The Bicentennial in 1976 was for me, as an African American teenager, a time of optimism. It was a moment to reflect upon our national history, and my first conscious celebration of what it means to be a citizen, a part of the polis larger than myself. Even at that age I was not naive about our country’s often-problematic past, yet I was profoundly encouraged by the progress of the Civil Rights Movement and by the social and economic gains of my own family.
I had also witnessed how legal and constitutional guardrails, the rule of law, reined in the crimes and misdemeanors of President Richard Nixon and his cohort during the Watergate scandal. Closer to hand, I was looking forward to finishing high school, going on to college and making my way into the wider world. I felt great hope in my future as an American citizen.
What I could not have imagined was that in 50 years, during the run-up to the nation’s next big birthday celebration, I would be carrying my United States passport every day in the fear of having to ward off potential search and seizure by government agents. It is disorienting to face the prospect that, 60 years after the Civil Rights Act and 160 years after the 14th Amendment, I must now carry my “papers” as I go about my daily round in Maine. I must do this because of the color of my skin, because I am African American and because I might be taken for an immigrant, a wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time, illegal or otherwise.
Whenever I allow myself to think about these circumstances, I am reduced to incredulity, because I am forced to admit that, yes, this is America, the America I spent my young life believing in and wanting to help build.
Who can say how much has been lost in the past 50 years? How much constitutional ground, goodwill and civic faith? What does that loss portend for the next 50, 100, 250 years? These concerns may seem like hyperbolic overstatement, but I don’t think they are. Wherever one looks — through lenses of gender relations, income inequality, elite impunity, book banning, conspiracy theories, environmental degradation, political polarization — our nation seems to be fraying at the seams. I fear that we Americans are living off and have taken for granted the capital that our parents and grandparents built and compounded and, in a lazy, self-satisfied, near-narcissistic haze, have lost sight of that inheritance, which previously enabled our progress and prosperity.
“Same as it ever was,” one might say, but I think the conditions are different this time, for three reasons. The first is the Faustian bargain we have made with technology, which has started to accumulate manipulative force — human and mechanical — beyond anyone’s ability to control or fully understand it. I am mostly but not only referring to social media, artificial intelligence, facial-recognition software and other forms of surveillance, though we might also add a general notion of speed. Consider how such inventions enable people to act, often impulsively, geometrically expediting the transmission of misinformation and false or bad ideas.
Second, climate change. Or global warming or “global weirding” as the scientists probably should have called it to make it more meme-able. We are living within an accumulating increase of warnings that something is off: more violent storms, increasing wildfires, melting polar ice, species loss, ocean-current disruptions, heat waves, droughts, dying coral, changing patterns. And we seem as a society to have convinced ourselves that we can safely — blithely — ignore the mathematical likelihood that when these trends culminate it will go climactically (near-pun intended) bad all at once, and we will not then have the time to build or improvise solutions. Or even to diagnose or to recognize what is happening.
My third reason for grave concern has to do with what we can put under a general rubric of “race.” We don’t talk about the issues provoked by and the threats looming from AI and social media, or the frightening and cruel realities of climate change, because we are too busy overtly and covertly arguing about racial conflict, which in many ways has become the theme of the nation: Who belongs, and who doesn’t? Who is a citizen, and who isn’t? Is this a nation solely for white people? For white men? I believe the current frenzy over immigration is self-defeating in so many ways. After all, who is going to ease our demographic crisis, including caring for our expanding elderly population, or do many other jobs — meatpacking, agriculture, construction, hospitality, food services, cleaning — that most Americans don’t want or refuse to do?
This, I think, goes all the way back to “three-fifths of a person,” the constitutional compromise on political representation in Article I, Section 2, that designated Black people as “debased by servitude,” James Madison’s term in Federalist No. 54. Black Americans were thus stipulated into a caste framework that inheres to this day. Too many of us cannot get past the lingering mythic fantasy of a white nation, where only certain people have full value, and it has caused us as a nation to lose track of what we have accomplished and what we have left to do. And causes me to carry my passport.
America is at a crossroads. We risk undoing 300 years of development, and — depending on how you want to count it, from the Emancipation Proclamation or, alternatively, from Brown v. Board of Education — generations of progress toward the more perfect union, the peace and predictable stability that we all crave and treasure. It takes hundreds of years to build a society. It takes far less time to endanger and destroy it.
One might say that this unraveling, driven by short-sightedness, xenophobia, selfishness and ordinary greed, is to be expected, that it is simply how we humans are. Benjamin Franklin famously warned that the republic he and his coevals had gifted us was ours “if we could keep it.” In my judgment, we are mindlessly close to realizing the founders’ greatest fear, what they worked so hard and risked their lives to prevent: the tragedy of our being undone by ourselves and our all-too human nature.
Anthony Walton is senior writer-in-residence at Bowdoin College. His most recent books are The End of Respectability and 1968, a chapbook of poems.