On Sunday 3/15/2026, I submitted the essay below titled, “Toward a New American Identity” to a local newspaper. Anyone can submit a letter up to 300 words and a column up to 750 words. Mine is 738 words. It seems the newspaper will not publish it since it has been more than a week as of 3/24/2026, so I am sharing it here with a Footnotes section as a bonus. The Footnotes section has links to videos and webpages I mention in the essay.

The essay’s earlier draft with about 1,200 words took a while to write, and cutting it down to 738 words took almost as long. My essay talks about the lack of a shared American identity, my past experiences of racial discrimination, and some suggestions on moving forward.

I have no idea what the newspaper’s editorial policy is, and I cannot objectively criticize my own writing to see what led to its non-publication. While my writing might be controversial, it does not seem all that much more so than other published letters and columns. Recently published columns include supporting and opposing the Iran war, for example. I was hoping the newspaper would publish my essay since it has a different perspective. I used to be more afraid of expressing my opinions due to possible negative reactions in-person and on social media. I then realized I have to risk expressing some opinions to move conversations forward. Here it is below.

The Original Essay

Identity is an emotional term that can make us question our core. I wonder if the lack of a shared identity as Americans is one factor in our social and political struggles. When we do not have a strong shared identity, we can more easily fall into building our identity through conflict and devaluing others.

I suspect racial discrimination is an offshoot of this thinking. It is the view that people from other races are inferior and deserve a lower social position. Race to me is a fuzzy and mutable concept composed of ancestry, culture, and physical appearances. If it was immutable, multi-racial people would not exist. 

I am a Korean-American who was born in the US and spent my childhood in South Korea, which was a mixed blessing. It gave me a different perspective; my Korean identity prompted others to treat me as an inferior Other.

When I moved to the US as a teenager, I noticed Hollywood was telling viewers that the only two paths for an Asian are nerd or Kung Fu Master. A college friend told me, “You Asians are smart but not creative.” 

When I moved to Western MA ten years ago, occasional incidents of discrimination continued. I heard comments such as “You Chinese don’t care about open space, but we Americans do.” I also have had ambiguous experiences where people who claim to be champions of racial justice would dismiss or caricaturize me. It made me leery that they are using People of Color as props for elevating their own identity.

People can be overt. Turning Point USA recently hosted the “All-American Halftime Show” featuring Kid Rock as a reaction against the Super Bowl halftime show featuring the American rapper Bad Bunny from Puerto Rico. I took the Turning Point show’s message to be that only people of certain ancestries and appearances can define what America is. The irony was that these self-appointed arbiters derived their music from the people they excluded. Kid Rock debuted as a rapper after opening shows for Black rappers. His song “Bawitdaba” is a reworking of the 1979 hit “Rapper’s Delight” from the Sugarhill Gang, according to songfacts.com.

At the core, I wonder if these are all struggles for identity, regardless of political leanings. I suspect many Americans have inner pain about not having a clear identity.

America was built on an ideal, not a uniform ancestry or culture. Even people of European descent cannot claim a homogeneous identity since Europeans have different nationalities, languages, cultures, and physical features. The American founding myth was that revolutionaries created a new nation of free people by fighting against the British monarchy.

The founding documents conflict with the myth of equality. The 1776 Declaration of independence states that “all men are created equal”, but Article 1, Section 2 of the 1789 Constitution states that a non-free person shall be counted as three-fifths of a free person when apportioning representatives. The 13th Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery, acknowledging this dilemma.

America continued being a class-based society, albeit less overtly. Initially, classes were based on race. Following historical wars and protests, race-based classes weakened, but a class system driven by wealth and family connections dominated.

The division and anger I see suggest that American identity is fracturing. Reviving it would require difficult self-reflections and questions. Americans would need to acknowledge America’s contradictions – equality and discrimination, generosity and greed, celebrations and wars. It would probably take a combined effort of creating a shared culture, re-understanding the Constitution, and taking specific actions. One cynical question is whether the US has the capacity for change when it cannot even provide basic healthcare for all.

The Constitution with its 27 amendments stopped being an accessible document for all and might require a rewrite. A cultural change led by all, not arbitrary self-appointees, might be needed to go beyond the limited ability of a legal document to connect people.

Americans would need more specific actions. For example, many protests are calling for the abolition of ICE, but then what? People of Color would not need to worry about harassment by government employees, but discrimination and tokenism would likely continue. Immigrants without visas would stay stuck in a gray area, their labors running the US economy, yet themselves not having authorization to reside in the US.

Some difficult questions await Americans. Asking them would mean facing one’s own faults and yearnings instead of blaming mythical Others.

Footnotes

1. Readers might notice that I never use the popular term “white” or “White” to describe Americans of European descent with lighter skin colors. It was intentional to try to get people to consider different perspectives without denigrating certain groups of people or putting people into broad boxes.
2. Some well-known multi-racial people include President Barack Obama, the singer Beyoncé, and the actor Daniel Henney.
3. I have some specific experiences of racial tokenism with documentation, but based on the 750-word limit and the dignity of people with whom I had negative experiences, I decided to not go into more specifics. I will mention some examples here. In a public meeting, somebody made a condescending and caricaturing statement about people from an Asian nation due to not realizing their complicated government structure. This person in the past made multiple social media posts about racial justice. I made a public complaint and did not receive a response. In another instance, a graduate student in an academic paper relegated me into a generic group of older men who were afraid to take risks for racial justice because I did not work on this student’s proposed group project in a diverse city. If the student had talked with me in depth, one would have found out that I was taking workshops on economic empowerment in a nearby diverse city. People sometimes only see color when it is convenient for them.
4. The Bad Bunny Super Bowl Halftime Show is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6FuWd4wNd8. The show was mostly in Spanish with a song in English by Lady Gaga.
5. Turning Point USA is a conservative group started by the late Charlie Kirk who was assassinated in 2025 at a college speaking event. The group hosted the alternative halftime show, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJszMT9wZtQ&list=RDnJszMT9wZtQ, as a reaction against the Bad Bunny show. The Turning Point show featured all songs in English. Most of the songs were in the country genre with some instrumentals. All musicians had lighter skin complexions. What I personally found degrading was that four artists with darker skin complexions introduced Kid Rock as their homie and disappeared into the background (Timestamp 1:04:28).
6. Kid Rock, for those who do not know him, is an American musician who was very popular in the 1990s. He debuted as a rapper and sometimes performs as a country singer under his birth name, Robert Ritchie. Here is a brief bio: https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/brian-mccollum/2015/08/26/kid-rock-early-years-detroit/31193049/. While I do not enjoy his style of music or his political viewpoints, I still find him to be a skilled musician. He was the headliner for the Turning Point show and got some flack for likely lip-syncing. For about 30 seconds starting at 1:06:00 on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJszMT9wZtQ&list=RDnJszMT9wZtQ, you can see him frequently stopping in the middle of singing while the song still plays. He later explained it as a video editing error, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZom5_NMUyM, and I am not convinced of his explanation.
7. Kid Rock performed Bawitdaba, one of his earlier hit songs from the 1990s, at the alternative halftime show. The original music video for the song, https://youtu.be/1OrNS2zbTZg?si=JlgijthQFb0AU89w, features him as a pimp with prostitutes hanging out on a dry terrain. His popular image was that of a rebel from a tough background, but it recently came out that he grew up as the son of a wealthy car dealership owner in Michigan: https://tasteofcountry.com/kid-rock-childhood-home-pictures/.
8. The song Bawitdaba is a reworking of “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang from 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcCK99wHrk0. An interview with a musician who collaborated with Kid Rock supports this idea. “Uncle Kracker was in the studio with Kid Rock when Rock came up with the Sugarhill Gang-inspired chorus.” (https://www.songfacts.com/facts/kid-rock/bawitdaba) Also, if you listen to those songs side by side, you will notice some similarities, especially Bawitdaba’s gibberish rap section which resembles the Rapper’s Delight’s fast rap section.
9. To read government transcripts of the founding documents of the United States, go here. Declaration of Independence: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript. The Constitution: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript. The 13th Amendment as “Amendment XIII”: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27.