Becoming an American

“It’s not that people don’t like America,” my Danish friend Antonia tries to explain to me one night at dinner. “It’s just that it’s in your face constantly. Whether good or bad, you have to have an opinion about it.”

Just how in-your-face America is is something I didn’t really understand until I got to Europe. The USA is everywhere. Walking down the street in Copenhagen, McDonald’s and Burger King signs wink at you. Taylor Swift croons from the Danish taxi drivers’ radios, and everything from The Macarena to Shaggy’s Wasn’t Me blasts in Danish bars. In Poland, the stars of the Divergent series stare down at you from their poster, an unfamiliar Polish word under their faces. The mall is filled with American stores — Sephora, J. Crew, Avon. The subways are crammed with ads for American products — Chuck Taylors, new Macbooks, Mango clothes.

I knew our movies and our products were consumed around the world. But I hadn’t understood how much. Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard felt the opposite when he profiled America for The New Yorker, writing that he “had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did…not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified collective identity as the ones Americans lived their lives within.”

To a certain extent, he’s right. In every state in our country, it’s normal to wear a pair of Chuck Taylors into a McDonald’s while listening to Taylor Swift on an iPod. But, it’s also pretty normal, as far as I can tell, in every country in the EU. America is everywhere.

As an American abroad, I have no idea how to feel about it. Because I have never had to think about it before. In the US, no one ever asks you how you feel about being an American or about American culture.

Because of globalization, Americans export culture. Our TV shows, our products, our brands, our music, our movies — they are consumed all around the world. And that consumption is steamrolling over local culture, both within America and without.

There’s a lot of American culture I’m horrifically embarrassed of. Every time I see a McDonald’s here I want to cringe. Every time someone reminds me that America is one of the only countries to pledge to our flag, that we’re like frat boys with our nationalism, I want to start saying “not all Americans!”, like some sort of crazed quasi-liberal.

But at the same time, there is a lot of America that I’m surprisingly proud of. Not all of it, of course. But when a Dane tells me that they’ve seen The Dark Knight and that it changed their life, or when we’re both singing along to the same amazing Bob Dylan song, I’m a little proud. It bubbles up within me, completely unexpected and not entirely welcome. I know that I am not supposed to feel proud of this particular aspect of globalization. I know I am supposed to feel nothing but guilt about the horrible things my country stands for, the horrible things we do.

And here is where I’m going to share a dirty little secret, something I almost didn’t want to write on the internet. I’m tired of feeling nothing but guilt about America. I’ve read The People’s History of the United States. I know what our policies are doing abroad, what they are doing at home. American history is the story of genocide and mass enslavement. It’s still being written with the blood of Native Americans and Black people and notorized by the endless sweat of the working class. The I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed with inequality. I know that.

Knowing that in America is different than knowing that in Europe though. Because in the US, I never have to identify as an American. Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis are also American, so having it be an integral part of my identity is a little redundant.

Not true in Europe. Here I’m an American. Which includes all of the aforementioned blood and sweat. I feel guilty about that — how could I not? But I’m also not sure how I feel about being an American that hates America. It sits right in my brain, but not in my gut. I can’t help but think that yes, we do horrible things. But we also do produce good things, some of them that I am fundamentally proud of.

I’ve never had an American part of my identity before. And I’m finding that now that I do, it’s not that I hate America completely. Or that I love it completely. But suddenly, being an American is in my face. And I have to form an opinion about it.