BAR Book Forum: Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country“and Carrie Bramen’s “American Niceness”
How do Americans, especially white Americans, appear to the rest of the world, and are they really as “nice” as they think they are?
“Trump is simply an extreme continuation of a kind of international white American supremacy that had persisted in conservative and liberal forms for many decades.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Suzy Hansenand Carrie Tirado Bramen. Hansen is contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and has written for many other publications. Her book is Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.
Bramen is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her book is American Niceness: A Cultural History.
Suzy Hansen’s “Notes on a Foreign Country”
“Our racial conflicts and history at home are very much linked to the way we as a nation have conducted ourselves abroad.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Suzy Hansen:I started writing my book long before the campaign and election of 2016, but that period did in the end influence some of my conclusions and ideas, and even the arc of the book. For the most part it seems the Trump era has made Americans questions so many things about what it means to be American, and what have been the realities of American history. This is a painful and volatile conversation, but of course a crucial one. I think, however, that it could be expanded to include questions about American foreign policy, imperialism and power, because our racial conflicts and history at home are very much linked to the way we as a nation have conducted ourselves abroad. My book explores a lot of these issues -- the history that I write about in the book very much, I think, brought us to Donald Trump. We like to think of him as an aberration, but he really is simply an extreme continuation of a kind of international white American supremacy that had persisted in conservative and liberal forms for many decades. When you look at the U.S. through the eyes of foreigners -- and in my book, I look at the country through the eyes of Turks, Greeks, Iranians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Afghans, etc. -- Donald Trump actually makes a lot of sense. We shouldn’t underestimate how much white supremacy has been dependent on American supremacy in foreign affairs. I think the latter is tricky for those on the liberal left to grapple with, as well.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
A lot of what my book hoped to do was probe, understand and explain this particular white American psychology that is dependent on American exceptionalism and that is largely unconscious of how much it is dependent on those ideas of specialness, goodness, superiority and power. I try to break down why it is so hard for white Americans to conceive of a new idea of themselves, a more peaceful one. Hopefully this portrait might be helpful to activists confronting a group of people who must somehow adjust to the more diverse country that the US is becoming, as well as to the less powerful country it is becoming (on the world stage). Perhaps it might also offer some ideas about how to make certain domestic movements more international, or how we Americans may benefit from the ideas of non-Americans who, after all, have been dealing with American power for a very long time.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
The entire book is about unlearning American exceptionalism. I tried it out on myself and I discovered it’s very hard. In my book I have moved to a foreign country -- Turkey -- and I am trying to understand that country on its own terms. But I find that is particularly difficult for Americans to do, because we have grown up believing that our country is at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of democracy and modernity, and therefore, often unconsciously, we analyze or perceive foreign cultures according to these standards. We also know very little about the history the US has had with each of these places -- what sort of economic, military, legislative, social or cultural interventions took place and shaped that country. To break down this particular way of thinking -- the way that Americans, and especially white Americans, look at the rest of the world -- requires a long, determined process of recognizing what American propaganda is and how it can be resisted. It’s harder than it might seem because our very identities and to some degree happiness has been dependent on these false ideas, on these myths.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
The intellectual guide in my book is James Baldwin. I moved to Istanbul in part because he had lived there in the 1960s, and it was through interviews he did with Turkish journalists that I learned how terrified he was to see Turkey used as a ping pong ball between the Soviets and the Americans. He was witnessing the beginnings of the postwar American empire, and he automatically wondered what kind of values exactly America hoped to spread around the world if it was still engaged in a violent racial struggle at home. I found that some of Baldwin’s most prescient writings about black and white Americans offered insight into white Americans’ relationships with foreigners, with Turks, Greeks, Egyptians, etc.
Baldwin is the primary intellectual in the book but I drew on the works of hundreds of writers for this project, both American and non-American. I remain incredibly grateful for their wisdom (and for the greatest reading experience of my life!).
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
I am not sure that it does because it very much is a project that sets out to describe the old world, except with, I hope, more clarity. I suppose by the end though it does nudge towards a new way of being -- the way Americans could be, or an idea of the American identity that is not as destructive, or based on whiteness, or enamored with false ideas of inherent goodness; one that is more clear-eyed about its own history, as well as about its divisions at home. The illness of American exceptionalism, after all, is shared by the right and the left; it is a problem that unites us, in fact. I worry that the opposition to Donald Trump will only end up reinforcing these former ideas of American liberalism and exceptionalism, when in fact, out of this current mess, we have an opportunity right now to truly forge an entirely new path for our country and for ourselves.
Carrie Bramen’s American Niceness
“Either smile at the white lady or she’ll call the cops on you.”
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Carrie Bramen: Niceness appears to be banal and superficial, as clichéd as the phrase, “have a nice day.” But the notion of niceness—of being amiable and friendly—turns out to be surprisingly complex. In my book American Niceness: A Cultural History, I argue that we need to take the banality of niceness seriously as an analytical tool to understand how everyday modes of sociality relate to wider contexts, with individual behavior reflecting, reinforcing and challenging racial, gendered and economic norms, while also making alternative formations possible. One of the paradoxes of niceness is that a term typically associated with placating conflict and smoothing over disagreement is riddled with contradictions.
“The banality of niceness is implicated within historical and structural relations of power: who has to be nice to whom?”
Take, for instance, the recent example involving Donisha Prendergast, the granddaughter of Bob Marley, leaving an Airbnb in California with two friends, who are also black. While they were packing their car, a white neighbor waved to them and when they did not smile and wave back, she suspected them of “stealing stuff” and called the police. Seven police cars were immediately dispatched to the scene. The owner of the Airbnb supported her neighbor and said that the situation could have been avoided if the guests were nicer. “’If the kids had simply smiled at (my neighbor) and waved back and acknowledged her and said, ‘We’re just Airbnb guests checking out,’none of this would have ever happened,’ she said. ‘But instead they were rude, unkind, not polite.’”
This example illustrates how the banality of niceness is implicated within historical and structural relations of power: who has to be nice to whom? My second chapter discusses the politics of the black smile within the context of slavery and the multiple ways in which the slave’s smile circulated whether on the auction block or subversively as Union spies during the Civil War.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Niceness matters in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it is implicated in normative modes of white American sociality. And as the recent example in California illustrates, it is a tool of white privilege: either smile at the white lady or she’ll call the cops on you. But it would be a mistake to stop the analysis there. Niceness has also played an important role in black feminist critiques of everyday racism, dating back to the nineteenth century.
The writer and educator Anna Julia Cooper remarked in 1892 that the train conductor’s hand was never offered to assist her off a train. This observation highlights the fact that racism includes the accrual of minor offenses, the absence of the banal niceties of everyday life, thus reinforcing and making palpable the structural experience of racial inequality. The true test of American courtesy, wrote Cooper, is how white men treat black women: “The man who is courteous to her is so, not because of anything he hopes or fears or sees, but because he is a gentleman.”
“The true test of American courtesy is how white men treat black women.”
In 1898, the writer and civil rights activist Frances Harper defined “true politeness” as “perfect sincerity” that constitutes “the social currency of everyday life.” For her and for Cooper, politeness is to social life “what oil is to machinery, a thing to oil the ruts and grooves of existence.” Harper and Cooper understood that the struggle for civil rights involved both challenging institutional discrimination and transforming everyday social interactions.
This legacy can be seen in the poetry of Maya Angelou, particularly in her poem, “Preacher, Don’t Send Me”: “I’d call a place/pure paradise/where families are loyal/and strangers are nice.”
What characterizes this black feminist legacy is an understanding of inter-racial niceness that is not motivated by suspicion or ulterior motives, as with the white neighbor of the Airbnb rental, but as a genuine expression of decency.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
I would like readers to continue to interrogate the still powerful ideology of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is superior to other nations for its moral integrity, democratic institutions, and political and religious freedoms. My book explores how niceness has figured in a national fantasy of American exceptionalism, based not exclusively or even primarily on military might and economic prowess, but on more banal attributes such as friendliness. The distinctiveness of Americans has been largely shaped by the rhetoric of sociality and the importance of likability. Americans are unique because we are nice and friendly. Nationalism requires an emotional, personal, and social component of everyday life. And the figure of the nice American gives concrete form to the abstract and impersonal notion of the nation-state.
“Niceness has figured in a national fantasy of American exceptionalism.”
When John O’Sullivan coined his famous phrase “manifest destiny” in the 1830s, he also wrote extensively about American optimism and what I call “manifest cheerfulness.” What united the nation was not rooted in the soil—given that the US during this period was violently removing Native Americans from their land and erasing them from national memory. Instead, the basis of unity, argued O’Sullivan, could be found in behavioral conformity based on a “cheerful creed of high hope and universal love.”
Although there is a long tradition of black skepticism toward US nationalism and its concomitant belief in American exceptionalism, there is also a sense in which this powerful ideology has to be continually unlearned for each generation. Childish Gambino’s “This is America” video poignantly juxtaposes the credo of American cheerfulness with sudden acts of gun violence. American niceness and American violence exist in tension throughout the video punctuated by Gambino’s carefully crafted smile and his stance—echoing the iconography of Jim Crow—which seamlessly shifts to horrific scenes of gunning down figures of black music from a lone guitarist (Calvin the Second) to a gospel choir.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I do not tend to have intellectual heroes, but I would like to express my gratitude toward one professor who directly inspired American Niceness: A Cultural History. My former professor Alan Sinfield, who taught at the University of Sussex, made me a lovely meal at his home in Brighton, England several years ago and I was telling him about some vague idea I had for a second book project, which was boring us both to tears. Then I quickly changed the topic and started talking about 9/11, which had occurred a couple of years earlier, and the pervasive question one heard at the time: Why do they hate us?
I found this question so puzzling because it ignores years of US foreign policy in the Middle East and what the CIA calls “blowback.” But I also found the question fascinating for the way it turned a complex political crisis into a problem of sociability. “Why do they hate us?” is another way of asking “Why don’t they like us?”The question personalizes the political, making it an interpersonal matter that became understood as a crisis of American likability.
Alan encouraged me to pursue this line of reasoning further and I soon realized that I had the germ of a book project. Unfortunately, Alan passed away from a long illness before I could share it with him, but his early encouragement reflected his integrity as a teacher and as an intellectual. His definition of the intellectual is something I will always remember: intellectuals expand the bounds of the thinkable.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
Imagine a historian at the end of this century writing about our current era and just focusing on Trump and his administration’s policies without acknowledging the social movements that have either emerged or have been galvanized during this time, such as Black Lives Matter, fight for $15, gun control, reproductive justice, #MeToo, and teachers’ strikes.
American Niceness is about reclaiming counter-narratives of outrage alongside the dominant stories of consensus. We need to recover the collective memory of past struggles to challenge ahistorical myths that minimize conflict and violence.
The dominant story of American niceness is how the ‘niceness’ of subaltern Americans was seen as fundamental to nation-making, whether in the form of Native American generosity and the first Thanksgiving or black smiles as iconic examples of manifest cheerfulness.
“Niceness matters for creating the ties of solidarity.”
But there are counter-narratives to tell as well: how some of the educators sent to the Philippines after the Spanish American War of 1898 to teach English either decided to stay in the Philippines, such as the black educator H. M. Butler, or were profoundly changed through their deep friendships with Filipinos.
I end the book by noting the powerful ties that occur through interracial friendships and intersectional alliances. Niceness is what binds us together; it is an expression of our desire to connect with others and feel a sense of belonging. Intersectional alliances for progressive change need to acknowledge the importance of the interpersonal: niceness matters for creating the ties of solidarity. Consequently, niceness represents the foundation for new forms of economic and social justice, reminding us that the interpersonal can help us reimagine the world.
Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
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