Our American Identity
Ever since I experienced my first significant identity crisis, I’ve been intrigued by how we construct this thing each of us calls “myself”. I’m going to use this post as a way of exploring identity in general, and American identity in specific.
Note: I started writing this in December 2020 and finished it in January 2021. It was difficult to keep my writing current and coherent as the USA experienced a violent and deadly attack on our Capitol, followed by the second impeachment of President Trump. I tried to navigate these events and this topic at the same time, but I definitely ended up in a different place than I expected. Fasten your seatbelts. 💺
Personal Identity
My identity crisis was preceded by what many would refer to as a stereotypical “mid-life crisis”. I had turned 40, I had bought a fast car, and then a few years later, painfully, a divorce. After 20 years of attaching part of my identity to being a husband, I was suddenly no longer in that role. Like many people going through this sort of transition, I naturally asked myself, “If I’m not a <role name>, who am I?”
Anytime I find myself in anything resembling a “crisis”, I consider the wise words of Gerald Weinberg:
It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the end of an illusion.
I love Jerry’s idea because it invites an important question in the midst of confusing circumstances: What illusion just ended? 🤔
In the context of an identity crisis, the illusion is that we are the roles we play. When we think of who we are, we often focus on our roles. Even as I grieved the loss of my role as a husband, I could find solace in my other roles: father, son, brother, uncle, friend. But I was only perpetuating the illusion. Could I construct my identity without using these kinds of interpersonal roles? I’m not yet actually sure I can, but I do try to meditate on the fact that they are indeed roles: they are not “me”. I’m still exploring what “me” is. Writing this post is a part of that exploration.
Collective Identity
We construct our identities from our genders, personalities, abilities, and interpersonal roles. We also identify with families, tribes, companies, communities, religions, organizations, memberships, vocations, schools, towns, cities, states, nations, and even continents. I consider these collective identities, in that their definition is determined within a group.
For example, there is some collective understanding of what it means to be a member of the “Hoover family”. If we are cohesive as a family, our collective identity will be stable and even adaptable. Let’s say that one aspect of the Hoover family identity is that we root for the Chicago Bears. The moment one member or sect of the family decides to root for the Green Bay Packers, the Hoover family identity splinters. This splintering might feel like a crisis to some people in the family. Going back to Jerry’s advice, what was the illusion in this case? Ultimately, the illusion is we found it deeply meaningful that the matriarch and patriarch of the Hoover family rooted for the Bears in the 1980’s.
On top of our enigmatic personal identity, and its relationship to all the roles we identify with, we layer myriad collective identities. We are attached to greater or lesser degrees to each of our collective identities. For instance, if I identify strongly as a Chicago Bears fan, then the outcomes of their games have a big impact on me. On the other hand, if I identify weakly as a Chicago Bears fan, then the outcomes of their games don’t phase me. If I identify strongly as a Chicago Bears fan, then I’m going to learn what it means to be a Chicago Bears fan, and act accordingly. Being a Chicago Bears fan means that you want a tough defense, and that games should generally be low scoring. If the Bears frequently played games where both teams scored more than 30 points, the fans would start having a collective identity crisis. “This is not Bears football. These aren’t the Bears I know.” The illusion that people are grappling with in this example is that there is actually a way for the Bears to win (or lose) games. That “way” has become outdated by a new reality. Bears fans have a choice about whether they want to splinter into multiple factions, remain cohesive be redefining the “way” the Bears play, or transcend the “way” they play, and simply come together under a new value of “win any way you can”.
Sorry, no more American football examples. Sports teams are an easy starting point because they are so prevalent around the world.
Being American
As I’ve alluded to, I’m going to spend some time considering the collective identity of the United States of America. Unlike most sports teams, the USA is a democracy. We actually get to choose our leaders, and to some extent, we collectively get to decide “who we are”.
Anyone who identifies as an American has some sense of what it means to be American. For example, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, Gabriel Sterling said the following on December 1, 2020:
Don’t be violent. Don’t intimidate. All that’s wrong. It’s un-American.
Gabriel undoubtedly identifies as an American. His words above were directed at President Trump, and he clearly attempted to differentiate some Americans’ behavior from what he, Gabriel Sterling, identifies as “American” behavior. I’m willing to bet that the people that Gabriel is concerned about believe that they are even more American than he is. After all, they are willing to threaten, intimidate, and violently attack other Americans for their cause, which I assume is the fight against what they perceive to be a corrupted election process.
In recent years, finding examples of an American identity crisis is incredibly easy. Today, American political polarization has reached new heights, aided by the polarization of our media outlets, and the echo chambers of our social networks. But the USA has had intermittent identity crises since the day we were conceived. It’s easier to see now that “mainstream” culture itself has fragmented, but it has always been there. What historical mainstream society professed to be “American” has always been pure dissonance for the marginalized and oppressed.
Perhaps the most eloquent and clear discussion of an American identity crisis is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 speech called “The Other America” (PDF, video). In this speech, Dr. King speaks of the America that is known by its wealthy citizens, and the other America that is known by its poor citizens. While he spends much of the speech focused on the systemic oppression of the African-American population, he is inclusive of many other poor folks when he initially differentiates the two Americas.
But of course, there isn’t just two Americas, there are countless Americas. We are a unique, multi-cultural mixture of people, where colonists and immigrants originally displaced indigenous nations, and where almost half a million people were imported as slaves against their will. To again go back to Jerry’s wisdom on crises, what is the illusion in the case of an American identity? It is an illusion that America has ever had a consistent and inclusive collective identity. With so little shared heritage, the American identity must be continually built up around a set of values and ideals. And yet, technological advancements create an opportunity for each of us to customize our lived reality to our individual sensibilities.
The Long Tail of the United States
Many of us have grown to appreciate the benefits of The Long Tail of consumerism. The Internet has accelerated humanity’s ability to profit off of products that fewer and fewer people want. Think about Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Spotify, and the two major App Stores. While they all might give us some extremely popular items, it’s their ability to give us nearly any product, song, or app that we could imagine that makes them powerful. The “long tail” represents the distribution of increasingly “niche” items in a market. While no single item on the right of the following graph is anywhere close to as popular as an item on the far left of the graph, there is still a huge number of items within a “long tail” distribution. And what we’ve learned since the birth of the World Wide Web is that we humans appreciate an almost infinite variety of niches.
What technology did for digital and physical products, the same is happening for our consumption of media. Starting in 1980, with Cable TV’s first 24-hour news network, CNN, and accelerating with the proliferation of the Internet, Americans’ have been able to consume increasingly niche media. Any semblance of cohesive American identity is increasingly subverted by our individual ability to nestle into our comfortable corner of the long tail of media consumption. Each of these niches filters current events and hot topics differently, and the result is that each of us, more or less, are living in different realities. Again, this phenomenon has always been more true of America than most other countries. But it is becoming even more true. After witnessing the election cycle of 2020 and the Capitol attack of January 2021, it feels like our collective identity as Americans is breaking down.
Even as certain niches, such as the one that Parler serves, are knocked down, the long tail is unstoppable, due to the nature of the Internet. While it might be harder for that niche to operate within mainstream tech platforms going forward, it will survive as long as there are people who find meaning within it. Similar to how every demand for a product on the Internet will eventually find a supply, the same is true for media. If you believe that you or someone you care about are suffering from an injustice, you can eventually find a niche that provides you with a narrative that reinforces your belief.
For various algorithmic and personal reasons, the media I consume via Twitter, Medium, and the New York Times leans politically left. Given that, you would probably be unsurprised to hear that it is incomprehensible to me how a person could choose to vote for Donald Trump. And yet, over 74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Given my reality in liberal Evanston, in liberal Illinois, reinforced by my niche of liberal media, I’m perplexed by the enormous number of Americans who voted for someone who in my reality, is a train wreck of a leader. I was so perplexed and demoralized by the possibility of his re-election, I was actually considering emigrating to Canada. This was my American identity crisis: “If we Americans re-elect Donald Trump, then who are we?” For the first time in my life, I couldn’t answer that question, and started feeling like I didn’t belong. My little corner of the media’s long tail was fairly disconnected from 74 million other people’s realities. Despite having some honest conversations with actual people who voted for Trump, I still couldn’t understand it.
I wonder how many of those 74 million Trump voters will be feeling like they don’t belong in the USA, or that the USA was stolen from them, when Joe Biden is inaugurated tomorrow. Certainly the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, Allen West, was feeling similarly when he suggested something that sounded like secession after the Supreme Court dismissed his lawsuit, challenging the results in several battleground states where Biden won. In this case, Allen West’s identity as a Texan was clearly stronger than his identity as an American. I’m curious how Allen would have responded if Biden had won Texas. Yet another identity crisis. These crises are going to keep happening, and given the pace of technical innovation, that long tail is going to perpetually grow longer.
Symbolic Appropriation
As a large country with a short history, composed of a diverse mix of ethnicities, religions, and subcultures, our national symbols are very important to us. Like most countries, our most iconic symbol is our 🇺🇸 flag. I’ve noticed, though, that our flag itself is becoming increasingly politicized. My experiences in the wake of two different national crises might be a helpful illustration.
In the final months of 2001, in the wake of the attacks of September 11th, I felt swept up in American patriotism like no other time in my life. The pain that I felt on behalf our our country, the victims and their families, was soothed by seeing people wave their American flags with pride. Seeing our flag in public places bolstered me and reminded me of our best qualities, and our values of freedom and inclusiveness.
In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, I felt swept up in the shame of American racism like many other times in my life, but it reached new depths. The pain that I felt on behalf of our country, the victims of racism and their families, was soothed by seeing our national and cultural leaders acknowledge and speak out against institutional racism. Seeing our flag in public places made me question our collective identity. I felt ashamed of our racist legacy, and wondered how we would ever transcend it. The courageous non-violent resistance of Colin Kaepernick, while being something I always supported, felt particularly vindicated.
The 9/11 example makes sense to me. The George Floyd example is more confusing. As 2020 wore on, I began noticing the American flag flying more prevalently in spaces that were more politically conservative. My sense was that many liberal Americans were losing our attachment to the flag, due to our shame that we were struggling with. And yet, many liberal Americas could react in the opposite way: we could identify strongly with our American values and wave our flag just as fervently as it was waved post-9/11. Yet, this doesn’t work when folks that one sees as racist are flying the same exact flag. This is an iconic example of our collective identity crisis.
As our collective identity splinters, many of us across the political spectrum appropriate the flag to help us stay connected to our American identity, while distancing ourselves from other Americans who we don’t want to be associated with.
Appropriating the flag in order to differentiate yourself from other Americans is a destructive act. While it feels good in the short-term, it leads nowhere constructive, since it only creates a deeper division between our subcultures. It’s not as if some new coherent nationality is going to be born of one of these derivatives. They will all eventually disappear, either because they are subsumed by a unified nation, or the irrelevance of a failed state. I encourage us to embrace our American flag, and feel the dissonance or pride that currently comes naturally.
As someone who recently considered emigrating to Canada, I recognize that everyone has their own boundary around when they feel like there is too much dissonance for them in America. They get to say when their identity as an American has reached a tipping point. I am encouraging us to lean into our unified collective identity as long as we can hold out. The dissonance we feel when we look across the abyss to the other side of the political spectrum, when we see people with what we consider to be deplorable values and beliefs waving our American flag, this is where we can draw energy.
One Path
At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Dr. Strange signals to Tony Stark that there is only one path to victory. Now, victory is subjective. My definition of “victory” in the context of the collective identity of the USA will look different than Couy Griffin’s definition. My definition of victory is the dream that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of. It is the dream of unity.
To be clear, the path to unity is quite narrow and exceedingly difficult. It requires justice for oppression and insurrection, while also requiring forgiveness and reconciliation. It requires a recognition that poor white folks feel increasingly alienated from society, even while we recognize that African-Americans have centuries of oppression to overcome. It requires us to admit that technological progress is going to work against our collective identity, while attempting to harness that progress to bring us together. It requires Democratic leaders to embrace progressive agendas without being consumed by identity politics. And it requires Republican leaders to reclaim their party, rallying around people like Mitt Romney and Peter Meijer who courageously speak out against insurrection. It requires all of our political leaders to prioritize our country over their party.
The path to unity will require incredible leadership, and deliberate strategy. Yes, yesterday was MLK Day, but on the other 364 days of 2021, I would say the same thing: Martin Luther King, Jr. seems to have been the sort of leader who had both a dream, and a coherent strategy to make that dream reality. The path to true collective American identity will only be found by a successive chain of unifying national leaders. People who will not sugarcoat past injustices, but also people who are capable of grace, forgiveness, and humility. Our democracy cannot survive another divisive, authoritarian Presidential term. For all of our sakes, I hope that Joe Biden and his team can live up to this moment.
Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the path to unity better than anyone else I’ve been exposed to. These words from his most famous speech are profoundly unifying:
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.
The collective destiny of the myriad splinters of America are most certainly tied together. My desperate hope is that we recognize our inter-dependence, and lift up unifying voices.
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