Justice Scalia on what it means to be an American

In writing this piece for The Weekly Standard, I was reminded of Scalia’s eloquent concurrence in the 1995 Adarand case, which concerned the constitutionality of race preferences in government contracting: “To pursue the concept of racial entitlement — even for the most admirable and benign of purposes — is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”
Published last week, Scalia Speaks is a collection of the justice’s speeches edited by his son Christopher and the lawyer Ed Whelan. The book has six parts, the first of which is “On the American People and Ethnicity.”

I was surprised that the book begins with speeches on those topics, instead of something on the law. But on second thought, I saw the logic: Scalia was an American of Italian heritage before he was anything else, and he gave a lot of thought to what it means to be an American. His essential point is this:

“What makes an American . . . is not the name or the blood or even the place of birth but the belief in the principles of freedom and equality that this country stands for.” A belief, no less. This is not exactly how peoples have been “made” over time, with blood and place of birth the usual criteria for determining who is what.

Scalia tells an audience of Italian heritage that they can be proud of it—“as the Irish can of theirs and the Jews of theirs—without feeling any less than 100 percent American because of that.”

Scalia sees America as exceptional: “One of the strengths of this great country,” he tells an audience, “one of the reasons we really are a symbol of light and hope for the world, is the way in which people of different faiths, different races, different national origins, have come together and learned—not merely to tolerate one another, because I think that is too stingy a word for what we have achieved—but to respect and love one another.”

This is Scalia’s rendering of the “melting pot,” with people of different faiths and races included, and a bit of an almost Bushian preachment about loving one another added in. Scalia is less the realist in that sentence than a positive thinker.

The deeper thought that this part of the book occasions is that the American people are still conducting their unique experiment in constitutional self-government. It has survived so far.

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