It is too early to say whether the conversations Mr. Hackney proposes will be fruitful. But whether they are or not, it is important to insist that a sense of shared national identity is not an evil. It is an absolutely essential component of citizenship, of any attempt to take our country and its problems seriously. There is no incompatibility between respect for cultural differences and American patriotism.

Like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself -- unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation's professed ideals.

That is the desire to which the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appealed, and he is somebody every American can be proud of. It is just as appropriate for white Americans to take pride in Dr. King and in his (limited) success as for black Americans to take pride in Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Dewey and their (limited) successes. Cornel West wrote a book -- "The American Evasion of Philosophy" -- about the connections between Emerson, Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois and his own preaching in African-American churches. The late Irving Howe, whose "World of Our Fathers" did much to make us aware that we are a nation of immigrants, also tried to persuade us (in "The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson") to cherish a distinctively American, distinctively Emersonian, hope.

Mr. Howe was able to rejoice in a country that had only in his lifetime started to allow Jews to be full-fledged members of society. Cornel West can still identify with a country that, by denying them decent schools and jobs, keeps so many black Americans humiliated and wretched.

There is no contradiction between such identification and shame at the greed, the intolerance and the indifference to suffering that is widespread in the United States. On the contrary, you can feel shame over your country's behavior only to the extent to which you feel it is your country. If we fail in such identification, we fail in national hope. If we fail in national hope, we shall no longer even try to change our ways. If American leftists cease to be proud of being the heirs of Emerson, Lincoln and King, Irving Howe's prophecy that "the 'newness' will come again" -- that we shall once again experience the joyous self-confidence which fills Emerson's "American Scholar" -- is unlikely to come true.