Why Understanding America’s Exceptional History Builds Self-Reliance

Originally Published on AEI.org

Building agency in the next generation will depend partly on teaching our young people to appreciate and embrace America’s founding principles

My parents, Vincent and Eula, came to the United States in 1968. They were Black immigrants who arrived during the tumultuous year in which both Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, and the country suffered through a wave of civil disturbance and race riots. Yet while they had both left their homes and families in Jamaica, my parents were not running from a tyrannical regime or impossible economic conditions. Rather, they were running toward a brighter future in the United States. Although they were fully cognizant of the nation’s struggle with racial discrimination and its legacy of slavery, nevertheless, they wanted to live and raise their children in a “land of opportunity” where anything was possible…