'WHO they ARE'

The late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Antonin Scalia in “College Education,” his commencement address at Catholic University in 1999 (Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, 2017):

“My point is that, as you have come to learn during your four years here, you are not just the child of your parents who are here today. Physically you are totally theirs, to be sure. But intellectually, attitudinally, culturally, you are a child of the West, and of that particular part of the West that is the United States—which is close to, but not quite the same as, the part that is England, and a little bit further from, but not very far from, the part that is France, and so forth. You are, to mention only a few of your forebears, a child of Homer and Alcibiades,  Cicero and Caesar, Dante and the Medici, Alfred and Chaucer, Joan of Arc and Louis XIV, Elizabeth and Shakespeare, Milton and Cromwell, Carlisle [sic] and Edmund Burke, Hamilton and Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. Many of your contemporaries, who have not had the benefit of a college education, are as much their children as you are—but they do not know it. They do not really know what they come from, WHO they ARE.”