Campaign 2008 is yet another campaign in which the issue of who is a “real” American and who isn’t (or isn’t as much of an American) has surfaced. In this Guest Voice, post frequent TMV commenter and blogger Hunter Hatfield puts the issue under the microscope.
Let’s Stop Playing The “Who’s Really American” Game
by Hunter Hatfield
We Americans appear to have a favorite pastime: judging who is a real American and who is just faking it. This dubious game re-appeared last week with some prominent comments implying that people in Hawaii are not truly American.
Cokie Roberts, for instance, recently questioned Sen. Obama’s vacation in Hawaii due to the appearances of it as a foreign, exotic place. Ironically, this comment came the same week as the state holiday known as Admissions Day, when Hawaii celebrates becoming the 50th state in the union.
Mark Penn, the former Clinton campaign strategist, apparently proposed to the other campaign managers that they go after candidate Obama for being insufficiently American due to having spent much of his childhood in Hawaii. To quote Mr. Penn, “His roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” To Sen. Clinton’s credit, she seems not to have decided to play Penn’s game of American one-upmanship.
Sure, Hawaii does some things differently than other places in America. We like to eat both chili dogs and teriyaki rice bowls, greasy hamburgers and pork laulau. Our little daughters might take hula with Ms. Leilani instead of ballet with Ms. Tammy. Hawaiians speak a lot of languages and come in a lot of shapes, sizes, and colors. We even have some holidays that other states don’t have: Kamehameha Day and Prince Kuhio Day. But, you know, every part of the American nation has some special things about it.
I grew up in Louisiana and we got off for Mardi Gras when no one else in the U.S. did. New Orleans is like no other American place; neither is southern Florida with South Beach and Cuban rhythms echoing in night clubs; nor is New York City’s Little Italy or Greenwich Village; nor is rural Minnesota with ice fishing and walleyes. Who in Louisiana ever heard of going ice fishing?! It’s crazy. Even a place like Kansas has geography and an agriculture only found in a small region of this nation. Most Americans don’t have lifestyles like a Kansan.
I am not writing this to defend Hawaii’s Americanness. Perhaps the fact that, according to the Heritage Foundation, the ethnicity of “Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander” is the single most over-represented group in the American armed forces, serving at over 6 times their population percentage, makes the point stronger than I ever could. If it isn’t Hawaii that is being labeled insufficiently American, it’s San Francisco for one group or West Virginia for another. We all can become targets if the political agenda is right: environmentalists, corporate CEOs, Americans whose parents were from Mexico, people who eat sushi, people who went to the wrong school…. This also has nothing to do with political left, right, and center.
Instead I am writing to encourage us to stop beating our fellow citizens up for eating the wrong things, living in the wrong places, or thinking the wrong thoughts. It’s like a discussion among siblings about who loves their mother the most. The only people who ever leave such conversations feeling better are those pick themselves up by knocking others down.
Here are a few things that make me proud to be American.
I am proud when I see pictures of soldiers in Iraq playing with a child when they know that tomorrow a roadside bomb could take them away.
I am proud when I look at the American Olympic team and see virtually every ethnicity in the world standing side by side all representing who America is.
I am proud when Americans have such confidence in our dreams that they think that if any nation can do something amazing, it would be America.
Go to Mars? Sure, America could do it if we wanted to! Build a colony at the bottom of the ocean? Sure!
However, to accomplish such dreams, we cannot spend all our time fighting one another.
So let’s stop playing the “Who’s really American” game and instead fight over real problems we can really solve together – as Americans.
Hunter Hatfield (known as a frequent TMV commenter under the name Pacatrue), left a computer job in Tennessee to pursue a doctorate in Hawaii under the assumption that one can never be sufficiently over-educated. He maintains a personal blog at http://pacatrue.blogspot.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.