The era of identity politics is upon us. No, I don’t mean voting for someone based on that person’s race, gender, religion or whatever. If this past election season crushed anything, it was the shallow idea that Americans are too trapped in social straitjackets to vote for a woman or a black man. Instead, what I’m talking about is something unprecedented in our history – the notion that we can identify with our leaders and, perhaps even more significantly, with the idea of America itself.
Barack Obama’s electoral victory caught me off guard. Not because of the outcome, but because of my reaction to it – I could barely suppress my tears at the news. Until very recently, I hardly even considered myself an American, though my family has lived here since I was 5 years old. We only decided to become citizens last year, and I was naturalized three months ago. My motivation: I thought it would be very Jason Bourne to travel with two passports. Oh, and I wanted to vote in a historic election.
But as far as I was concerned, the American dream was an anthropological curiosity I knew better than to buy into. Imagine my surprise, then, when on election night I found myself so deeply moved by the election of our first black president. I was experiencing the moment as an American, and I did not want it any other way.
The truth is, no matter how much we scoff at our American mythology, we are all socialized by it. My experience was really only one version of what so many of us, regardless of background, felt on Nov. 4 – the rejuvenation of an ideal we thought was lost or imaginary.
But that’s also why portraying Obama’s victory as a historic breakthrough for the African-American community fails to capture its momentousness. Obama’s win didn’t just vindicate one historically marginalized group; it vindicated us all. How incredible it is that the man who today embodies our nation’s highest aspirations might have been slurred and even lynched just 50 years ago.
If a country can undergo such a profound shift in a few generations, then what does that suggest about the future of identity in America?
The pesky thing about human nature is that we like to be around people like us – thus we self-segregate and distance ourselves from the “other.” In 2007, the social scientist Robert Putnam released a disquieting report on ethnic relations in America. Inhabitants of ethnically diverse communities, Putnam found, “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, [and] to withdraw even from close friends.” Diversity, apparently, brings out the worst in all of us.
Certain conservatives jumped at Putnam’s findings with giddiness. “Ha!” went the refrain. “The liberal diversity agenda discredited!”
There’s certainly something unappealing about artificially imposed diversity that fails to recognize the ways in which human beings form social bonds. What the boosters of diversity don’t often recognize is that authentic multiculturalism means more than coexistence among colorful groups. But that doesn’t mean all such supposedly utopian schemes have to be scrapped. We just have to get over all that otherness.
Strangely, Obama’s opponents may have done more to help in that regard than anyone else during this election season.
First the Clinton and then the McCain campaign depicted Obama as an exotic outsider out of touch with “real” Americans. In a now infamous internal campaign memo, Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster, wrote: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050.”
It looks like we only had to wait until 2008.
In trying to get the country to reject the “outsider,” Penn and company ultimately made Americans more comfortable with electing someone who’s not like us. According to a recent Gallup poll, “two-thirds of Americans report feeling proud and optimistic after Obama’s election, and about six in 10 say they are excited.” But if we can shed tears at the election of the “other,” what does that suggest to us about the “other” sitting across the dining hall? In his paper, Putnam concludes that, in the long run, societies “create new forms of social solidarity and dampen the negative effects of diversity by constructing new, more encompassing identities.” The challenge, he says, is to create “a new, broader sense of `we.'” That, I think, is the promise of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama – the promise of a “more perfect union,” of the assimilated “other,” of an America with which every single one of us can identify, whether born in Brooklyn or Bialystok, Poland.
If you believe there’s progress in history, then this looks like progress, indeed.
Lukasz Swiderski is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and is studying abroad at Oxford University in England. He can be reached at swiderskithehoya.com. UNFOREIGN AFFAIRS appears every other Tuesday.
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