“Whiteness Is Still a Proxy for Being American”
“In a March 2007 memo, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, argued that she should attack Obama for “not [being] at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.” Had Obama been white and named Joe Smith, Penn’s line of attack would have been inconceivable, since Obama’s thinking and values were typical of a liberal Democrat’s, and similar to Clinton’s own. Penn’s effort to question Obama’s Americanness was entirely a function of the fact that he traced his ancestry to the third world and had spent some of his childhood abroad.”
I feel as though the US says out loud “anyone can come here and be like us (aren’t we kind and open!)” and then leaves unsaid the second half of the sentence: “but no matter how much our demographics change we are not going to change what ‘be like us’ means, and also if you aren’t enough like us we won’t want you to be here”.
It’s like this war between two narratives: In one narrative, we are a nation defined by the values and needs of the people who are currently citizens, and there is perfect embrace of democracy and modernity and etc… (but underneath, there are problems about who gets to be that voice and what does history mean and it raises the stakes of citizenship and immigration a lot). Then there is the other narrative, where we are defined by the values of our founders and that plaque on the Statue of Liberty, and the world is full of people who will one day come here and, through the magic of the American Dream, be part of contributing to and shaping this country.
This second narrative gives us a lot of moral credibility, but the first narrative makes the people who are already recognized as citizens feel safe and stable. These narratives don’t inherently contradict, but right now I’m reading a lot of the racism and xenophobia as evidence that some people really reliant on the first narrative are feeling in conflict with the second.
It would be an interesting conversation, to figure out which one people want to prioritize. Maybe that’s sort of what’s happening right now?
Related — “The Unbearable Whiteness of the American Left”
