Cradle Americans

Hi all,

There is a phrase in the Catholic Church for a certain kind of believer, the cradle Catholic. It means one who was born into the faith, baptized before he could speak, and was raised inside the rituals that he never chose. He was not a convert. He did not study his way in or have a come-to-Jesus moment that brought him to the church door as a grown man. The cradle Catholic was simply always there. And the church worries quietly about him, an insecurity, because the thing you are handed in the cradle is the thing you are most likely to take for granted. The convert had to earn his faith and so he knows exactly what it is. But the cradle Catholic risks practicing out of habit a thing he has never once had to defend.

I have come to think there is such a thing as a cradle American, and that many of us now are one. We were born into freedom the way the cradle Catholic was born into the faith. We did not convert to freedom. Most of us under seventy did not serve in the armed forces or march for it or risk our families. We were born into this nation where the rights were already written down and the laws made. And like the cradle Catholic, we are in danger of losing the greatest thing we have ever been given, because a freedom you never had to defend is a freedom you do not know how to defend.

This week America turns two hundred and fifty. For most of my life, I have heard of America talked about as a wound rather than a country, a place haunted by what she did before any of us were born, a place whose every achievement comes stamped with an asterisk. I do not believe this narrative, and the reason I do not believe it is that my own family were not cradle Americans. They were converts. They came to American freedom the way the adult convert comes to the church, by choice, at a cost, and with their eyes open.

My paternal grandfather was born to former slaves at the turn of the last century. He grew up dirt poor in segregation and he educated himself by reading every book he could find. As an adult, he marched in the Civil Rights movement for the full freedom denied to him because of his skin color. My white grandmother gave up a comfortable life in Ohio and when she married my grandfather in Chicago in 1942, she moved to his side of the color line and joined his quest for freedom. My father spent the first twenty years of his life in segregation. My other grandfather spent six years staying alive while Nazis and Ukrainians and Poles and Russians tried to kill him for being a Jew. On the Lower East Side of New York, my mother grew up in a depressed enclave of Holocaust survivors where she was expected to carry on Judaism and marry a Jew. She wanted to be a part of larger America and left the enclave for Iowa where she met my father. Every one of them chose America because she was the guarantor of freedom.

I am the first male on my father’s side to be born free of any government-sanctioned racial oppression, and who knows how far back the line of unfree men runs behind me in America. That is the inheritance my converts left me. I did not earn it. I was the cradle American they made possible. I grew up in freedom but do I and the millions of others like me know what I was given? Or do I only practice it out of habit? What is the value of a freedom that has not been suffered for?

I have had to think much about what freedom itself is, largely because we use the word as if its meaning were obvious and it is not. We talk about freedom as if it were a set of rules or conditions out in the world, something that the government grants us or not, something that can be given to us or taken away. But that is only the outer shell of it. The core of freedom is not out there. I have had the blessing of being surrounded by those who won their freedom while growing up, and one thing that always struck me was that they sought freedom even when their larger society denied it to them. My grandfather, who lived all but ten years of his life in segregation, always said he was a free man. My other grandfather survived the Holocaust because the impulse to be free was so strong within him that it gave him life.

Freedom is the most existential of conditions, and it lives within us. We were born with it, condemned to author our own life or to surrender it to someone else. It is the natural law. No manmade law can grant or take it away. Freedom is what makes us a person, and it is the one possession that cannot be given to you.

I have argued this for years, and it provokes people. I will say that even in the extremity of slavery, a person is not wholly unfree in the deepest sense, and they look at me as though I have lost my mind. Of course, the slave is in bondage. The chains are real, degrading, and often unbreakable. Yet, inside that brutal existence there always remains a choice, no matter how small or cruel it may be. The choice to run or stay, to submit or resist in whatever way one can.

We saw the same terrible truth in the Nazi death camps. The prisoners facing certain murder still had one thing the guards could not take from them. They could choose the manner in which they died. The inmates who rose up at Treblinka, seizing weapons and burning the camp even though almost none would survive, died in an act of freedom, and they knew it.

This does not lessen the evil of oppression. Tearing down the walls of true oppression is among the noblest things a person can do. But that fight itself begins with the freedom within us. My grandfather did not wait to be handed his freedom before he marched in the Civil Rights movement. He already carried it within him, and the marching was that freedom reaching outward toward a world of equality.

The real question, then, has nothing to do with how wide my space happens to be. Mine is the widest that anyone in my family has ever experienced. The real question is whether I will use the freedom within me or not. My grandfather was squeezed on every side by Jim Crow, and he used every inch of freedom that he had. He read every book he could find. He started side businesses, including a pesticide business, and made enough money to buy a car nice enough that he parked it blocks from work so his white boss would never see it. It was because the world tried to deny him freedom that he valued it and refused to surrender it. He exercised freedom in his private quarters and marched for it publicly to have it applied equally to all Americans.

I have never understood the temptation to trade that inheritance for a grievance. Both of my grandfathers, born into poverty and hunted by history, lifted themselves and their families high enough that by the time I was born I enjoyed a middle-class life. The freedom they chose, at an enormous cost to themselves, is what they left me. It wasn’t the box, the tribal game, or a claim on someone else’s guilt. So why would I become the Backward Man and profit off their pain, pain I never suffered? To pick up grievance as my inheritance would be to spit on the actual inheritance they bled for.

This is the deepest evil of white guilt. It cannot admit that this inner freedom is real because if it did, then its profound flaws would be exposed. So it teaches the opposite. It grounds us not in the world of character but in immutable traits. It teaches us that we do not live in a free country at all, that we live in a systemically racist nation in which blacks and other minorities are held down by forces so total that no individual act of will can rise above them. If that is true, then the freedom my grandfathers carried within them through segregation and genocide is a fiction, a fairy tale the powerful tell to excuse themselves.

Real freedom offers no such shelter. To fully embrace it is to be exposed, fully visible, flaws and all, no longer able to pretend that what becomes of you is somebody else’s doing. The inner freedom was always the real thing. But America is the rare country that also tore down the outer walls that stood in its way, which is why to waste the choice here, where nothing stands between us and it, is the deepest betrayal of the freedom my family proved was real even where everything stood against it.

And so the narrative must be pushed, always and everywhere, that America is a prison and its minorities the inmates. The lie is not incidental to white guilt but essential to it, because without it there is nothing to redeem and no reason for any of it to exist. And a lie that large has to be maintained. It needs a permanent class of people whose whole job is to keep the country convinced it is not free. So we raise them with this purpose. We target the young minds, train the most susceptible among them as activists, and tell them the noblest thing they can do is lead the rest of us toward a “freedom” that, by the logic of the ideology itself, can never actually arrive — because if it did, they would no longer be needed. So their cruel fate, if they allow themselves to be seduced by this false innocence of white guilt, is to be condemned to an identity that depends on their country remaining a prison.

And that perhaps has been the strangest thing about my lifetime, that far too many in this country with every freedom written into its laws have spent years insisting they are not free. After the great collisions of the 1960s, the doors were opening to freedom and yet many of us turned back toward race and tribe. The laws were on the books and we still told ourselves that they were shut.

Some of us kept building, pushing the country into the future. But far too many of us became a backward-looking people, the Backward Man, and grievance has become one of our largest industries. A movement rose insisting that blacks and other minorities were not free, and this was during the decades when minorities had more safety and opportunity than at any point in American history. And millions of whites were told that to defend themselves against the charge of racism was itself proof of racism. Many of them went quiet. It was easier than fighting. The few who did speak out often made the news. That was the quiet tragedy of my lifetime — that a free people, handed the widest liberty in human history, grew so frightened of a single accusation that they chose to give the freedom back. A freedom you stop defending is a freedom that you’re no longer able to see, which is why a great city can now elect a mayor promising the very socialism that both of my grandfathers — including my paternal grandfather, who was tempted by its promise of equality during segregation — ultimately rejected, and call it progress.

The past is finished. Going backward is easy. The past asks nothing of you. Going forward means risking failure with no one else to blame. The Backward Man gets to feel righteous and never has to risk a thing to earn it.

And while we looked backward, too many of us fell silent, all because of one word. They feared being called racist more than they feared losing the very freedoms that past Americans sacrificed their lives for.

We have spent sixty years clapping for the man who performs the right feelings in public. The man who quietly does the hard thing and asks for nothing goes unnoticed. My grandparents asked America for nothing but the chance, and out of that chance they made everything. They made it against a world that told them no at every turn, and still they chose to be free. Which is where we cradle Americans come in. We were born into the freedom they had to win. We did not earn it, and it is easy to forget that the one thing we share with every human before us is the very freedom within us. It is our inheritance. It is the hardest inheritance there is.

On the week the country turns two hundred and fifty, we Americans alive today are the freest human beings who have ever walked the earth. Not the freest Americans. The freest people in the whole long story of our species, with more liberty, more safety, and more possibility than any human beings who ever lived. I do not want to be the American who was handed everything and did nothing with it. I want to reach within, to the freedom my grandparents proved was real even in the narrowest of rooms, and actually live in it.

I have not always lived up to their gift. There were times I stayed silent when I should have spoken, and times I found my courage only after the moment for it had passed. I cannot undo the fact that I am a cradle American, and was handed freedom before I understood what I was holding. But the cradle Catholic has one remedy and so do I: to stop inheriting the faith and start choosing it.

My best,

Eli