American Identity in the Age of Obama

Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Richard L. O’Bryant, Richard L. O'Bryant

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317937159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The election of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States has opened a new chapter in the country's long and often tortured history of inter-racial and inter-ethnic relations. Many relished in the inauguration of the country's first African American president — an event foreseen by another White House aspirant, Senator Robert Kennedy, four decades earlier. What could have only been categorized as a dream in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education was now a reality. Some dared to contemplate a post-racial America. Still, soon after Obama's election a small but persistent faction questioned his eligibility to hold office; they insisted that Obama was foreign-born. Following the Civil Rights battles of the 20th century hate speech, at least in public, is no longer as free flowing as it had been. Perhaps xenophobia, in a land of immigrants, is the new rhetorical device to assail what which is non-white and hence un-American. Furthermore, recent debates about immigration and racial profiling in Arizona along with the battle over rewriting of history and civics textbooks in Texas suggest that a post-racial America is a long way off.

What roles do race, ethnicity, ancestry, immigration status, locus of birth play in the public and private conversations that defy and reinforce existing conceptions of what it means to be American?

This book exposes the changing and persistent notions of American identity in the age of Obama. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Richard L. O'Bryant, and an outstanding line up of contributors examine Obama's election and reelection as watershed phenomena that will be exploited by the president's supporters and detractors to engage in different forms of narrating the American national saga. Despite the potential for major changes in rhetorical mythmaking, they question whether American society has changed substantively.

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Obama and Enduring Notions of American National Identity

Amílcar Antonio Barreto

Following a major tremor seismologists warn the public at large to brace for aftershocks. Without a doubt, the 2008 US elections represented a ground-shaking event in American political life. One of the resulting convulsions was the rise of the Tea Party movement—the vanguard opposition to the new administration. Despite its efforts this movement failed to unseat him. Obama’s reelection four years later indicated that this political shake and quiver was not just a one-time fluke. Still, the venomous tone with which his most ardent opponents assail Obama leave many questioning the degree to which large segments of the American public accept a president unlike all of his predecessors.

In light of the tumultuous history of US racial relations, the election and subsequent reelection of the country’s first African American president is undoubtedly a pivotal moment. His two presidential victories were causes for joyous celebrations in some quarters. His adversaries were expectedly disappointed. Nonetheless, among Obama’s political rivals was a subset that was profoundly unsettled, one that believed the presidency was an office reserved for a particular segment of the citizenry. Many will point to Obama’s election as evidence that the country has surpassed the racial tensions that marked its first two and a quarter centuries. Others, whether supporters or critics, will dismiss such an assertion out of hand, claiming, instead, that replacing the ship’s captain is no guarantee of a fundamental change of course. Obama’s meteoric arrival on the national stage provides us with a golden opportunity to reexamine the contentious debate over the essence of American national identity.

The motto E Pluribus Unum—one out of many—rhetorically embraces all who commit to the republic’s founding principles of liberty, democracy, and egalitarianism. A commitment to a shared set of civic ideals, we are told, serves as the epoxy binding the federation’s basic building blocks. But from the start daily practices, social attitudes, and government policies have conspired to constrain national membership, de jure and de facto. Since the country’s founding, full membership has been restricted on the basis of racial, cultural, and even confessional traits. A recurring debate since the country’s naissance, among ordinary citizens and policymakers alike, is the expansiveness of those inherited parameters. This state of affairs has entrenched a rather schizophrenic national identity—it is defined as ideological by some, particularly in the government; an alternative definition limited Americans, to varying degrees, based on their racial, ethnic, confessional, or other inherited attributes; and yet another hybrid notion blended elements of the first two. Obama’s tenure invites us to discuss to what degree articulations of American identity have changed or whether it has changed at all.

Defining a Young Nation

On rare occasions an academic field of inquiry is profoundly transformed by the publication of one work. Infrequent as they are, these scientific revolutions fundamentally alter the way in which the scholarly community approaches a particular topic (Kuhn 1970). The studies of biology and physics were forever transformed by Darwin and Einstein, respectively; in the same spirit the study of nationalism changed fundamentally following the publication of Anderson’s (1983) now classic tome. Earlier definitions of this phenomenon relied on an extensive enumeration of cultural and historic features differentiating groups from one another. For example, Stalin (1935: 8) defined a nation as “a historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.” Such a characterization leaves observers in the pursuit of a rather extensive and often incoherent laundry list of ethno-cultural traits capable of differentiating one community from another. Anderson (1983) sidestepped such earlier approaches and defined a nation, succinctly, as an imagined political community.

First, the nation is an imagined or contrived entity. It is possible to know everyone in a hamlet, perhaps even a village, but this is not so with every fellow national. And yet, compatriots are capable of recognizing one another. In sync with Anderson, Hobsbawm (1983: 7) described imagining national peoplehood as an invented tradition. The notion of imagination and invention speak to nationalism’s artificial nature. As a fabricated entity the nation can be created, and different societal actors have vested interests in forging the nation in dissimilar fashions. Its engineered nature leaves nationalist activists with the uncomfortable supposition—one they usually dismiss out of hand—that there was a time before national identities, and that their sense of communal bonds is engineered.

Second, Anderson depicted nations as political phenomena. Nationalists believe their people are imbued with the inalienable right to live within a shared politico-administrative edifice. In the case of minorities, their aspirations could be mild requests for greater autonomy from the central state. Alternatively, they might adamantly insist on independence from a state dominated by another ethnic community. In the case of ethnic majorities the tactic often switches. As the group at the top it seeks to impose national uniformity—a homogeny limited to the parameters of the state’s majority— through such varied tactics such as marginalization, assimilation, or forced expulsion of minorities. It is precisely this political dimension that differentiated nationalism from the related concept of ethnicity (Eriksen 1993: 6).

Lastly, nationalism is founded on a supposition that members pertain to a community bound by familial ties: a macro-extended family. Every group member, nationalists assume, is a distant cousin. But on what basis do nationalists make such a presumption? Communal ties are assumed based on shared features. Objectifying national identities on the basis of observable ethno-cultural traits is the norm. Without birth certificates or any other state-issued documents co-nationals are more than capable of identifying one another thanks to patent features such as language, folk customs, religion, and phenotypical characteristics (Handler 1988: 11–15). These markers set the parameters for national membership differentiating us from them. Nationalism’s nature is such that these discriminating markers are recurrently fetishized as the living embodiment of identity and group survival.

American identity has been habitually presented as one of the great exceptions to this rule. Historically the country’s official national identity has been presented as “ethnically neutral” (Connor 1994: 79). Thus Lipset (1990: 26) insisted that the nature of American identity was ideological rather than ethnic. American-ness was based on the degree to which one internalized the country’s guiding principles: antistatism, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism. Kallen concurred. “Respect for ancestors, pride of race! Time was when these would have been repudiated as the enemies of democracy, the antithesis of the fundamentals of the North American Republic” (Kallen 1998: 62). These were the principled convictions dividing liberty-loving Americans from their Crown-loving cousins on the eastern side of the Atlantic and in the Canadian colonies. For Myrdal (1962: 8), equality and liberty laid at the bedrock of the American Creed. As Lévy (2006: 251) said, while retracing Tocqueville’s journey through the United States: “It has always been this artifact, forged by people of diverse origins who had nothing in common but this sharing not of a memory but of a desire and an Idea.”

Yet from the start these laudable principles were associated with a particular subset of the larger population. Indeed, even contemporary writers have reiterated the connection between founding principles and ethnic or confessional traits. With great fanfare Huntington (2004) claimed the United States was founded on the bedrock of Anglo-Protestantism. He anointed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants the country’s founders, its staatsvolk and its raison d’être: “America was created as a Protestant society just as and for some of the same reasons Pakistan and Israel were created as Muslim and Jewish societies in the twentieth century” (Ibid., 63). To soften the ethnocentric and racial implications of his thesis Huntington claimed he did not favor Anglo-Protestant people, per se, but Anglo-Protestant culture (Ibid., xvii). But his depiction of Latinos, particularly Mexicans, as a threat to country’s unity (Ibid., 229–230) did not succeed in swaying his detractor (Lévy 2006: 229).

Despite Huntington’s statement about the ideological foundations of American identity, Lipset (2003: 330) confessed that at the time of country’s founding egalitarianism was limited to white men. “Not being born of the same blood is not a liability, but an asset: Americans will constitute the first political community united by a choice of freedom over tyranny—or at least, whites ‘from every part of Europe’ will do so” (Zolberg 2006: 51; emphasis in original). Hence, the United States was not completely free at birth. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that not everyone was entitled to the same degree of liberty and freedom. Rich in dichotomies, from the time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord the country was both free and slave, inhabited with masters and servants, and filled with rich and poor (Zinn 2005: 50). This paradox between practice and rhetoric endured long after the 1776 Revolution.

Outside of the opening chapters in Genesis we do not see creation out of nothing. Nationalist mythmakers employed preexisting traditions (Geary 2002: 17). Motyl (2001: 59) stated: “The point is that both invention and imagination presuppose preexisting building blocks on the one hand and their combination and subsequent transformation by inventors or imaginers into a novel end-product on the other. We cannot invent or imagine ex nihilo.” The early American settlers did indeed arrive on the shores of the Atlantic with preexisting perceptions who belonged within their core group. By the late eighteenth century leaders and followers were weaving these ideals into the fabric of a nascent national identity. Before their departure from the British Isles settlers had already developed notions of a Protestant us vis-à-vis a Catholic them (Colley 1992; Knott 1993). The menacing other was both domestic, particularly in Ireland, and foreign, in the case of Spain and France. Pan-Protestantism as a cornerstone of British identity allowed the faithful to reinterpret themselves as a new chosen people (Cherry 1998).

From time of the first settlements this belief in divine selection took on racial undertones. And that dynamic was already at play before African slaves were brought to Jamestown in 1619. For instance, in the early seventeenth century Governor Bradford (2006: 44) of the Plymouth Colony classified Native Americans as “savages.” Although he converted Pocahontas to Christianity, Reverend Alexander Whitaker still classified the country’s aboriginal population as “naked slaves of the divell [sic]” (in Cherry 1998: 32). Not all founding clerics shared this blatant disdain for the country’s first peoples. Roger Williams (2008: 158), the founder of the Providence Plantation, later the colony of Rhode Island, strongly objected to labeling Native Americans as savages or “heathens.” But Williams was exceedingly progressive in contrast to most European thinkers of his era, and his perception of the continents’ indigenous peoples was a minority view.

American identity was unique, the founders claimed, because it sprang from shared ancestral connections and a common ideological spirit. In the early 1800s Tocqueville (1969: 307–308) observed that most Americans came from essentially the same British stock, adhered to a common faith, and clung to a common set of laws. But the most direct expression of that two-pronged supposition is found in John Jay’s Second Federalist. The future Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said:

… Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence. (Hamilton, Madison & Jay 1961: 38)

Jay’s statement was not an isolated utterance. In the 12th and 14th Federalists James Madison extolled that the American people were united in an “affinity of language and manners” and there was a “kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens” (Hamilton, Madison, & Jay 1961: 94, 104). Smith referred to this interpretation of American identity, an exegesis fraught with incongruity, as the multiple traditions thesis. American political culture, he contended, was based on a “complex pattern of apparently inconsistent combinations of the traditions, accompanied by recurring conflicts” (Smith 1993: 558). For Holloway (2011: 111), this back and forth between diverging perceptions is a clear indication that American identity was, from the start, rather “ambiguous.”

From the start there were disagreements as to what kind of immigrants were desirable. During the debates on the 1787 Constitution, Colonel George Mason, a delegate from Virginia, attacked slavery. His anxieties were not centered on the morality of owing slaves, but on how their presence would influence new European arrivals. Slavery made every master into a “petty tyrant” and since slaves perform manual labor, the kind usually undertaken by recent immigrants, their presence discouraged the immigration of whites who “really enrich and strengthen a country” (Ketcham 1986: 162). In terms of immigration, future Americans would only come from “respectable Europeans,” said Madison, and he did not mean everyone from that continent (Ibid., 157). Certainly Anglo-Saxon immigrants fit the bill. For Jefferson (1993: 273–274), love of liberty was ingrained in the British settlers who inherited that philosophical proclivity from their Germanic forebears.¹ Anglo-Saxons were hard-wired for love of liberty, thought Jefferson. The same did not hold for all whites. Immigrants from absolute monarchies could not shake their inclination towards autocracy. In time their children would become citizens and elect like-minded representatives transforming laws into a “heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass” (Ibid., 204). English immigrants were a different matter. Jefferson wrote: “Our laws, language, religion, politics and manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as part of ours, and to study our laws in that as its origin” (Ibid., 555).

Founders differed as to where precisely to draw the line. Franklin expressed a strong proclivity towards British immigrants. From his perspective Africans, Asians, and Native Americans were “tawny” while southern and eastern Europeans were too “swarthy” (Franklin 1987: 374).² German immigrants were certainly light-skinned; but the Deutsch, a people strange in language and custom, were arriving in threateningly large numbers.³ Uttering an attack still deployed against newcomers, Franklin accused the Germans of underselling English labor (Ibid., 445). On the other hand, Jefferson did not look kindly on al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors and Editors
• Introduction: The Age of Obama and American Identity
• 1 Obama and Enduring Notions of American National Identity
• 2 Racial Identification in a Post-Obama Era: Multiracialism, Identity Choice, and Candidate Evaluation
• 3 The Son of a Black Man from Kenya and a White Woman from Kansas: Immigration and Racial Neoliberalism in the Age of Obama
• 4 Immigrant Resentment and American Identity in the Twenty-First Century
• 5 Browning Our Way to Post-Race: Identity, Identification, and Securitization of Brown
• 6 White Masculinities in the Age of Obama: Rebuilding or Reloading?
• 7 Exceptionally Distinctive: President Obama’s Complicated Articulation of American Exceptionalism
• 8 Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Leadership: Renewing America’s Image
• 9 The First Black President?: Cross-Racial Perceptions of Barack Obama’s Race
• Index