'Who Are We?': The Dangers Of Pigeonholing
After terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans had a lot of questions, and made a lot of assumptions, about Muslims. iStockphoto.com hide caption
After terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans had a lot of questions, and made a lot of assumptions, about Muslims.
iStockphoto.comGary Younge believes that identity itself is harmless, but the ways people choose to use it can hurt.
In his new book, Who Are We — And Should it Matter in the Twenty-First Century? Younge explores the ways people identify one another and how those identities affect our lives.
Younge tells NPR's Brian Naylor that his exploration of identity started, naturally, with his own.
"I'm a black Brit who's lived in New York for nine years," he says.
And that matters because of all the ways he's been misidentified and because of how that treatment has influenced his own story — a story that very much informs his point of view.
"I think we all come to life, politics, social interactions with something," he says. "The idea that we are purely objective, omniscient all-seeing beings is a terrible mistake."
But sometimes the more powerful your identity is, the less it can actually feels like one. Younge uses his own story as an example.
Who Are We — And Should It Matter In The Twenty-First Century?
By Gary Younge
Hardcover, 256 pages
Nation Books
List Price: $26.99
"Nobody asks me, 'When did you first come out as a straight guy?' " he says, like one might ask of a gay person. Nor do they ask him, a foreign correspondent with a 4-year-old son, how he manages to balance travel with raising his child, as women are often asked.
Younge says this point played out on a national stage during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was criticized for her "wise Latina" comments.
"You had mostly white male senators saying ... 'But you're going to rule as a Latina,' as though they weren't ruling as white guys; as though white masculinity was an objective position, an orthodoxy, almost."
For Younge, all it takes is walking down the street with his infant son to get an idea of other people's expectations. On those walks, he says, black women sometimes congratulate him not on the birth of his son but for being a "responsible black father."
But, he says, "We are many things all at the same time." Younge is black; he's British; he's "nominally Christian"; he lives in New York; he speaks Russian. "But we're always just one thing, which is ourselves."
That may seem overly simple, but it's still important.
"In certain moments, people will seek to identify one part of your identity as being the most important or the only relevant part," he says.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he says, "you could have been a beer-drinking, womanizing, pork-eating nominal Muslim," but come Sept. 12, "you're being asked to answer for a range of policies and politics and practices of a group of people who you may not identify with."
Americans discovered a similar dynamic in Europe after the war began in Iraq.
"Americans around Europe found their American-ness being elevated to being the most important thing about them," Younge says. "And people would demand that they answer for Americans."
And of course, in both cases, people are more than just Muslim or just American.
Younge says it's often only when you leave the place of your identity that you become most comfortable with it. He says white people in much of the U.S. may not think of their racial identification as particularly interesting until they go to Africa or certain areas of Brooklyn, N.Y., where their whiteness stands out.
And there's nothing like going to a gay bar as a straight person to realize that straight is also its own identity.
Who Are We-And Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
Excerpt: 'Who Are We'
Who Are We — And Should It Matter In The Twenty-First Century
By Gary Younge
Hardcover, 256 pages
Nation Books
List Price: $26.99
Over a breakfast of pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs in a backroom in the Nuggett Casino in Pahrump, rural Nevada, the conversation among around forty men turned to the most auspicious moment for armed insurrection.
"The last thing we want to see is to break out our arms," said one. "But we need to have 'em in hand, and the government needs to know that we will use [our arms] if they continue down the path they're on. I'm not promoting arms against our government. But the government needs to know if they go past a certain line in the sand that will take place. That's why we have the second amendment. That's why it says we should have a well-regulated militia. Do we have a well-regulated militia? No, we don't. We're not even ready. We need to get ready."
Another, fearing such talk could give a visiting journalist the wrong impression, insisted few in the room would agree with such a ridiculous view.
"This talk about taking up arms against the government is ridiculous, and I don't think many people in this room believe that. We have a lot of legal avenues to exhaust before we ever get to that."
But it turned out quite a few did. "Look how much damage Barack Obama and his socialist congress did in eighteen months," bellowed another. "It could take us ten years to undo this crap. And you say we can't consider using weapons."
They call it the "old farts' club": a gathering of elderly, conservative men (all but two of them are white) that has been meeting every Friday morning for the last five years at the Nugget for breakfast and a bull session. On the day I was there (just a few days before the 2010 mid-term elections), they discussed topics that ranged from judges — one calls for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to be removed from the Supreme Court — to the fate of a local park. The discussions are spirited, but it is a warm, convivial, garrulous bunch.
For all that, however, one cannot escape a pervasive sense of anger and fear in the room that portends some encroaching, escalating and all-encompassing calamity. The list of sources for this fear seems endless: the media, illegal immigrants, gays, civil rights leadership, the judiciary, Democrats, liberals, establishment Republicans, China, government, schools, the coastal states in general, California in particular. Each place setting comes with a copy of the constitution: a sacred document being violated by the government. When I ask how many believe they are living in tyranny, they all raise their hands. When I ask how many believe President Obama was born in the United States, only one arm goes up.
Being a white man in America is not what it used to be. True, wherever power is exercised that demographic group is overrepresented and has been for centuries. They also earn more than women of any race, more than men of any other race (except Asians) and more than most people in most countries. And yet the sense of fragility as a cohort is palpable. Before a single vote had been cast for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination that saw Obama face off against Hillary Clinton, Esquire ran a cover asking: "Can a white man still be elected president?" and a book had been released entitled: The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.
But while the nature of the crisis might be miscast the notion that there is a crisis is difficult to deny.
For working and middle-class white men — the overwhelming majority — their race, gender and nationality had done little to shield them from the economic ravages of the new global economy. Over the last generation median income for white American men has stalled, as has social mobility, taking with it the very American notion that each year will be better than the next and each successive generation more prosperous.
This sense of regression has been particularly acute for men. Women are now more likely to apply to and graduate from a university than men, and in some metropolitan centers women under 25 earn more than their male peers. Even if things have been getting tougher because of the recession, most women born in or before 1980 had more options (economic, social, sexual and academic) than their mothers.
But the problems went beyond race and gender. Many blamed their problems, in part or in whole, on the outside world. The United States may have been one of the principal motors of neoliberal globalization, but its citizens are also its victims. From 47 countries polled by Pew in 2007, Americans showed the sharpest decline in their support for foreign trade and had the least positive view of it. By at the latest 2030 China's GDP will overtake America.
To the sting of economic vulnerability has been added the indignity of geopolitical decline and the erosion of the myth of invincibility that lay at the heart of America's post–World War II national identity. As the sole global superpower since the end of the Cold War, the United States was once able to rig the competition with carrots, sticks and, if need be, B52s. Now it must accept that Indians, Chinese, Brazilians and others can also change the rules.
"Owing to the relative decline of its economic and, to a lesser extent, military power, the US will no longer have the same flexibility in choosing among as many policy options," concluded the National Intelligence Council (which coordinates analysis from all US intelligence agencies) shortly after Obama's election. The report acknowledged that, while the United States would remain the single most powerful force in the world, its relative strength and potential leverage are waning.
Excerpted from Who Are We — And Should it Matter in the Twenty-First Century, by Gary Younge. Available from Nation Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2011.