Opinion | This Is the Birthright Reckoning That America Needs

Our country has urgent problems and solving them requires the civic solidarity that thinking of ourselves as Americans helps to create. The historian Richard Slotkin has observed that a workable American identity must join both the descendants of the Indigenous and those who dispossessed them, the line of the enslaved and those who possessed them, ... See more

The world has changed, so the way that we think about what it means to become American must too. But one thing remains the same: A cohesive and inclusive American identity won’t just create itself. It must be forged. And it’s a project that we must all participate in, adapting the successes and avoiding the missteps of the past.