BOB "What Blood are Americans"

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Talat, a 16-year-old Turkish boy, kept asking me the question. He lived in Istanbul when I met him in June of 1983. I told him about the indigenous population (I have a bit of their blood) at the time of the European discovery of America and the successive waves of immigration that came: the Northern Europeans, the Southern Europeans, those who were stolen from Africa (and from themselves). Later they came from all over the world. I mentioned the melting pot (denied by some).

But his question does not have an answer.

Americans are not defined by blood. As many have noted an American is defined by location and the acceptance of the creed: the” self-evident truths” of the Declaration; the Constitutional restraints that begin with things like “Congress shall make no law …” or “No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. I don’t believe that I succeeded in explaining it to Talat.

Twenty seven years later I got a census form with ten questions on it. Two of them were about race. Like Talat, they wanted to know what blood I was. They offered the usual choices.
I thought about it for a while and then checked the box for “other” and wrote: American.
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