And what the epic myth of language tells me is that the United States has never been a monolingual country and it never will be. The ghosts of a thousand other languages haunt the houses of each word we speak. Forged in the fires of oppression and resistance, we are and always have been a nation of complex identities, slowly gathering clouds, epic poems, and power plays, and so the question of national identity isn’t up for debate. It was answered many, many years ago, and the answer continues to echo down, day after day, across the entire country. The echo will never stop ringing, not because
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