I’ve been stuck for a while on the seeming lack of balance in columnist Jerome Stocks’ “America at 250” piece. I struggled to put my sense of “the rest of the story” into words that matched what I knew to be true about our 250 years.
I’m not without opinions on this, but I’ll admit I couldn’t write it as clearly as I wanted, so I worked through it with Claude AI. What came out was a sharper version of the balance I’d been reaching for. I wish I could write like that myself.
Here’s the gist of it: “The editorial’s version of American history has a curious gap: For a nation built on rewarding ‘talent, effort, and results,’ it took most of that history for talent to count if you weren’t White, male and Christian.”
Meritocracy is a beautiful idea. It has also, for most of American history, been a myth applied selectively. Enslaved people built the wealth of the antebellum South through forced labor, not “grit.” Women were barred from most professions, from obtaining patents to attending universities, well into the 20th century — not for lack of ability, but because the doors were locked.
Chinese laborers built the transcontinental railroad, then were barred from citizenship by name. Redlining, not merit, decided who could buy a home and build generational wealth. When the essay credits “immigrants arriving with little more than drive and skill,” it should also mention that immigration law itself, from 1790 to 1965, was explicitly designed to prefer White Europeans.
None of this means individual effort doesn’t matter. It means the playing field the essay describes as neutral was never neutral. A system that stacks the odds by race, sex and religion and then congratulates the winners on their “merit” isn’t meritocracy — it’s a just-so story that lets the beneficiaries of exclusion feel they earned an advantage they inherited.
The innovations the essay lists — the lightbulb, the telephone, the genome and the moon landing — are real, but crediting them to “meritocratic culture” alone erases the immigrants, women and Black scientists who did the work without getting the byline: the Black mathematicians at NASA who calculated the trajectories for the moon landing; the immigrant physicists, many fleeing fascism, who built the transistor; and the generations of Indigenous, Black, Latino and Asian American innovators written out of the “great man” story.
American greatness was never monocultural. It was made by exactly the pluralism the essay is nervous about.
That’s the real case for DEI: not “checkboxes” over competence, but a recognition that talent is evenly distributed even though opportunity historically has not been. It doesn’t lower the bar; it expands who gets to clear it.
The Founders wrote “all men are created equal” while enslaving people and excluding women from the franchise. Honest patriotism finishes the sentence they started.
Steve Bartram is a retired Marine and science teacher. He lives in Carlsbad.
