Besides being a high school teacher for more than thirty years, I spent about fifteen years helping young Americans learn for themselves what it means to be an American.
Each summer from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, I traveled to far-flung places like Australia, Iceland, and a dozen or more European countries, coaching high school aged American athletes in soccer cups like Oslo’s Norway Cup, Denmark’s Dana Cup, and Hungary’s Kun Cup. One of the tournaments, Sweden’s Gothia Cup, hosts more than 1,700 teams from 80 nations, with an Olympic-style opening ceremony that draws 50,000 spectators.
My first trip was with a group called Teams USA, and in subsequent years with a group called Stars ‘n Stripes. And everywhere we went, we told our young athletes that winning soccer games was somewhere well down the list of our expectations for them, behind our top priorities of performing as goodwill ambassadors for America, or learning what other cultures might have to teach us.
Our players came from all across the United States, and part of the fun was watching New Jersey teens become fast friends with players from Utah and everywhere in-between, learning that they shared more similarities than differences. We trained them hard, three sessions a day for a week or so at some remote training camp, forging strangers into disciplined, well-conditioned teams before immersing them into highly competitive cups against foreign athletes for whom soccer was not just a sport, but a lifestyle.
As you might imagine, our American players were star-struck as they watched athletes their own age from Europe, Asia, or Africa perform magic tricks with a soccer ball.
But once the game was over, teams from other countries treated our American kids like rock stars.
One summer, a Swedish team in Gothenburg invited our team to be their guests at a barbecue — a fairly common experience we enjoyed year after year — and as the players joked with each other, challenged each other to juggling contests, or sat and told stories about their lives, I chatted with the Swedish coach.
“They seem to be getting along pretty well,” I said to him.
“I am not surprised,” he said. “Our players have always been fascinated with you Americans, and they couldn’t wait to spend time with you.”
I asked him what the source of their fascination was, and his answer surprised me. It had nothing to do with American TV, clothing styles, music or slang.
“We see your teams walking down the street and we know you are Americans, even when you are not wearing your uniforms. We know because you have blonde hair, and brown hair, and red hair, and black hair. You have white faces, black faces, brown faces, and Asian faces. No other teams in the world are like that. And our players are fascinated that so many different types of people can be together on the same team — and not even notice that they are different from each other.”
His comments opened my eyes, and for the rest of the Gothia Cup and I saw that he was right. Our American teams were a melting pot of the world, while teams from most other nations all seemed stamped from the same mold.
At a coaches’ banquet a few nights later, I chatted with a coach from the Netherlands and told him of my conversation with the Swedish coach. Nodding, he said, “Yes, but that is not all. You Americans walk differently, too.”
That theory was more surprising to me than what the Swedish coach said, so I asked him what he meant.
“You walk down the street with such confidence,” he said, though I could tell by his gestures that he was having trouble coming up with the right words to express his meaning. “It is like you have no fear — not just fear of what is around you, but…but what others who see you might think of you. It is like you belong wherever you are.”
“Not in a bad way, I hope,” I said to him. “I hope you don’t mean that we walk around like we think we own the place.”
“No, no,” he was quick to add, and he waved the thought away with his hands. “It is that you are…you are….” He waved his fingers toward his face, unable to find the words.
His gesture brought words to my mind, words that I hoped would complete his thought accurately: “Comfortable in our own skin?” I ventured.
“Yes!” he said, and he poked me in the heart with his forefinger. He probably did it harder than he intended, but he was happy to have the words. “That is it exactly! You are all so comfortable in your own skin, whatever that skin looks like —even if it is different from the skin on your teammate! And you don’t even see it in yourselves!”
I thought about those coaches’ comments today when I read about a new survey from the Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — a survey that found that Americans disagree wildly about something as basic as what it means to be American.
It took me forty years or so and several trips to foreign lands to learn for myself what it means to be American. I never fully understood that it is our broad diversity — and our innocence about how unique it is — that makes us exceptional. I had to travel to countries that lack that special uniqueness to see how much the rest of the world admires us for it.
It may be that the best way to define America for yourself is to leave it for a while and see how hollow and empty a land can feel without diversity.
But do it soon, because there are those fearful, self-absorbed Americans who would rather strip America of its diversity — and with it, the admiration and respect of the rest of the world.
