What the Obama and Palin Phenomena Say about American Culture

by Andrés T. Tapia –

With cultural and political phenomenon Sarah Palin’s current multi-city bus tour publicising her recently published memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, it’s a good time to relook at what the Obama and Palin phenomena say about current American culture and the state of diversity. Palin’s large crowds in Borders bookstores in medium and small towns highlight that competing worldviews are pressing against each other in the diversity era that made President Obama possible which Barack Obama captured in his own memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

As the blogosphere and talk radio on the left and right keep the volume turned up, and as the media obsesses on the horse-race of who’s winning and losing in opinion polls and elections, there’s a deeper story underneath the made-for-YouTube accusations that get Twitted by the minute by both sides. Whether the debate be healthcare, the economy, Afghanistan, and on, what’s at play are competing worldview visions of what it means to be an American.

The answer to this debate is not only essential for life in the USA but also for the US’s role in an increasingly global economy. 

Some reflections on the U.S.’s current cultural paradox.

The Obama and Palin visions offer very different mythologies about American identity in the face of an upside down world (for a global context, see excerpt from chapter 1 of The Inclusion Paradox, “An Upside-Down World“). The archetypes facing off are urban, diverse, communal, and global on the one hand and rural, homogeneous, individualistic, and parochial on the other.

In  order to find a way through to inclusion, as a diversity expert I seek to understand what drives the conflicting perspectives of different sides. The cyber shouting during the election and which has continued unabated since then question the very humanness of the other side. The heated debate reveals a fear that one vision of America will prevail over the other. Partisans on both sides claim to speak for the “real America.”

To try to understand what’s going on, I’ve been tracing my own journey through these competing views of America. Even though I grew up in Lima, Peru, my biographical trajectories have had me crisscross the United States. My American mom gave me family roots in a tiny white rural town called Harrington, 50 miles west of Spokane in the western frontier state of Washington. My German-American wife hails from the evangelical heart of Kansas. And I now live in multicultural, urbane Chicago.

Rugged Frontier and Vibrant City
Visiting my American grandparents Freida and Brownie Graham as a kid entailed traveling through a cultural worm hole that took me from the chaotic streets of Third World Lima to the tranquil wheat fields of Harrington. As I stepped into this Norman Rockwell America with my darker skin and the heavy accent of my youth, I experienced the America of the rugged individual, master of one’s own domain. Paradoxically, it was also a tightly-knit community of 500 that jointly experienced the yearly rituals of the town’s Turkey Gobble Pancake Breakfast, the Lilac Parade, and wheat harvest.

I marveled at 13-year-olds getting to drive trucks along massive John Deere harvesters and then careen into the town’s wheat grain exchange, with harvested grain brimming over the truck bed. Then after harvest, hanging out on hot lazy afternoons at Mini Falls chewing on tall sun-baked prairie grass.

But something terrible has happened. My nostalgic memories of Main Street in Harrington and stocking up on a week’s supply of candy at the local drugstore, grabbing spare parts for my grandpa’s weed control pick-up truck at the hardware store, and going to the Challenger Cafe with him for chili can’t be confirmed by a visit anymore. Today the drug and hardware store as well as the Challenger Cafe are gone. Agribusiness has bought out several of the family-owned farms and people have moved to the cities. Towns 30 miles away need to combine their school sports programs in order to field enough kids for a basketball squad. Even the friends I made during those childhood visits, Linda and Ron, who are third-generation farmers, have a brooding sense that family farming is coming to an end and are encouraging their two college-aged daughters to seek livelihoods elsewhere.

As attractive as this lifestyle is for millions of Americans, the American mythology as represented by Palin is facing the rising waters of change that are turning land mass into islands. It is no coincidence that the Palin mythology has come forth from America’s final frontier, Alaska.

But American cities are facing their own days of reckoning. The glitz and rapid pace of New York and Los Angeles, their mythologies of America glorified by Hollywood blockbusters and embraced by “I Love New York” bumper stickers, have taken devastating blows. New York’s mystique and invulnerability took its first hit with the crumbling of the Twin Towers and suffered another crippling blow with the humiliation of Wall Street. American financial hegemony is over. In the same way that family farms ceded economic ownership to big business, economic ownership has shifted en masse to Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese hands. Hollywood is losing ground to Bollywood. Residents in New Orleans and Galveston are still picking up the pieces of their lives obliterated by storms that have names but no mercy.

Both American mythologies –- Rugged Frontier and Vibrant City — have been tarnished. Yet the 2008 presidential election breathed new life into both of them. The battles lines were such that one got the sense that only one could survive. In the blogosphere, “arugula-eating” and “moose-hunting” became the shorthands for mutual disdain.

The Real Americans
So who then are the real Americans?

As I think of this nation I have crisscrossed from sea to shining sea, here’s what I believe. It’s my 92-year-old grandmother in a nursing home in Washington. It’s the Wall Street whiz kid who lost her job at Lehman. It’s the Alaska boy who loves ice fishing. It’s the hip-hop breakdancer on Chicago’s South Side. The tiara-decked girl at her quinceañera. The Torah-reciting boy at his bar mitzvah. It’s the AmeriCorps teacher in El Paso. It’s moms and dads making peanut butter sandwiches, my Peruvian high-school mate Luis who on 9/11 said, “Today I became an American.” It’s my wife Lori’s Oklahoma cattle ranching relatives who emailed us their deepest fears about the man with a Muslim name. It’s me. It’s Palin and it’s Obama. And the people they represent.

What does it mean to be an American?

Essayist Richard Rodriguez has written that the idea of America is that it is a place where one can re-invent him or herself. Where our destiny is not fixed. Right now I believe the task is not an individual reinvention but a collective one.

Tumultuously, adolescent America is coming into adulthood. As we often remind our 18-year-old about her own life, Americans must now make good, mature choices. Much is at stake. And in society, and in our workplaces, we can continue to pursue divisiveness or we can choose to do the very, very, hard – but healing work — of inclusiveness.

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- Andrés Tapia is the author of The Inclusion Paradox: The Obama Era and the Transformation of Global Diversity and chief diversity officer at Hewitt Associates.

A version of this article written by the author first appeared in the New America Media.

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