We have to make sure that across this country, people of diverse backgrounds are respecting each other’s identities, building relationships across communities and cooperating with one another.
Eboo Patel
| Opinion contributor
Jill Biden receives White House Christmas tree for the last time
First lady Jill Biden, alongside her grandson Beau, received the White House Christmas Tree, which was donated by a Western North Carolina family.
The best speech at my wedding was given by my father-in-law. Sweating profusely, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, he spoke of coming to this country as a Muslim from India with less than $100 in his pocket, studying engineering at a state university, building a career serving others by working in public housing and with his wife raising four Indian Muslim daughters ‒ each of whom went into service professions: one in medicine, one in education, one in philanthropy and, the one I married, civil rights law.
“I love my homeland,” my father-in-law concluded, “but I am well aware that my story could only happen in this country.”
It is the quintessential American story of pride in one’s identity; progress for your family and community; and a sense of patriotic duty to build a nation where people from diverse backgrounds can work together to give everyone those opportunities.
The United States of America is a ‘magical place’
That was a year before Sen. Barack Obama’s famous speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. As the future president spoke about America as a “magical place” where his own immigrant father got a scholarship to study, I always thought he might have gotten an idea or two from my father-in-law.
I sure did. I built a whole organization based off the spirit he articulated in his talk, an organization called Interfaith America. It is an organization devoted to strengthening American pluralism.
In the most religiously diverse nation in human history, and the most religiously devout nation among wealthy Western democracies, faith has to be a source of inspiration and a bridge of cooperation.
We have to make sure that in every corner of this country, people of diverse backgrounds are respecting each other’s identities, building relationships across communities and cooperating with one another to serve the common good.
Respect, relate, cooperate – that’s American pluralism.
We partnered with the Obama White House to launch The President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. That work continues. We have impacted over a thousand campuses, hundreds of communities and dozens of companies with our pluralism training.
The American promise of pluralism
At so many of these events, I’ve told the story of my father-in-law’s wedding address as an embodiment of the American promise of pluralism ‒ how pride in identity, progress for one’s community and the patriotic duty of public service become a virtuous circle.
I was surprised when, in early 2017, someone responded to that story with anger. “You have to stop saying that,” this person scolded me. “This is not the time for pluralism, it’s the time for the resistance. We need to stop talking about cooperation, we need to defeat the oppressors.”
But I don’t think about America as a battlefield where we defeat our fellow citizens. I think about America as a potluck supper, where we invite everyone’s contribution.
A potluck works best when a diverse group of people bring delicious dishes inspired by their distinctive identities to a common table. The magic happens when one person’s crusty bread from his Lithuanian grandmother meets another person’s spicy dip, a family recipe originating in Lebanon.
Your best dish is made better by someone else’s best dish: distinctive identities in creative combinations, family stories shared in enriching conversations, cooperation across differences to prepare the space and clean it up when the party is over.
That’s the spirit of American pluralism. Where diversity is a strength, identity is a source of pride, cooperation is better than division, faith is a bridge and everyone is a contributor.
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, hosts the podcast “Interfaith America with Eboo Patel” and is the author of “We Need To Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy.” He’ll be delivering a speech about pluralism on Thursday at the 2024 Obama Democracy Forum in Chicago.
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Publish date : 2024-12-04 20:11:00
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Publish date : 2024-12-05 10:17:20
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