You want to defend citizenship? Don't persecute or isolate those without papers. Just live like a citizen. That'd be a first-class way to be American.

Today, public understanding of our past and our system of government is pitifully low.

To be sure, the United States has profound problems, not least our faltering educational and physical infrastructure.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

Society becomes how you behave.

If whiteness were of no particular advantage, then having a fuller color wheel of skin tones would be purely a matter of celebration. But whiteness - just a drop of it - does still carry privilege. You learn that very young in America.

Why does an iPhone cost only a couple hundred dollars? Because, as the stage performer Mike Daisey depicted in an arresting one-man show called 'The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,' Apple's shiniest products are made by a shadowy company in China called Foxconn.