Iain Bernhoft, Providence College
Two-thirds of Americans identify themselves as possessing above-average intelligence. The percentage of those with above-average moral character is apparently even higher. And who among us wouldn’t self-identify as “genuine” or “down-to-earth”? Yet how frequently we encounter people who seem otherwise! Other identifiers, meanwhile, only ever apply to other people. Take “hipster,” for instance: Almost no one would self-identify as such, but most anyone can spot one: the pretentious tastes and tasteless tattoos, the ironically scruffy shirts and distressed skinny jeans. A Someone Else and not me. I suspect that current discourse on “identity politics” works the same way. We have perspectives, informed by our experiences, principles, and common sense. Identity politics is something in which other people indulge, to the detriment of our shared identities as Americans.
My point is this: Identification is inextricably yoked not simply to description(how it is) but also to aspiration (how we want to be). And as such, discerning a distinctive American identity on the basis of Americans’ self-understanding leads straightaway into murky water. In a 1959 essay entitled “Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” James Baldwin wrote that
America’s history, her aspirations, her peculiar triumphs, her even more peculiar defeats, and her position in the world—yesterday and today—are all so profoundly and stubbornly unique that the very word ‘America’ remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun. No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.
For Baldwin, we struggle to define “America” because we have never seen it before. Moreover, America’s increasingly motley massiveness defies not just comprehension but even the possibility of any shared, essential quality. For what distinctive, unifying thread could run through New York City and New Ulm, Minnesota, or bind Kennebunkport, Maine to Carson City rather than Quebec City? One suspects that only the thinnest kind of “Americanness” could stretch across such geographic, economic, and racial divides. Perhaps, as Josh Vandiver argues in his contribution, it is instead the case that America’s “endless proliferation and reconfiguration of identities” serves ultimately to undermine any singular or fixed identity.
Recently I’ve been working on the question of American Identity in the work of the contemporary novelist Colson Whitehead. His 2016 Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad is partly a fugitive slave novel, but more centrally a journey in pursuit of what it calls “the true face of America.” I’d argue that The Underground Railroad stages the question of American identity like this: Should we define America according to its aspirations (liberty and equality for all) or by critically describing its history (expansionist warfare, slavery, indigenous genocide, etc.)? To borrow the paradigm that Ryan Dawkins presents in his essay between “nativist” and “multicultural” conceptions of America, the former locates the essence of “America” in the past, seeing in its founding the definitive ideal we must preserve. The latter (progressive) stance regards this past with suspicion, instead locating “America” in a pluralistic near-future. America is what we once were; America is where we ought to go.
Regarding this conflict, Whitehead’s novels make the case that allgrand narratives of identity are largely mythic—that is, stories that derive from selective accounts of reality. As such, they seem true insofar as one is already inclined to believe them, false if one already doubts their premises. Attempts to pin down a distinctive American identity are thus always aspirational rather than descriptive, desire masquerading as diagnosis. In Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), the protagonist thinks of America as “one of those balloon names . . . getting bigger and bigger and thinner and thinner. What kind of gas it was, stretching the thing to its limits, who could say. Whatever we dreamed.” In this telling, “America” seems primarily a container term inflated by the gas of Americans’ incongruent dreams.
But Whitehead’s novels also suggest that we might do better if we can untether American identity from aspiration by attending solely to actual lived experience. Early in The Underground Railroad, a stationmaster promises the fugitive slave Cora, “Ifyou want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America” (69). At first, this sounds like an Amtrak campaign: natural sights and local diversity, adding up to a tapestry we call America! As the novel progresses, and Cora stumbles from one cruel and terrifying state to the next, she starts to hear it as a bleak and twisted joke—since “[t]here was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness” (263). But towards the end of the novel, something wondrous happens:
Limping, tripping over crossties. Cora ran her hand along the wall of the tunnel, the ridges and pockets. Her fingers danced over valleys, rivers, the peaks of mountains, the contours of a new nation hidden beneath the old. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. She could not see it but she felt it, moved through its heart. (304)
Gone is the promise of sweeping vistas or rapid conveyance to someplace better. The “contours of a new nation” are not seen but felt, located not in ideas but in the dirt below her fingers.
This, Whitehead’s historical fictions propose, is where any search for American identity should begin: Not in aspiration but in description; not with sweeping pronouncement but with embodied particularity. Perhaps this project is itself a naive, hopeless quest. Perhaps there’s nothing to find beyond contested, shifting multiplicity. But if we do hope to better define America, that “almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,” we must first eschew the grand narratives of patriotism or progress in favor of meticulous attention to who Americans are, not what they hope to be.