So Ta-Nehisi Coates’ plea for reparations for slavery focused my mind a bit this week on the question of why, exactly, someone who came to awareness in the 1960's age of civil rights and who idealizes many civil rights leaders (that’d be me) is so unhappy with the current frames for discussing race in America.

And because I had a long motorcycle ride home Monday, I thought about it a lot, and I had an idea which I hope to share here.

It’s rooted in John Schaar’s discussion of patriotism, and his point that America is a nation where membership comes from an idea, not from blood or land like the Founders’ European ancestors.

Now for much of our history this was just not true. If you were black, no way. Irish, not for a while, then Italian, then Jewish, then Mexican. And a woman? Not for a long time. So it was, for Protestant white men, a place where being attached to an idea made you a member of a universal polity.

So there was a right side — universality — and a wrong side of prejudice about blood, race, or sex.

The civil rights movement I embraced wanted — no demanded — that we expand the right side to be absolutely inclusive. That anyone who believed in our ideals could, and should be an American. Knocking down the historical barriers that kept people out because of their color, sex, or blood was the project. We all wanted to stand together.

The “civil rights” movement of today — the one represented by Ta-Nehisi Coates — seems to me to try and expand the error, and so make the thing the Founders got most wrong the thing we all should embrace.

They want us to live in communities of blood, or tribe, to be divided by our sex (or sexuality), color, language, and history, and for those communities — not the unifying ideal community of ideas and freedom — to define our membership in America.

I’ve seen that movie, and it ends with snipers shooting from a mall roof in Sarajevo. I reject it absolutely, completely, and totally.

There’s a lot of work to do before we can make the Founders’ ideals as inclusive as they should be. Today, they are not, even though we’re far closer than we’ve been. It has been and will be a long road. But let’s be damn sure that’s the road we’re on. We won’t like where the other one takes us.

(photo from Sarajevo in 1992)