American exceptionalism has never been for everyone

American exceptionalism?

You're kidding, right?

For all the talk about Cities on Hills and Last Best Hopes of Mankind, America has always had a significant gap between reality and ideals.

Let's start at the beginning, whether it was Columbus who "discovered" America or the Vikings hundreds of years earlier.

It's impossible to know the exact number, but there's no question there were millions of Native Americans inhabiting the continent the first time white men arrived.

So of course the Europeans called them heathens and set out to convert them to Christianity. Then they started taking their land, pushing them west and eventually killing them off.

Exceptional, huh?


Then there were the Africans. Just 12 years after the first permanent English-language settlement was founded at Jamestown in 1607, the first slave ships arrived in Virginia. From that point on, America was certainly less than exceptional for black people.

Next year will be the 400th anniversary of the arrival of those first slave ships, and while things are certainly different than they were in 1619, there are still all sorts of things working against black people.

In fact, in recent years the exceptionalism crew on the right has been trying to convince people that slavery was actually a blessing to Africans because it made their descendants Americans.

Indians and black people were hardly the only ones to feel the discrimination. Whether it was "No Irish Need Apply" or simple anti-Semitism, or not allowing first generation Japanese immigrants to own property, there was always something going on.

One thing pretty definite about this country is that your average white Anglo-Saxon heartland American doesn't know much more about ethnic groups or other races than they learn from television sitcoms.

I would never consider myself knowledgeable, but I did some reading back in the day. Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," John Howard Griffin's "Black Like Me" and several of the great James Baldwin's books. Griffin was a white journalist who colored his skin to see what it was like being black in the 1961 Jim Crow South.

Ellison's book was deeply insightful, but it was three decades of Baldwin's books, essays and magazine articles that did more than anyone to explain the black experience in America.

His last book, which he didn't live to finish, "Remember This House," was to be about three murdered black leaders -- Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Filmmaker Raoul Peck used Baldwin's notes for the book to do a documentary about race in 20th century America, "I Am Not Your Negro."

We don't have to be exceptional to be a good country. The fact is, most of the recent run of American Exceptionalism stories started with Ronald Reagan in the 1980 campaign. At the same time wealth was being shifted upward, the working class types who were losing out were told it was OK because Americans lived in the best place in the world.

Are we exceptional?

Maybe only in our gullibility.