Identity in the Different American Cultures
In the wake of Trump’s electoral college victory, I’m struggling with the concept of identity.
Identity politics undoubtedly played a large role in the outcome. Trump rallied white people and men in the midwest, plains states, and the south to a narrow of electoral college successes, despite loosing the national popular vote.
Not to discount the role prejudice played in this election (Trump wouldn’t have won without it), but there’s more to this than racism and misogyny. For example, if you trust the exit polling, living in a small town or rural area was a stronger indicator or Trump support than race or gender.
Anyone who has spent time in a major city and a small town understands they are a world appart. And it’s this gap, between an America culture that exists mainly in urban areas and the American culture that is in small towns, that leaves me struggling with identity.
Because if we assume Trump mobilised white men based on their identity, I think it’s fair to assume he mobilsed of people from small towns on the basis of identity too. Meaning the New York City self-claimed billionaire somehow was able to connect with a part of America that on the surface should be nothing like him.
There have been exhaustive post-mortems about that connection coming from the sense of anger at the existing system, or rural people dispising elites. David Wong’s Cracked article in particular captures the cultural divide between urban and rural America.
These analyses ring true, but none feels like a full picture to me since Trump was a long established political donor and the very definition of elite. His whole brand is that his very name means elite. Yet somehow people connected with him.
I hypothesise that people felt they could understand him in a way that went beyond his simplistic stump speech. They could understand him because he expressed his identity in a way they that matched the way certain Americans understood. And for that same reason, they felt they couldn’t understand Clinton.
It starts with people wanting to understand where someone is from.
Where I’m From
I’m a British American. I was born in Michigan, grew up in New Mexico, but left at 18 to go to university in Massachusetts. I lived in London 5 years, and currently call Nairobi home. There are very few places I go where I’m not asked, “where are you from?”
For a long time, I was befuddled by this question. I didn’t know what people meant. Where I currently live? Where I was educated? What path my ancestors followed before coming to America, the nation of immigrants?
Answering “here” in New Mexico, London, or Nairobi seems to draw equally confused and dismissive looks, which is fair as they’re all untrue to some degree. Really it’s a question of identity. People want to get a sense of my cultural background, and “where I’m from” was how they understand identity.
The fact is my identity doesn’t match a singular geography. That’s true for lots of people. Which is why, living in Washington DC, London, or Nairobi, I found the common question amongst my peers was “what do you do?”
These global hubs drew in people from all over, and many of us find greater commonality with people from half a world away than we did with people from our home towns. Thus work, hobbies, passions, and politics immediately became more important markers of our identities.
Sometimes “where are you from?” is used in a racist way to insist that someone certainly can’t belong. But often it’s just a simple effort to get a sketch of someone’s identity. And indeed, it’s inevitable that part of a person’s cultural identity is rooted in where they have lived. The question isn’t without merit.
Taiye Selasi does a great TED talk on this topic, proposing that rather than asking where we come from, ask where a person is local to.
I agree with her, but the problem remains that most people will seek to understand other’s identities based on how they understand their own identity. For a great many people, they understand their own identity primarily as a story of where they are from, so will seek to understand others in a similar way.
This, I think, is one of the roots of the cultural divide in America. The “from” vs people who identify more broadly than being from a single place.
Trump’s personal story, if not his accent, certainly marked him as being from a place. While Clinton’s story spanned the country. I suspect people didn’t feel like they could know who she was because her identity and story was about what she’d done rather than where she did it, or more critically where she came from.
I’ve experienced this cultural divide between how people understand their own identities (and thus the cultural identities of others) a couple of ways. I’ll share those experiences in a effort to better process my own understanding of the condition America finds itself in at the moment. Convieniently both come with maps.
1. Sports, Especially College Football
I never really supported a sports team. With rare exception, they’re a group of professional athletes with no connection to the geography of their fan base. Yet when Olympics rolls around, I’m cheering like mad for Team USA and Team GB. I get that identity motivates strong affliation with a sports team.
I went to university at a small liberal arts school outside Boston. It wasn’t a typical American college experience depicted in popular cultlure: we didn’t have frats nor a football team.
Senior year, I took a trip to Missouri to meet up with some friends and see a Missouri versus Nebraska college football game. We knew it was going to be a cultural experience for us because there’s an America that cares about college football. It looks like this:
If I don’t understand sports, I certainly don’t understand college football. You look at places like Alabama, and you’ll see that more people like college football than have a college education.
But I somehow instinctively knew that the culture of college football wasn’t about a large number of graduates supporting their team. Rather the it was people latching on to a university sports team as a marker of identity, mostly in places where there wasn’t a professional team people identified with in a significant way.
I found this to be true on my trip. What I found visiting Missouri was that the college football team was much more than school sports. It was a matter of identity and pride of being a Missourian. It was a sense that Missouri could assemble the best team and throw the best party. It didn’t matter if you didn’t go to the school, the game and the parties around it represented the state.
The inverse of the college football map is soccer fans in the US. I can’t find a more recent map, than one showing growth in the sport after the US hosted the world cup in 1994.
This map shows the same two distict American cultures as the college football fandom map. This is the America that formed my cultural identity.
I played soccer growing up, and enjoy watching it largely off that experience. But the rates of participation in youth soccer aren’t that different for West Virginia and New Mexico, so there’s something more than personal history at play. It’s about how people identify with the sport.
I truely only watch football at the moment of the World Cup, when nations compete with one another in a spirit of fair play and camaraderie. I identify with this sport because it’s about global unity. It’s something we all share and we all have our unique styles and place in the global game.
I count myself a soccer fan not because I have a team that represents where I’m from, but because it’s something I took part in and that brings people around the world together. That and it’s a really entertaining sport to watch.
The point being that I see two different types of sports fandom in America, and they represent different cultures and different ways that people understand their own identities. One is a pride in singular location, and the the other is a combination of lived experience and feeling like a part of a larger world.
2. Travelling the World
The vast majority of my friends have traveled outside of the US. But that’s certainly not the norm, especially as only roughly 40% of Americans own a passport.
Part of this is economics, people who can’t afford to travel abroad don’t have a passport. But median salaries in Pennsylvania are higher than Florida. Same thing for Wyoming and Colorado. So there’s more than just ability to travel reflected in this map, it’s also will to travel.
Every individual will have their own reasons for wanting to see the world or wanting to stay put. But when you add them all up, you have distinct cultural mindsets in different parts of the country about wanting to travel the world.
Often when I meet someone who hasn’t left the country, they struggle to understand why I travel so much. It’s just the same as I struggle to understand why they don’t. We come from different cultural backgrounds, two different Americas, and value different things.
The people who stay put invariably ask “where are you from?”, the travelers are the ones more likely to ask “what do you do?”
Bridging the cultural identity gap
I think the cultural divide we face, not just in America but Europe as well, has never be encapsulated so well as two sentences from Theresa May’s party conference speech:
“But if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means.”
For people who understand identity as linked to a singular geography, nothing is so alien as someone whose identity is constructed through actions and multiple locations.
I take offence at May’s comment. I feel it’s fair that someone might feel an obligation to the world beyond sovereign states for which they happen to hold a passport. But I’ll put that frustration aside and take a lesson on the cultural perspective she’s sharing.
If we want to connect with voters, whether in a de-industrialised north of England or the Rust-Belt of America, we need to communicate candidate identities and culture in a way that matches the way people understand themselves. It’s something Obama did successfully with his stories of being an organiser on the South Side of Chicago. Though there were racist efforts to accuse him of being born abroad, he made it clear where his home was, what sports teams he supported, and where he went to church.
Obviously there’s more to winning elections than that, but suddenly finding myself at odds with a segment of America (and Britian) expressing distaste with the way I think of my own identity, I can’t help but think it makes a difference.
