The United States celebrates its 232nd birthday this week. Amid barbeques, fireworks and parades, it’s worth noting how much the country has changed in its short lifespan and how it is still changing, even more dramatically, at a much faster pace.
When those wealthy white men signed the Declaration of Independence, they obviously had in mind a country modeled after Europe. They borrowed the republican form of government from the Greeks and the Enlightenment Age, adopted the language and the legal system from England, and followed the values of Christianity. Native peoples, women and non-whites were relegated to non-person status; they simply did not matter.
Natives fought a losing battle against this discrimination for over two centuries, and only now are they regaining some of their status and power in the land of their ancestors.
Women first organized in 1848, or 72 years after independence, to demand their citizen’s rights. It took exactly another 72 years for the country to acknowledge women’s right to vote in 1920. However, the conditions were still not ripe for full gender equality until the civil rights movement and other advances following World War II.
The struggle for freedom and equality of African slaves truly shaped our country’s history. Given three-fifths of the recognition as a person, black folks were freed only after the bloodiest war in our history, but they had to wait another century to be fully recognized as whole persons with their votes, their equality and their dignity guaranteed.
And what about us, Asian Americans? Unless we count our native brothers and sisters as not-so-distant cousins who left our common ancestral home to colonize these far-flung continents during the last ice age, APIs were not present at the creation of this country. But by the Gold Rush of the mid-19th century, we came in droves, searching for better opportunities like everyone else.
What followed the Gold Rush was not pretty. By 1882, Congress enacted the only explicitly race-based legislation in our history, the Chinese Exclusion Act, to keep all Asians at bay. The government continued on that track with the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1910 to divert Japanese and Filipino immigrants to Hawai‘i, and the 1924 Immigration Act with a quota designed to make sure that the U.S. population would forever maintain a European majority.
Today, Native Americans make more money in gambling than Las Vegas, more women are attending colleges than men, and the Census Bureau estimates that, by 2050, the U.S. will have a non-white majority. The California Supreme Court just validated same-sex marriage, a woman almost made it as the Democratic presidential candidate in this year’s election, and a mixed-race African American is about to become president of the United States.
Happy Birthday, USA!
Vu-Duc Vuong (vuduc.vuong@gmail.com) is a teacher and writer in the Bay Area.