On the
stakes of 2012 for an American issue that can seem abstract but has plenty of
very concrete and crucial effects.
Anyone who
has read this
blog for a while, or who has read my
second book, or who has ever talked with me about anything American
Studies-related, knows how centrally interested I am in the question of how we
define “American,” of what that idea, that identity, that community, means. As
I argue at length in that book’s Conclusion, I believe that the debates over
Barack Obama’s “American-ness,” over the question (to quote a Time cover story from just before the
2008 election) “Is Barack Obama American Enough?,” have been central to our
political culture for the last four years. You can see those debates in the
Birther movement, in the Tea Party
cry of “I want my country back,” and in so many other moments and
issues in contemporary America. And Mitt Romney has been a part of those
debates for just as long, dating back at least to his statement, during the
2008 presidential campaign, that “Barack
Obama looks toward Europe for a lot of his inspiration; John McCain is going to
make sure that America stays America.”
It’s easy
to see this issue as less significant than many in this election year, and I’m
not going to argue that it has nearly the immediate and practical relevance
that they do. Certainly the question of where Obama was born, while incredibly
frustrating to those of us in the reality-based community, would only be
practically significant if one of the many Birther lawsuits managed to actually
keep him off of a state’s ballot or the like. But I think there are any number
of immediate and significant effects to each possible definition of America,
from the most to the least inclusive; is there any doubt, to cite one ongoing
current event, that the debate
over a possible mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, depends
entirely on whether we see Muslim Americans as part of “America” or somehow
outside of it? Isn’t it clear, as Obama
acknowledged in the speech with which he announced his DREAM Act executive
order, that seeing its young beneficiaries as “Americans in their
hearts, in their minds” is crucial to supporting that policy change? The second
of those examples is without doubt more complex than the first, includes legal
and governmental factors much more centrally; but both nonetheless hinge on
precisely who and what we mean (and don’t mean) by “American.”
Yet
there’s another, and to my mind even more meaningful, effect to these debates:
what they mean for the identities and perspectives of each individual American.
I’ve
expressed before my admiration for Colin Powell’s answer, during
his 2008 endorsement of Obama, to lies about Obama’s Muslim identity, his
statement that while the correct answer is that Obama is not a Muslim, the
“more correct” answer is: “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The
answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a
seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?” If
I had to express most succinctly why I think these debates over the meaning of
“American” are so crucial, I would ask precisely the same question, writ large:
how do you think it feels for a young kid—a Muslim American kid, or the child
of undocumented immigrants, or a kid realizing he or she is gay—to be told,
implicitly but often explicitly as well, that he or she is outside of
“American” identity, is an other within his or her homeland? That’s the stake
of these debates—and, I believe, one of the most fundamental stakes of the 2012
election, and many of our ongoing political arguments beyond it.
Next Obama post tomorrow (tomorrow!),
Ben
PS. What do you think?
11/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two controversial and inspiring
Americans who came to embody much of their respective eras: Benjamin
Butler, the Civil
War General, Reconstruction
leader, and civil
rights activist; and Ida
Tarbell, the Gilded
Age and Progressive-era
muckraker par
excellence.
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