One of my favorite lines of poetry was written by Dr. Maya Angelou. In her poem, Human Family, she writes: “We are more alike, my friends,/than we are unalike.”

It’s not a platitude; it’s a revolutionary statement, and it’s at the core of the American experiment. That people from different upbringings and who come from different faiths, nationalities, and ethnic backgrounds are not only more alike than they are unalike but that they can live and prosper together despite these differences is a radical proclamation.

Our country’s history is a series of attempts to disprove this belief and it is also a series of courageous responses from men and women to prove it. My own parents were forced to leave Maryland when they got married due to racist anti-miscegenation laws. It takes courage to look at a world proclaiming that differences are irreconcilable and trust in your own judgement. My parents were forced to place their faith in their values over the chorus of state law and the majority of Americans at the time. Even my father’s family was against their union. This type of courage is the bedrock for how we overcome division. It is also the foundation of a pluralistic democracy that seeks to extend civil rights and liberties and political agency to thousands of different groups.

Growing up at the center of the dissonance between our nation’s promise of unity and its reality of so many fractious dualities forced me to look for the common threads: the ties that bind us together, the factors that makes our nation’s motto E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — less a promise broken, and more a prophecy yet to be fulfilled.

Whether we were born here, or whether we sacrificed everything to be here, what makes us most American — from the Gulf of Mexico to the Green Mountains, from the James River to the Pacific Rim — is our commitment to persevere in the face of great odds, not just secure our family’s future but that of our neighbors too, because we know our national destiny is to move: ever forward, never backwards.

Why is unity important? We can see that there are members of our community who don’t see the value in unifying across race, gender, and religion. So we find ourselves making the case for unity again. Let’s be clear: divisions are not fixed, definable entities. If we allowed differences to dictate who is deserving of being part of our nation the fracturing would never end. Race, for instance, is an arbitrary characteristic that has changed over time. Religion has had fault lines that have lead to dozens of divisions leaving us with hundreds of denominations of different faiths. All of this to say: if we search for purity in our communities, if we are always looking for someone who believes all the things we do, looks the way we do, acts and thinks the way we do, we’ll be a community of one.

But beyond this, diversity is good because it makes us better people. When we come into contact with cultures and ways of being that challenge our perspective, we become more reflective people. By engaging with people who disagree with us we are forced to inspect our own beliefs, prejudices, and assumptions.

This is the core thing I want to say to you: it is easy to live divided. It is easy for us to move to neighborhoods with people just like us, to eat foods that we’ve always eaten, to consume art that we know we like. It is easy for us to turn our ignorance about others into a dismissal of other cultures and ways of thinking. What is hard is recommitting yourself everyday to the ideal of unity.

One person who wrote eloquently about this very idea was Frederick Douglass. He spoke about our natural tendency to divide ourselves:

“In all this there is, of course, nothing strange. Repugnance to the presence and influence of foreigners is an ancient feeling among men. It is peculiar to no particular race or nation. It is met with not only in the conduct of one nation toward another, but in the conduct of the inhabitants of different parts of the same country, some times of the same city, and even of the same village. Lands intersected by a narrow frith, abhor each other. Mountains interposed, make enemies of nations.”

He goes on to say, “Nature has two voices, the one is high, the other low; one is in sweet accord with reason and justice, and the other apparently at war with both. The more men really know of the essential nature of things, and on the true relation of mankind, the freer they are from prejudice of every kind. The child is afraid of the giant form of his own shadow. This is natural, but he will part with his fears when he is older and wiser. So ignorance is full of prejudice, but it will disappear with enlightenment.”

Unity is not about erasing differences or pretending that they are meaningless. It’s a decision to move past our differences in pursuit of a nation where it is our commitments to certain principles that define us, not our race, religion, or any other identifying characteristic. And in a time where economic, social, and political forces seek to exploit our divisions, we have to commit ourselves to pushing forward together.