Who Is “We”? Ontology, Attribution, and Historical Credit

A small pronoun can carry a very large claim. Before accepting the credit—or assigning the blame—we should ask what it means.

“We built America.”

The sentence sounds straightforward until we ask who is speaking, who performed the work, what counts as building, and how the speaker is connected to the people whose actions are being claimed.

Suppose a white American today uses “we” to identify with white men who lived in the colonies and the United States centuries ago. Their achievements are offered as grounds for present pride, personal standing, or racial superiority. When wrongdoing by members of that same historical population enters the discussion, however, the response changes: “That was them. I wasn’t there.”

Something needs explaining. Membership appeared sufficient to establish the flattering connection. Why did it stop mattering when the subject changed?

This article examines that move through two questions: What kind of entity is “we”? And what may properly be attributed to it—or to someone who belongs to it?

EDITORIAL PLACEHOLDER: Embed the accompanying 2:12 video here. No video URL was supplied when this draft was prepared.

1. Ontology: what kind of thing are we talking about?

Ontology concerns what exists and what kinds of things exist. In this discussion, its practical use is to slow us down before we treat very different collections of people as the same kind of entity.

“We” might identify the people in this room, a household, a corporation, the members of a political movement, a racial category, or a nation understood across generations. Those descriptions do different work.

A group of neighbors can jointly decide to repair a fence. A corporation can adopt a policy through its governing procedures. A demographic category may contain millions of people who never met, agreed, coordinated, or authorized anyone to act for them.

The category can be real and socially consequential without being a single decision-maker. Sharing a classification does not, by itself, establish shared agency.

This does not require denying that groups can act. Christian List and Philip Pettit defend the possibility that suitably organized collectives can be intentional agents in their own right. Their account gives us a useful contrast: organization capable of supporting agency is a substantive issue, not something supplied merely by a plural label.^[1]

For our purposes, the question is modest: when a speaker says that a group acted, what makes this an action of that group? Was there a shared undertaking, an institutional process, an authorized representative, or only an observer’s classification after the event?

2. A historical “we” adds the problem of continuity

Now introduce time. The people being discussed may have died long before the speaker was born.

A present-day institution can have a history extending beyond the tenure of its current members. A person can also identify with a community’s inherited stories, practices, or aspirations. Neither connection means that the present individual literally performed the historical actions.

Consider the difference between these statements:

The first three claims do not automatically establish the fourth or fifth. A speaker may move between them so quickly that a feeling of connection begins functioning as evidence of personal merit.

That is the first discipline of the inquiry: identify the connection before deciding what follows from it.

3. Attribution: belonging, causing, deserving, and owing

Attribution concerns what we assign to whom. Here, several assignments need to be kept distinct.

Causal contribution concerns helping bring about an outcome. Credit concerns recognition or praise. Identification concerns how someone understands their relationship to people or events. Benefit concerns what someone receives. Responsibility can concern answering for conduct or addressing a present problem. Personal guilt concerns culpability for wrongdoing.

These are working distinctions for this article, not a claim that every philosophical tradition uses the terms identically.

A person can benefit from work they did not perform. They can admire a founder without claiming to have founded anything. They can have a present reason to help correct an institution’s practices without having personally created its historical wrongs.

Conversely, having something in common with an accomplished person does not automatically entitle someone to that person’s credit. An attribution argument needs a connecting reason. The word “we” cannot supply all of those reasons at once.

4. The American founding: one history, more than one truth

The Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal.” Thomas Jefferson was its principal drafter, and he also enslaved people. Monticello’s biography identifies both his central role in the Declaration and his lifetime enslavement of more than 600 people.^[2][3]

Those facts can be considered together. A person may defend the equality principle while condemning enslavement. A judgment about the principle’s value does not require denying what its drafter did. A judgment about his wrongdoing does not, by itself, refute the principle.

The attribution problem appears when someone adds a different argument: because Jefferson belongs to a racial category with which the speaker identifies, the achievement establishes the speaker’s own merit—or the inherent superiority of that category.

If the same speaker then treats Jefferson’s wrongdoing as entirely irrelevant to the category, the question is not whether the speaker personally enslaved anyone. The question is why racial membership was supposed to transfer the favorable significance but cannot even admit the unfavorable evidence into the same assessment.

This example does not establish that every founder acted alike, or that every white person of the period participated in either undertaking. It shows why the unit of analysis matters. A person, a set of political delegates, a population, and an entire racial category cannot be substituted for one another without further argument.

5. Who actually built? The White House example

The word “built” introduces another attribution problem: whose contribution becomes visible?

The National Park Service describes free and enslaved workers, including African Americans and workers from several national backgrounds, laboring on the White House’s original construction. The National Archives preserves records of enslaved workers’ contributions, including skilled carpentry and brickmaking, and explains that payments for their labor went to enslavers.^[4][5]

This is a concrete reason to question any simple picture of an exclusively white “we” doing the building. Even at the level of a single iconic structure, the historical account includes people whom that racial account would exclude.

It also separates contribution from authority. Commissioning a building, designing it, financing it, organizing construction, and physically constructing it are distinguishable activities. Control over a project does not erase the contributions of the people who performed its work.

Nor does forced contribution establish voluntary identification with the project. A person can materially help produce an outcome under coercion without endorsing the undertaking or authorizing those directing it.

The same broad word—“we”—can therefore conceal several questions: who ordered, who labored, who benefited, who was compelled, and who now claims the credit?

Recognizing omitted contributors does not justify assigning every present member of another racial category personal credit either. The corrective is more accurate attribution, applied consistently.

6. “We” for glory, “they” for wrongdoing

We can call the shifting pattern selective collective identification: the speaker emphasizes membership when it is flattering and minimizes it when it becomes uncomfortable. That phrase is descriptive here, rather than the name of a clinical diagnosis or a single experimentally established mechanism.

Several established psychological concepts help illuminate it.

Basking in reflected glory

In their 1976 football field studies, Robert Cialdini and colleagues examined people’s public association with successful others despite having no causal role in the success. Students used “we” more when describing their school’s victory than a nonvictory.^[6]

The pronoun matters: affiliation can become more attractive when there is glory to share. Applying this insight to historical racial identification is an analogy, not a finding those football studies directly tested.

Group-serving attribution and the ultimate attribution error

Thomas Pettigrew’s 1979 formulation of the ultimate attribution error addresses prejudiced explanations of outgroup conduct: negative behavior is attributed to the people’s dispositions, while positive behavior is explained as exceptional or as the product of favorable circumstances and related factors.^[7]

The broader concern is an uneven explanatory standard. Our side’s success reveals character; their side’s success gets explained away. Their wrongdoing reveals character; our side’s wrongdoing gets contextualized.

These concepts should not be treated as universal laws. Miles Hewstone’s 1990 review found substantial evidence of ingroup-favoring attribution across the studies reviewed but only limited support for Pettigrew’s specific formulation.^[8] The research provides useful tools for inquiry; it does not let us diagnose a particular person’s motives from one sentence.

Cherry-picking and the further leap to superiority

Selecting one admired achievement and treating it as representative of an entire population is an evidentiary choice. We should ask what was omitted and why the selected event is supposed to carry such broad weight.

Even a well-supported account of a group’s contribution does not establish that racial membership caused it. That causal claim would require examining competing explanations, including opportunity, institutions, resources, education, political power, and the work of others.

Nor would an achievement by particular people establish an inherent trait of every person placed in the same category. The historical claim, the causal claim, and the claim of superiority are different propositions. Each needs its own support.

7. Does consistency require collective guilt?

No. The argument is not: “If you feel pride, you must accept personal guilt for every wrong committed by someone in your category.” That would reproduce the indiscriminate attribution we are examining.

A person can consistently say: “I identify with this country’s history. I admire some of its achievements and condemn some of its actions. I did not personally perform either.”

A person can also identify specifically with a principle: “I regard the equality ideal as part of the tradition I choose to carry forward.” That is a claim about a present commitment. It can be assessed by what the person understands, endorses, and does.

What needs justification is the stronger claim that demographic membership itself establishes personal merit, while the same connection is dismissed whenever contrary evidence appears.

If “I wasn’t there” answers the accusation, it also limits the boast.

“Limits” matters. Nonparticipation limits claims of personal authorship and culpability. It does not settle every question about cultural identification, inherited benefit, institutional continuity, or present obligations.

Similarly, consistent reasoning does not require praise and blame to follow identical rules. Admiring a community’s achievement may require less than establishing personal culpability for a wrong. A principled difference is possible. The speaker should explain it instead of quietly changing the meaning of membership.

8. Can we choose the tradition we identify with?

Yes—but selection should be explicit.

Someone may identify with abolitionists rather than enslavers, with defenders of equal citizenship rather than racial hierarchy, or with a particular school of political thought rather than everyone classified into a race.

The relevant “we” then becomes a community defined by commitments, practices, or affiliations. Membership needs to be explained through those criteria. Sharing a racial classification with a historical advocate is not the same as sharing the advocate’s principles.

Changing the subject from “all people of this race” to “people committed to this ideal” can improve an argument. It also changes the argument. The historical achievements of the selected community cannot simply be reassigned to the whole racial category afterward.

This is why asking for a definition is substantive. It reveals whether the claimed relationship is demographic, institutional, genealogical, ideological, or merely rhetorical.

9. A practical test for any historical “we”

Before accepting a sweeping claim, ask:

1. Who is included? Name the population, period, institution, or commitment. Who is excluded?
2. What did they do? Replace “built,” “created,” or “destroyed” with identifiable actions and contributions.
3. What makes them a group for this purpose? Was there coordination, representation, an institutional process, or only a shared label?
4. What connects the speaker to them? Citizenship, descent, participation, institutional membership, endorsement, or resemblance?
5. What is being claimed? Identification, historical contribution, personal credit, benefit, responsibility, or guilt?
6. Does the reasoning survive an unfavorable example? If the conclusion changes, what relevant difference explains the change?

The last question tests a rule rather than demanding that history be reduced to a moral balance sheet. A historical population need not be assigned one final score before we can make specific, supported judgments about its members’ conduct.

Likewise, invoking aggregate crime totals would not automatically establish a present individual’s culpability or a population’s inherent character. Without a defined population, period, evidence, and a defensible attribution rule, impressive-looking numbers would only give the ambiguity a numerical form.

10. The relationship hidden inside the pronoun

For Intend to Relate, the larger question is relational: what connection is being asserted, and what is that connection supposed to authorize?

“We” can express affection, solidarity, continuity, shared purpose, or responsibility. It can also try to obtain standing without participation, credit without contribution, or authority without agreement.

We should be able to value a historical achievement without pretending to have performed it. We should be able to acknowledge a historical wrong without assigning personal guilt by demographic resemblance. And we should be able to examine our present relationships to institutions and inherited conditions without confusing those questions with either fiction.

A more precise statement might be: “These people contributed to this achievement. I identify with these principles. This is what I intend to carry forward.”

That statement identifies a relationship others can understand and evaluate.

Who is “we”? What connects its members? And what, exactly, follows from belonging?

Sources and further reading

The historical sources support the factual examples. The psychological sources identify related research; they do not establish the motives of any particular speaker. The argument about consistency and the working distinctions above are this article’s analysis.

1. Christian List and Philip Pettit, Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press, 2011). See List’s author summary for the account of suitably organized collectives as intentional agents. Further discussion: List and Pettit, “Group Agency and Supervenience” (2006).
2. National Archives, “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” Primary text of the Declaration.
3. Thomas Jefferson Foundation / Monticello, “Brief Biography of Thomas Jefferson.” For the lifetime scope of the enslavement count, see also “Slavery FAQs.”
4. National Park Service, “Information Panel: Construction of the White House.” Describes free and enslaved workers and their construction roles.
5. National Archives, “Slaves Built the White House and Capitol—See the Records” (December 10, 2008). Includes images and descriptions of original labor records and payment documents.
6. Robert B. Cialdini, Richard J. Borden, Avril Thorne, Marcus Randall Walker, Stephen Freeman, and Lloyd Reynolds Sloan, “Basking in Reflected Glory: Three (Football) Field Studies,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34, no. 3 (1976): 366–375. DOI; article PDF.
7. Thomas F. Pettigrew, “The Ultimate Attribution Error: Extending Allport’s Cognitive Analysis of Prejudice,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 5, no. 4 (1979): 461–476. Article and abstract. The description here follows the published abstract.
8. Miles Hewstone, “The ‘Ultimate Attribution Error’? A Review of the Literature on Intergroup Causal Attribution,” European Journal of Social Psychology 20, no. 4 (1990): 311–335. Article and abstract. The research qualification here follows the review’s published abstract.

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