heroes of their Lost Cause—rejoined the fold, and the day’s scope was expanded to honor Americans who died fighting in any U.S war. Commemorating the fallen is one way that governments rebuild the morale of nations that have suffered great loss. Even in victory, losses are real to families, and depictions of a triumphant nation thankful for its heroes can be comforting to a populace trying to move forward. The U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, also known as the Iwo Jima Memorial—which was unveiled in 1954 in Arlington, Virginia, and shows five Marines and a Navy corpsman hoisting the American flag during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II—is the quintessential depiction of perseverance and a classic commemoration of war.

But in the aftermath of no war do grief and glory intersect seamlessly. The needs of the state, bereaved families, and surviving veterans do not always coincide. In his book Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century, Indiana University historian John Bodnar describes the main sides of the late 1970s and early 1980s controversy over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On the one side, he writes, were national leaders, many patriotic veterans, and private citizens “who saw in the monument a device that would foster national unity and patriotism.” On the other were veterans who fought in Vietnam, people who cared about them, and bereaved families who were less interested in the memorial being a display of unity or patriotism than an expression of empathy for the soldiers who suffered and died. Empathy is paramount to the monument that was ultimately erected. The memorial—with the names of the fallen etched into black granite walls that sink into the National Mall—wound up symbolizing, in Bodnar’s words, “the human pain and sorrow of war rather than the valor and glory of warriors and nations.”

The annual Memorial Day holiday doesn’t elicit the same depth of emotional intensity as the planning of a permanent, national war memorial. But the interplay between grief and glory is ongoing. The politics and public reaction to war is ever-changing, and families who have lost soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan are likely to observe the day differently than somebody who has not had a relative in uniform since the Korean War.

Memorial Day also has divided the public in another way: between those who chose to observe the holiday and those who saw it as a chance for leisure time. While there’s no way to accurately estimate the size of each group, historians Richard P. Harmond and Thomas J. Curran suggest it’s likely that the latter always has been larger than the former. And that gap is probably growing wider.

Rather than harangue about some presumed decline of patriotism or gratitude in America, I’d suggest that backyard barbecues are also fundamental to Memorial Day’s building of national morale. Yes, it is absolutely critical to remember the fallen and the wars they died in. But, as the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan argued, forgetting is “an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” We also need to move beyond old divisions and the brutality of history. That, my fellow Americans, is where the hot dogs come in.

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No one knew it at the time, but Haley’s bestseller—and the blockbuster television mini-series that aired a year later—were the beginnings of a genealogy craze that would sweep the nation.

Four decades later, genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening, according to ABC News, and the second most visited category of websites, after pornography. It’s a billion-dollar industry that has spawned profitable websites, television shows, scores of books, and—with the advent of over-the-counter genetic test kits—a cottage industry in DNA ancestry testing.

During and after the 2008 presidential campaign, the press had a field day researching the family histories of Barack and Michelle Obama. Indeed, the winner of that election first came to the public eye as the author of Dreams From My Father, what he called an “autobiography, memoir, family history, or something else” that was essentially the tale of a young man desperately trying to find his own identity by exploring his unknown family past.

Genealogy has always had a following in the U.S. But prior to the civil rights movement, which encouraged racial and ethnic minorities to embrace their previously marginalized identities, the study of family history was largely the province of white social climbers and racists. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with millions of southern Europeans arriving on American shores, white elites often sought to maintain their social status by promoting a definition of whiteness that excluded newcomers. Genealogy became a way for them to prove their credentials and gain entry into such hereditary societies as the Daughters of the American Revolution, which was founded in 1890 and stood for, in the words of its president general, “the purity of our Caucasian blood.”

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, such bald-faced white supremacy was in retreat, the vibrant immigrant identities of the early 20th century had largely been assimilated, and the women’s movement was challenging old-fashioned gender roles. In other words: The very institutions that once defined our ancestors’ identities were very much in flux.

All this tumult is what made “identity crisis” and “finding yourself” household terms. The publication, production, and popularity of Roots were part and parcel of a newfound need to locate oneself in uncertain cultural terrain.

The great irony is that many Americans—particularly those who were several generations removed from the immigrant experience—were trying to find personal meaning in their ancestry long after their heritage ceased to play a meaningful role in their lives. In 1986, psychologist Roy F. Baumeister concluded rather cynically that genealogy’s popularity stemmed from the fact that it was the only “quest for self-knowledge” that boasted a “well-defined method,” whose “techniques were clear-cut, a matter of definite questions with definite answers.”

Religion and technology helped make the search for those answers even easier. In the 1960s, the Mormon Church—which espouses the doctrine of baptism of the dead by proxy and encourages its members to research their unbaptized ancestors—opened branch genealogical libraries throughout the country. In the 1970s, these libraries began to receive more and more non-Mormon patrons.

In the 1990s, digital technology and the Internet revolutionized the way large amounts of information could be reproduced, transferred, and retrieved. Moving genealogical databases online then made it possible for tens of millions more Americans to research their families in the comfort of their own homes. A hobby once dominated by persnickety elites was now fully democratized and focused on identity rather than pedigree.

A few years ago, my father spent a year researching his family roots. At the end of his journey, he presented each of his children with an ornate album containing his findings, which reach back to the early 18th century in what is today Chihuahua, Mexico.

While I admired the work he’d done and thought most of what he’d found pretty cool, none of it struck me as having the power to change the way I saw myself in the world. But that was before I looked more closely at the photocopy from the 1900 census he had placed under a laminated sheet. It was then that I discovered that my great-grandfather Federico Rodriguez, who worked as a smelter in a large copper mine in eastern Arizona, had arrived in the United States as early as 1893. Before, I had thought both my mother’s and father’s families came to the U.S. in the 1910s during the Mexican Revolution. We hadn’t known much about the paternal side of my dad’s family.

But suddenly, there it was: proof that my dad’s grandfather was living and working and raising a family in Arizona 19 years before it became a state of the Union.

It’s silly I know, but every time I fly to the Grand Canyon State, I’m tempted to get off the plane wearing one of those black Pilgrim hats with buckles. Now I understand why so many millions of Americans love it. Genealogy is fun.

The post Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Genealogy? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Let’s face it. We are a nation of commitment-phobes, always eager to liberate ourselves from life’s constraints. Unhappy with your family of origin? Form a family of choice. Has your marriage soured over the years? Find someone new! In the 21st century, even an individual’s gender at birth is seen as changeable—and when we talk about sex change, we use the language of liberation: a man trapped in a woman’s body. From where we work to where we live, Americans see change—or is it exchange?—as a birthright.

This culture of impermanence has created what sociologists call “limited liability communities.” Whenever we attach ourselves to, well, anything, we reserve the right to quit when that attachment no longer serves our purposes. That’s what freedom of choice is all about, right?

Yes, but we rarely acknowledge that the flipside of all this freedom is weak attachments to people, groups, and, particularly, to place.

Toffler’s prediction has given way to a lot of contemporary handwringing about “placelessness”—the notion that a monotonous, standardized, and homogeneous American landscape, working in concert with new technologies, has disconnected us from the uniquely rooted locales that once grounded us in community. Not long ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a national campaign called “This Place Matters” to encourage communities to rally around iconic locales. A growing number of philanthropic foundations are funding a movement called “placemaking,” which emphasizes the role specific public places can play in building strong communities with a healthy sense of belonging.

This loss of a sense of place is generally seen as a modern malaise. We blame corporate chains and big box stores for draining the American landscape of so much authentic local expression. We lament how the Internet and digital technology have undermined the primacy of place. But it seems to me that what we call placelessness today is actually a much older phenomenon that tells us something more fundamental about the American character.

In his classic 1888 book, The American Commonwealth, Lord James Bryce, who would later become British ambassador to the U.S., bemoaned the remarkable uniformity of most American cities. “Some of them are built more with brick than with wood, and others more with wood than with brick,” he wrote. But it wasn’t simply a matter of architecture, he concluded; it was that these cities appeared to have no interest at all in preserving “anything that speaks of the past.”

A century later, essayist and cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson argued that the “all-pervading sameness” of the American landscape was by and large the product of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which together established a rectangular survey system designed to transfer public lands to private citizens in the simplest and most equitable way possible. This enormous grid, which you can easily see from the window of a plane as you fly over the country, covers two-thirds of the nation, from Ohio to the Pacific Coast, and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

The standardized system ensured that the organization and planning of cities, towns, and subdivisions would neither be tailored to the natural landscape nor grounded in any specific local cultural tradition.

Sure, over time, parts of the grid developed their own special character. But more than 1 billion acres of interchangeable, rectangular spaces inevitably fostered, according to Jackson, “the temptation to consider all uses as temporary. Space, rather than land, is what the settlers bought, and it was so easy to buy, so easy to sell, that commitment to a specific plan for the future must have been difficult for many.”

An absence of connectedness to place also gave U.S. culture a special sense of physical freedom—along with peculiarly lonely landscapes. Think about it: For all of our sunny-side-of-the-street cheerfulness, there are few more quintessentially American images than a ribbon of highway tapering off into the horizon or an Edward Hopper painting of an isolated figure in an urban landscape.

Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has written that place gives us security while space promises freedom. Human lives, he says, “are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom.”

That rings true, but I can’t help thinking about whether different cultures favor one side of the equation over the other. In the U.S., we have long been clearly biased toward space over place, and so a certain amount of placelessness has been our lot.

This doesn’t at all mean that we shouldn’t make concerted efforts to nurture a sense of place in America. It does suggest, however, that such efforts will be uphill struggles, pushing back against both our history and our grid.

The post Is Placelessness the Cost of American Freedom? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Comedian Jon Stewart was one who got it. He quipped that if he ever becomes a dictator, he’d “get rid of these [bleep]ing squares” Why? Because “nothing good happens for dictators” in such places.

In the U.S., children are taught that the public square is essential to democracy. Here, the phrase “public square” is practically synonymous with free political speech. But these days “public square” is more likely to be a metaphor for media in all its forms than it is a reference to an actual, concrete place.

For at least a generation, urban planners and sociologists have bemoaned the decline of public space in American life. While older towns and cities, particularly in the Northeast and South, may have been built around a commons or town square, most newer cities in the West—often planned with the automobile in mind—were designed without town centers. The explicit intention of many planners was to give people their own private spaces rather than provide opportunities to come together in public.

“We stopped building public squares in the post-war years also in part because of the fear of who would use them,” says Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces in New York. “And those we do have, we don’t use very much.”

If public squares are essential to democracy, is their relative absence in modern American life bad for our democracy—or a sign that we’re not as democratic as we imagine?

I can’t help but think of that over-the-top Cadillac television commercial that features a tightly wound, barrel-chested, blond dude who exalts the “crazy, driven” American work ethic while disdaining those “other countries” whose people “stroll home,” “stop by the café,” and “take August off.” The commercial, while clearly a caricature, does manage to capture a macho disdain that Americans—including myself—are sometimes guilty of exhibiting toward non-productive time, the hours and days that are not filled with goal-oriented activity.

That bias toward filling time also applies to our collective approach to space. Think of the hyper-commercialized, sensory overload that is New York’s Times Square or the clutter of billboards that line L.A’s Sunset Strip. Whether it’s a shopping mall or a new park, planners harbor a strong bias toward filling spaces with everything from vendor stalls to matching outdoor furniture. Places, they tell us, can’t just lie there empty; they must be “activated” by amenities and organized programs.

It’s tempting to pin this desire for distraction on our aggressive consumer culture or on an ingrained American emphasis on action over repose. But the causes are likely even more far reaching. Herbert Muschamp, the late architecture critic for The New York Times, felt that “horror vacui”—the fear of emptiness—kept Americans from creating and enjoying open public spaces. But empty spaces, he argued, are the kind of places—think Japanese gardens—that encourage us to collect our thoughts and ponder new ones.

Common public places are also ideal—maybe even necessary—for the performance of quintessential democratic behaviors. As in Maidan, Taksim, and Tahrir squares, they’re a stage for the expression of political opinions. But they’re also a space that facilitates the everyday social interaction of citizens whose paths may otherwise never cross.

In capital cities, such spaces are where groups of citizens can make political claims and demonstrate the scale of their displeasure within close proximity of governmental power. But everywhere else, diverse and open public places that are not the domain of any particular social group or stratum are the physical embodiment and symbolic expressions of a diverse citizenry peacefully inhabiting a common geographic place. They connect us to democracy not through an interaction with the government but by encouraging us to interact with one another.

In Washington, protests are increasingly scripted and controlled by organized interest groups rather arising organically out of broad public sentiment. Nationally, the decline of public space is part of a troublesome broader trend of Americans choosing to socialize with and live near people very much like themselves. It follows, then, that a fragmenting country whose constituent parts are increasingly keeping to themselves would abandon the public square, both figuratively and literally.

So, yes, the decline of public space in America is bad for democratic culture. Balancing the parts and the whole has always been the most challenging aspect of the American experiment. And if we want our democracy to function and thrive, we need to learn to live with and negotiate social differences and competing interests.

It won’t solve all our democracy’s problems, but restoring spaces where Americans can interact across ideological, religious, racial, and class lines would be a promising start.

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