Tribalizing America: The Emerging National Identity Crisis

This book is a consciousness raising effort to call attention to the imminent crisis in America's identity and the reality of the implications thereof. It urges America to return to emphasizing a unified people, instead of emphasizing ethnicity and divergent cultures. America's success as a nation, and one like no other, lies in her identity and character. America's identity and character, in turn, lies in successfully maintaining the delicate balance between individual identity and group identity. The foundation of America's essential character is in the belief that individual rights precede and rank above group rights; and that collective individual rights should determine group rights; that group rights should derive from individual rights, not determine them. This is the essence of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which, perhaps, are the two greatest testaments of democracy in human history. Some people characterize the emerging crisis in America's identity as a sign of inevitable coming of age-the shedding of "quaint modernist idealism," for trendy postmodernist multiculturalism, as borne by the "vehicle" of political correctness, on the road to progress. The author, while recognizing the merits of political correctness, disagrees with this notion, characterizing it as multiculturalism driving the vehicle of political correctness to the terminus of chaos. He believes that there is unnecessary and excessive emphasis on ethnicity and groups in America that threatens to erode the essence of the American citizenship and identity, because it encourages cultural divergence or parallel cultures, hence a "tribal-like" consciousness. This book calls for America's return to ideas and values that have worked and made America successful thus far-a common language instead of multiple languages, individual rights instead of group rights, unified culture instead of parallel cultures. The author warns that if America is to avoid ending up like most of the world, with entrenched and debilitating ethnic and sectarian problems, she must return to the unifying ideas and values that have made her successful as a nation. Through dispassionate reflections, thinking independently and critically, the author has presented and established a different, but credible perspective on the subject, hence overcoming the usual controversies engendered by preconceived notions and passionate sentiments that have often attended the subject. Okoli is a visionary philosopher and a precision processor; he has drawn from these dispositions and from his personal experience, history and current trends, to render a perceptive and insightful examination of the issues. This book will challenge your assumptions, the inclinations and motivations that inspired those assumptions. It will awaken you to the realities of the potential outcomes of the issues the author has brilliantly presented.