Miss Americana?
Between Fearless (Taylor’s Edition) being released last week and my instructor making us get off our bikes and do the “Hoedown Throwdown” during Miley Cyrus vs. Hannah Montana SoulCycle (that dance felt much easier to do when I was 14 but yes, I still remembered it), I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of Americana.
I’ve listened to every episode of “Renegades” with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen and in the last episode, they talk about what it’s like to be an American™️, holding the seemingly disparate ideas that you can simultaneously be very critical of your nation and very prideful of your nation and what it represents. In the words of James Baldwin, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” But of course, a white man named Dennis M. Hogan felt the need to write about how Bruce is betraying his own identity because he’s a liberal and friends with Barack Obama and they’re doing a podcast together where they talk about the disgusting neoliberal topics of masculinity and fatherhood and coming to terms with aging when they never planned to do so.
In the podcast, Obama name checks Sarah Palin, who constantly dogwhistled about "real” Americans during the 2008 election and he points out that her true message was that people like Obama, and people like me, are not “true” Americans because of the color of our skin. We might serve and live and die for this country, but it never belongs to us because we aren’t white. In a way, us loving this country is almost a middle finger at those who would rather us simply not exist in this country, even as a footnote. Not that Dennis M. Hogan and men like him have any idea what any of that feels like because they’ve never been made to feel like outsiders in the only country they’ve ever really known.
Taylor Swift was born and spent her childhood and early adolescence in Berks County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by about 10% in 2016 and 2020 respectively. When she was younger, Taylor was apolitical to a fault, refusing to even endorse anybody in 2016 (slightly ironic in that Taylor Swift and Hillary Clinton are not not the same person), but as she’s grown up, she’s become a vocal Democrat, endorsing Phil Bredesen in 2018 and Joe Biden in 2020. However, Taylor’s punishment for becoming politically outspoken has been losing her clout and standing with the people that made her famous so to speak, to the extent Taylor was intentionally removed from Nashville’s Country Legends mural, and replaced with Brad Paisley, in spite of changing the landscape country music for good before she could even legally drink.
By not conforming to the ideals of “America” as it’s delineated by white men, by not being conservative and gun-toting and in my case, not being white, we lose our status as true Americans, and I hate it. I’ve lived in the United States since the Clinton administration, I didn’t become an American citizen until I was 19 (thank you @ the Bush Administration for dropping the ball on THAT), and it sometimes gets to me that half(ish) of this country still thinks I don’t belong here. When I was 6, we moved to the whitest part of a Dallas suburb that was already 85% white and unsurprisingly, I was quickly and thoroughly ridiculed for my strong Indian accent, the food I brought to lunch, and being younger than everybody else in the class. I’d like to think that if I wasn’t a child, I’d have stood up for myself and my identity but I didn’t do that. I lied to my whole class that I was a year older than I actually was and when I got home from school, I would watch TV and practice the accents of the main characters in the mirror for hours on end, making my mouth move just like the characters’ mouths did, which is why I sound the way I do today, all Cher Horowitz (right down to the hair) with a strong Blair Waldorf undertone and a touch of Rachel Green if I had to parse it.
A decade later, during my junior and senior years of high school, I dated a guy I met at a competitive math camp who hailed from a town in eastern Washington that had less people than my high school graduating class. His friends and family would never admit to being racist but they called me a “good investment despite not being white” and no matter what he said, I always felt like an exotic oddity to him and his cohort, like an exploding star that couldn’t be contained because of where I came from and who I was. I don’t wish him especially ill (I don’t wish him well either) but it does bother me that I never articulated to him or anybody else at the time why his treatment of me unsettled me as much as it did.
Subsequently, in college, I spent way too much time and energy on someone I called “a slick chrome American prince,” who was quite frankly already halfway rusted by the time I met him, and it’d surprise me greatly if he’s got even a bit of steel left to him today. That was around when I found my voice, or rather developed a penchant for melodramatic Peter Pan and plantation mistress metaphors, which predictably unnerved others as was my intention. I’m proud that around this time, I finally learned to stop taking passive aggressiveness (or aggressive aggressiveness) laying down but a tiny secret part of me wishes I was able to sit down and shut up like I did for the first 16 years of my life since that was easier even if I didn’t like myself as much.
In any case, that relationship was ironic in that while he was never racist to me and his (Republican) family was never racist to me, other people, especially white girls, were egregiously racist to me. Girls, both drunk and sober, would come up to me and straight up ask me what he saw in me but they’d never dare ask him obviously because he, being a performatively wealthy white male, had a power over them that I never will no matter what my family’s tax returns say. Once at a party, I overheard a girl say he was “hardcore slumming it” with me, not realizing I was in the room because we’d never actually met before. I walked over, smiled, looked her right in the eye, and introduced myself to her and she looked nothing short of terrified, but I didn’t make a scene since that was improper (or so I’d been raised).
The fact is, I’m polite to a fault because that’s how I was brought up, by my parents and the etiquette classes I attended, but I stop short of being nice to people unless they’ve earned it, which according to Emily Post and her biddies, isn’t what immigrant women of color™️ are supposed to do. We’re supposed to be grateful to be accepted (but never loved) by white people, acquiescent and maybe even a bit subservient but not in a way that makes white people aware of what we’re doing. Don’t get me wrong, I think my life would be simpler, perhaps even better, if I was less confrontational, utterly convinced of my own sharpness in way that scares people, but somewhere along the line, I lost the ability to be that way, trading it in for self-actualization in vein of Janie Crawford and self-respect in the vein of Joan Didion (and decidedly not in the vein of Carrie Bradshaw), and in the words of Taylor Swift, I have to live with the pain.
Deep down in my prematurely osteoporotic bones, I’m convinced that I was born fundamentally unlikeable and that’s how I’ll die. As a result, over the years, I conditioned myself to stop caring whether or not I’m universally liked to the point that caring if I’m liked by people I don’t love became impossible to turn back figuratively speaking. A whole lot of people in my life, including but not limited to guys I’ve dated, have loudly proclaimed that they don’t care if people liked them but they were lying through their teeth and I’m not, not least because I’m a terrible liar. From the time I was a child, I’ve thought of rules as guidelines, to be followed only when they benefit me, and I’m going to face the consequences for that mindset for as long as I live and quite possibly, it’s what I deserve.