Yesterday, I was thinking about how on the Fourth of July in 1977, I fired a gun.

Don’t picture me living in a mean neighborhood where guns were common coin. This was a leafy New Jersey suburb. But for reasons I forget — I was 12 — the neighbor happened to have a gun, brought it out amidst a civil discussion to demonstrate something about its mechanism, and he let me, as Dad watched, shoot it into the ground over by our backyard fence.

I’ll never forget the awesome force of the shot. It left me ever aware of how destructive a gunshot is to a human body.

Ten years later on the Fourth, I met the fiancee of one of my best neighborhood friends. I could tell that this marriage wasn’t going to last. At 22, it was the first time I had encountered that sentiment — liking the intended, but unable to pretend internally that the marriage would work. The marriage is over now.

Fifteen years later, watching fireworks over the Hudson, I quietly realized that I would be best off leaving my tenured position at U.C. Berkeley and moving to New York to be a think tank employee doing linguistics on the side.

I could go on — I am struck by how often the Fourth has been an educational day for me. And yesterday it occurred to me that for most Americans, education is one of the last things anyone expects from the Fourth. It’s about barbecuing, mosquitoes, and chatter. Let’s face it — that the holiday is supposed to be about something as abstract as celebrating the birth of our nation is hardly front and center for all but a few of us.

This year, that got me to thinking about a forum I participated in a little while ago examining what being American means to most people today. The consensus was that what is most valuable about America is that we are free to dissent, that we live in a land of opportunity, and that we are a Christian nation.

That characterization left an ashy taste in my mouth. Dissent, opportunity, Jesus — that’s a culture? None of those things are exactly unheard of in lots of other countries. Dissent, opportunity, and Jesus are a specific constellation of factors that we feel in our gut as a vital essence?

I want a more visceral, pointed sense of pride in my American culture. And what moves me most is that this land is one where the general consensus has transcended tendencies common to human beings worldwide such as assessing people in crude hierarchies based on genitalia and melanin.

The tendency is, after all, a human universal. There are no recorded societies in which women rule the roost and men are the also-rans. And yet the feminist revolution in America got us beyond Mamie Eisenhower chirping “I turn the lamb chops.” America is now the land of two female secretaries of State, and Ruth Simmons, Shirley Tilghman, and Amy Gutmann as presidents of Ivy League universities, with no one batting an eye.

Okay, countries like Germany, Finland, and the Philippines are a notch ahead of us in having females heading their governments. But they only got that way taking a cue from a feminist revolution that began right here.

And for all the cries from last week’s Supreme Court decision against distributing schoolchildren according to race that take us back to Jim Crow, Dred Scott would be astounded at how far we have come in getting past race-based bigotry overall in our great nation.

This is even clear from people whose views are opposed to mine. I just reviewed a book by a white author who is as up in arms against racism as, say, Sonny Carson, a 1960s black activist who was a self-avowed anti-white racist here in New York, whose heirs are now appalled at resistance to naming a street after him in Brooklyn. This author is no one-off oddball, but a type, otherwise known as the garden variety white academic or journalist. I’ll take people like this any day over the state of the race debate in France, Germany, or Russia. There, whites taking the side of brown people down below and virtually pretending to be them are significantly fewer, and brown people are vastly less integrated into the mainstream than most black Americans — as opposed to the underclass minority among them — are.

For my wife’s birthday and Fourth of July party, we had whites, blacks, hard leftists, Bush voters, gay people, Jews, you name it — and that “diversity” was the last thing on anyone’s mind. Everybody had a great time being just people.

My wife and I are an “interracial couple” — but that, too, was an utter non-issue at this party, as it is anywhere else we go. That she and I have different levels of melanin in our skin is much less important to us or anyone we know than the fact that when you read this, we will be dealing with a massive amount of dishes.

That’s America. Here’s to what the Fourth of July is really supposed to be about.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.