Johann N. Neem started becoming an American at the age of three, when his family moved from India to California, he writes in the Hedgehog Review. He played with the other kids in the neighborhood, carpooled with them to public school, “grew up knowing about our differences but caring about what we shared.”
Now, as identity politics takes hold, Neem is Unbecoming American, he writes. What he thought was American culture has been labeled “white.”
His family eagerly learned American rituals and traditions, such as Christmas gifts, Fourth of July barbecues and the neighborhood Easter egg hunt. They learned norms such as saying “thank you” for service, “a sign of the respect each American owed fellow Americans for their contributions to society,” Neem writes. America “had a creed, too — that the United States promised all people a better, freer, more prosperous life.”
As a child, I thought that to be American was to believe in individuality, to support pluralism and equality, and also to celebrate common holidays and eat common foods, such as the oozy grilled cheeses and bean burritos that the school cafeteria dished up for us, or the sloppy joes and tacos that my mom learned to cook (even though my favorite food remained dahl and rice).
. . . we could all be American, not because of our cultural differences but because of what we could share. This shared culture — this sense of being a people — is a precondition to sustaining the universal ideals of American democracy. We like to pretend that principles are enough, but abstract ideas are thin gruel for flesh-and-blood human beings. . . . Culture connects us to our country and to one another. But that culture depends on shared rituals and experiences. Today, we are so afraid of offense that we risk privatizing the very culture we once could share together.
In an Atlantic interview, Neem tellsConor Friedersdorf that America is now labeled as “whiteness”.
Though he worries about hostility to Indo-Americans, Neem is far more likely to be treated as “the other” by whites on the left rather than by racists on the right.
“They’re so aware of their whiteness that there’s a wall between us that wasn’t there before. Sometimes they’ll attribute something to whiteness and I’ll think, I’m not white and I believe that or do that. That’s just American.
. . . It’s a constant redrawing and minding of racial borders, making it more difficult for immigrants like me to be part of the nation.
Neem doesn’t want to live in a color-coded box, he tells Friedersdorf.
So my ask is to recognize that it’s okay to live in a world where there are parts of us that are the same and other parts that are different. Those shared parts help us to live together and treat each other equally; they allow us to feel at home. We shouldn’t assume that just because something is reflected in majority culture, it’s suspect — or that immigrants cannot or should not become part of it.
“Challenging racism doesn’t require racializing everything,” Neem concludes.
A senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia and professor of history at Western Washington University, is author of What’s the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in an Age of Reform and Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.