Yes, we are foundationally English in our language, traditions of law, social organization, market mindedness, and frames of intellectual reference. But then we are foundationally African as well-in the way American slaves changed American speech and song and civic ideals; in the way slavery formed and deformed every aspect of life here, from the wording of our Constitution to the forms of our faith to the anxious hypocrisy of the codes of the enslavers and their descendants.