Becoming White in America

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You've wondered what you would find if you traced the two threads of your ancestry reaching back through the lives of your parents and their parents and their parents through the quilt of history.

And so you pull the threads and what you unravel is the story of how our forebears made the world that we inherited and how we might pass on a better one.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, the executive editor of The Atlantic.

Joining me today in studio is my esteemed co-host, Jeff Goldberg.

Jeff, hello.

Hi, Matt.

And my other esteemed co-host in a studio in New York, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Alex.

Hey, Matt and Jeff.

And we're delighted to be joined once again by Adam Serwer, editor and writer at The Atlantic.

Adam, welcome.

Thank you.

Hi, everybody.

And hello to you.

No sound effects, please.

This is a serious conversation.

Sorry.

Today, we are discussing the family history of our own Alex Wagner, whose book.

It's kind of weird, actually, when you think about it.

Yeah, today's Family Tree Day on Radio Atlantic.

Alex's book, Future Face, hits bookstores near you on April 17th, 2018.

The subtitle of this book is A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging.

Alex, this is a great book.

This is a really enjoyable book.

Congratulations.

Thank you, Matt.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The bribes worked.

You guys finally read it.

Yeah, it's been a work in progress for three and a half years, so I'm really glad that it's finally completely.

Congratulations.

Tell the truth, Alex.

It's been a work in progress your entire life.

Real talk.

That is so true, Matt.

One of the most fascinating passages is the chapter where you begin to investigate your dad's side of the family, or the white side, to put it rudely.

Before you started that exploration, what was the story that you had heard about your dad's roots in Iowa?

So just to back up a little bit, so for those of you who have not yet pre-ordered or ordered your copy of Future Race, I grew up a mixed-race kid, the daughter of a Burmese mother and a white American father who was born in a tiny town in northeast Iowa on the Lansing River.

And I realized through a series of conversations that the stories my family had been telling itself about who we were and who we are as Americans were filled with half-truths and obfuscations and in some cases, lies, right?

The story my dad's family had been telling itself, which is a story that I think a lot of white American families from the heartland tell themselves, is that we'd come over from the old world and gone west seeking fortune and a better life in America.

And through the bounty and the largesse of this place we call home, we'd made it here through dint of, by dint of hard work and perseverance in a very sort of Horatio Alger homespun America.

My dad grew up on a tiny plot of land, not any kind of farm, but he grew up the fifth youngest of six children.

His father was a rural rural mail carrier in Iowa and his mom was a stay-at-home mom.

This was a family that effectively, I think, lived inside a Norman Rockwell postcard.

They had fish on Fridays.

They all went to Catholic school and got into trouble with the nuns and the priests in the sort of charming way that you get into trouble with priests and nuns in Irish Catholic school.

They had homemade bread and doughnuts on Sunday.

They played stickball and the twilight hours on the street.

And it was a a happy, merry American tableau.

That was a story they told themselves.

And I had accepted it at face value forever, effectively, until I began this quest to figure out who my people really are and were.

So you started pulling on this thread, and you began to discover more and more about your dad's family, his grandparents,

and when that side of the family had crossed over to America from Europe.

And tell us about what you learned.

So

there's one piece of it I think we should focus on for the purposes of this discussion, which is this idea that we made it in America because we were somehow good or better or more capable than other people who didn't make it in America.

I had always wondered, like, where did we get this land from?

How did we end up on this very fertile plot of

Iowa land?

My dad would tell stories about growing up and he knew all the local salespeople.

He knew that the Gaunitz brothers sold.

They were the butchers.

He knew that Jacob Ehrlich was the fishmonger.

He was the only Jewish person my dad could speak of.

But my dad never said anything like, oh, maybe they felt marginalized or maybe it was weird being the only Jewish family in such a white Christian town.

And then he said this thing to me.

He said, the only person of color I can ever remember was the black dry cleaner.

He was a really good guy.

And, you know, in this day and age, when you think about, when you hear someone usually white, say, that one person of color was a really great guy, one wonders, well, what was that lone black dry cleaner thinking of being in a one-horse white Christian town?

Or what was that lone Jewish family thinking of being the lone Jewish family in a one-horse white Christian town?

So I began to do a little bit of research about this town that my dad had come from.

And what it turns out is that his story intersects directly with the story of Native Americans in the Great Plains, specifically the tribe of the Winnebago, who initially had that land but were felled and driven off by disease and encroachment and basically given the worst of the worst and decimated in number to the point that they no longer really even existed.

And that's why there were no people of color when my dad grew up.

Where my dad grew up, that's why it was so lily white.

It's because basically

the government drove the people of color off the property or off the land that was once their own.

And through the Homestead Act and immigration,

Iowa and Lansing, Iowa became the town that my dad would know it to be growing up in the 1940s and 50s.

So a combination of genocide and affirmative action.

Exactly.

Well, and you know, the other thing, Adam, is when you talk about people of color, one of the reasons why there weren't a lot of black folks up in that part of the country is because after Reconstruction, it was actually hard for people of color, newly freed black slaves, to get out of the South.

There were steamship captains who wouldn't take them.

There were mobs.

There were groups of people that used violence as a way to keep black people in the South.

All of this history is not stuff we think of when we think of our own family stories.

We think about the genocide of Native Americans or post-Reconstruction American South as sort of abstract concepts.

I think especially when you're talking about the history of like white Americans in this country, we think of those things as having happened in discrete fashion.

But truly, if you get deeper into your own family history, you understand how the big shaping forces of history end up touching your very own story of ancestry.

Yeah, I think what I really loved about that chapter, Alex, is that you showed how even in a place where there only seemed to be white people, the history of people of color is extremely important to telling that story.

And I think for a lot of people, they just assume African-American history or Native American history is sort of a part from American history.

But you do a fantastic job of showing how that history is relevant even to the most lily-white of white places, because it explains how those places got that way to begin with.

Right.

And we never think about the story behind the story.

Alex, when do we get to talk about the fact that you may or may not be Jewish?

So that's,

well, I mean, like, we can talk about that every podcast, Jeff.

So what is going to have 10 minutes reserved?

One of the things that I also discovered in this ancestral quest, if you will, was that there was a working theory among some of my father's sisters mostly that we were actually Jewish.

And I have to tell you, that was a like drop the mic record scratch moment.

Like to not be Irish Catholic in my family was akin to having,

you know, I mean, been actually born on Mars.

Not that there's anything wrong with being Martian, but Irish Catholicism and the church was so central to our family mythology that to actually secretly be Jewish would be to turn that whole world and that experience in some ways upside down.

But,

you know,

while I was

in some ways, I don't know how much

in some ways the charming quest for your long-lost Jewish ancestor has been a very important

vision of this book.

It is.

It is.

It is.

I mean, I think part of it is there is such a, we're in America right now.

It's such a moment of

roots seeking, but also tribalism and to some degree, nativism.

And all of these forces sort of push and pull against each other.

And,

you know, I began this quest looking for my people, right?

What does that actually mean?

Judaism, and Jeff, you can speak to this better than perhaps anybody.

It is,

right?

Well, anybody at this podcast.

Don't be modest.

Maybe Adam.

Adam's deeply tribal.

I liked the idea

Jewish belonging in the sort of Jewish tribe would upend the family myth-making because I was, I think, secretly dirtily looking for something that would

complicate the narrative, but also...

That sense of fundamental belonging, that sense of rootedness seemed to be a really powerful part of the Jewish experience.

So I went to great lengths around the globe trying to divine the true sort of

to unpack the mystery of our so-called

theoretical Jewish roots.

Yeah.

No spoiler.

But I mean, do you guys, I mean, Jeff, I'll start with you.

When one talks about a search for identity, how central is Judaism to your sense of identity?

If I said fairly, fairly, that would be an understatement.

Right.

You're right.

I mean, to a degree that's unusual today among the kids today in non-Orthodox American Jewry.

Yeah, that is obviously the central part of my identity.

But when you're Jewish, you also learn very, very quickly to live with multiple identities, including multiple identities that people who don't like Jews say you can't have, which is to say you can't be

an identifiable member of

a tribe that spans the borders, but also be a loyal American.

Perhaps you've heard of the recent controversy around the world, Globalist,

which is going

at that point.

So

there are aspects of Jewishness that people who don't like Jews actually admire.

And the tribalism of the Jews,

even if it manifests itself in the minds of anti-Semites as a kind of self-interested cosmopolitanism, It is still something that white racists are actually endeavoring to achieve themselves.

It's a very interesting moment in Jewish identity in America.

Aaron Ross Powell, do you think, Adam, as children, as mixed race Americans, that, I mean, Jeff talks about being Jewish, you have to be used to being, you have to get accustomed to being many things.

I felt that way growing up.

I was this inscrutable mix of different things.

And at one point, that was like a badge of honor.

But then at one point, there was the fundamental existential loneliness that I couldn't seem to shake.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a badge of honor when you're a kid and you don't know that you're weird because your parents have just told you how wonderful and different you are.

And then when you sort of figure out that there are like these incredible fault lines

dividing, you know, the two groups of people that make up your family and the rest of the country, then it suddenly becomes weird and you sort of aren't sure what to do with yourself.

But ultimately, I mean, like, obviously, like, every mixed kid figures it out.

But it's true that at first it starts off as like, oh, I'm special, and then it becomes, oh, I'm weird.

I'm different.

Or this is complicated.

Yeah.

One of the phrases that you coin in the discussion of your search for your dad's ancestry, Alex, is the white immigrant origin story.

And what was that to you, that story?

The white immigrant origin story is sort of predicated on this idea of our divine providence, that we sort of landed here, we escaped something nebulous but not good from another place to come here.

And we left all that bad stuff behind and we became Americans and we succeeded in this place because of hard work.

And that's what has made America great.

And it is largely built on.

us and our families' endeavors and not, for example, based on, as we talked about before, the work or sacrifices of other unnamed people who may have been here before us.

And I think the white immigrant origin story, W-I-O-S in the book Shorthand, is what we're coming into contact a lot today, you know, and it takes on various partisan shades, but

my father's family, it is comprised of resolute Democrats, but it's a story that unknowingly told and told again.

I think to the detriment of the truth.

And I think in large part when you think of Donald Trump and Make America Great Again, that is hearkening back to this idea of the sort of white immigrant origin story that necessarily doesn't highlight the immigrant part, but is really the white origin story of America, which is effectively, I mean, a lie.

During the campaign, I used to like to point out the fact that Donald Trump had a large number of Italian-American surrogates and that, you know,

a hundred years ago, it was the Italian Americans who were the

who were the immigrant group that everyone was scared of because they were criminal, they were violent, they were radicalized,

their religion made them stupid, they were incapable of self-governance in the way that previous Anglo-immigrants had been.

And now, of course, they're the people who are saying that we can't let these Muslims in because they're scary and dangerous.

Well, I mean, I think one of the most interesting trends in American politics and cultural life is the process of whiteification, political whitification or the self-whitening of groups that were not considered white.

I mean, Jews, too, obviously.

I mean, Jews were the subject of an extraordinary amount of level of fear, not because of the usual reasons that people fear Jews, but because they were gathered in, they tended toward criminality, gathered in these teeming ghettos in the inner cities and were a hygiene problem and a disorder problem.

This is just 100 years ago.

And Jews gradually became white.

Jews were not white, obviously, in Europe.

They became white, just as Italians became white, Irish became white.

And it's actually interesting because you see this argument going on in Asian American communities, you know, where

you eventually

adopt

some of the privilege, or you're allowed to adopt some of the privilege reserved for whites narrowly defined, meaning the original, so-called, quote-unquote, original wasps.

I mean, that's one of the reasons this book is so interesting and urgent right now, because we're still in this process of

whiteness, is a political concept as much as anything else, and we're still in this process of understanding how a person becomes white in America.

Well, and I think one of the most interesting phenomena that you write about quite explicitly in the book, Alex, is the way that whiteness gets collapsed into American-ness, that the two are treated as synonymous, that American sometimes is just a shorthand for the

white, the W-I-O-S, the white immigrant origin story.

Well, and you see that in hyphenation too, right?

You're Mexican American or you're African-American, but you're never white American.

You never see a hyphenation like white American because American just means white.

Because the two, right, get collapsed into the same thing.

And so you can choose at that point to kind of leave all the cleavages of your past, right?

If you are perceived as just kind of American here, one with the country since its beginnings, then you can kind of paper over that land that your great-grandfather happened to inhabit thanks to it having been very forcefully wrested from the Winnebago Indians for you.

And then made available to people like him.

Right.

I just thought, you know, I began to imagine, I just had a child, which we've talked about a number of times on this podcast, but I began to think about telling our family story at a different starting point.

Now, what I learned in the research of this book is you have to pick and choose your starting point and your ending point with any history, right?

Because history

is long.

But I began after I finished this book to think about what if I started to tell the story about the Wagners of Lansing, Iowa, not when Henry Wagner, my great-grandfather, set foot on terra firma here in the United States, but what if I began our story by telling my child about the Hochungra nation, the Winnebago, the people of the big voice, and said, these people once lived in Lansing, Iowa.

And when they were killed and when they were removed, we got to take their land.

And because of the land that they sacrificed, we were able to build our home.

It really made me rethink the way we conceive of how we got here on a really sort of practical storytelling level.

And for me, it felt so much more truthful to start with that experience as opposed to just ours, because it drives home the idea that America is an inherited place, and it's also a place that's forever changing.

Can I ask you a question, Alex, just about the few?

I mean, you've been studying ethnicity, whiteness, other subjects.

You've been living this complication.

Do you understand

why

quote-unquote white Americans

are so anxious about their status right now.

I'm not asking you to forgive it or anything.

I'm just to analytically

what do you find interesting or unusual about this moment?

Well, look, I think

the one thing that is true about assimilation and to some degree immigration is things do get lost in the process.

Edges get sanded down.

The sort of cultural inheritance isn't as pronounced the more integrated you become.

And that's, it's okay to, I think it's okay to say that, right?

Like Luxembourg's motto, where my great-grandfather was from, is, we will remain what we are.

And I thought, my God, if there's an anti-American national motto, if ever there was one, that's it, right?

When I read that, I had to say to myself, is that true?

And that's kind of a beautiful part of America, too, right?

That's why you can start over again because you're allowed to exfoliate the parts you don't like, but you also do lose things, right?

And

I think white America sees the demographic destiny of this country, which is also, by the way, the destiny of the human species, which is movement and change and marriage and intermarriage and children and bloodlines that look nothing like their own.

And what we're seeing right now, and I don't think I'm like breaking any molds by saying this, is a shattering of the sort of like white cultural monotheism that we've seen like as sort of foundational to America for the last 200 years.

That's going to go away.

America in 2200 is not going to look the way it does today.

America in 2100 is not going to look the way it does today.

But, you know, and that's scary to some people.

And I think that that dovetails with economic disenfranchisement, latent racism, and a host of other sort of things to combine.

It's an alchemical kind of equation that has given rise to this particular moment in politics.

But I think it fundamentally is rooted in a fear of loss.

So I want to play devil's advocate a little bit here.

I think Alex is correct in her diagnosis, but I think that the prophecy is not necessarily going to come true.

I mean, this is actually what they said in the 1900s and 19s when they were talking about passing restrictive immigration laws to keep out Jews, Italians, and Poles and the rest of the quote-unquote dregs of Europe.

They were like, we are going to be, white people are going to be swamped by these, you know, subhuman creatures, and then it's not going to be a white country anymore.

And then white people.

That's not what I was saying.

And then, white people, and then suddenly those people also became white.

So, I wonder sometimes, really, if, despite the anxieties of much of white America that they are going to be a minority, if instead what we're going to see is an expansion of another expansion of the definition of whiteness in such a way that white people actually remain the dominant, not just cultural, but numerical majority in ways that seem unbelievable now, but may certainly be the case by the time we we get to the point.

It would certainly be, right?

It would certainly be unbelievable to a wasp of 100 years ago or even 50 years ago that Jews have almost, to borrow an expression from another culture, Brahmin-like status in America, right?

And so there's nothing that prohibits, given that elasticity, there's nothing prohibits Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans from joining into that narrative.

Certainly

Cuban Americans are certainly more forward on that than Mexican Americans at the moment.

But there's nothing to,

it's not about color.

Can I say one thing on that note, Jeff?

Hispanic Americans, I actually wrote a piece on this in a publication I won't mention that ends in New York Times.

Why do you hurt me?

Why?

Why do you think that?

Because I love you.

Pain is part of love.

But I wrote a piece for the Sunday Review section that's all about our census.

And I don't think people realize this, but racially speaking, you can't be Hispanic.

You can be

Hispanic or black Hispanic, but overwhelmingly, it's divided into whites and then non-Hispanic whites and Hispanic whites.

So we effectively do say Hispanics are basically whites or blacks, but overwhelmingly they're whites.

Unless Hispanics themselves choose and they tend to choose some other race.

But to both of your points,

the tent of whiteness is both artificially large and expanding.

But that's because it's nonsense.

Ultimately, it's nonsense.

It's a fabricated thing.

They can change the rules anytime they feel like it.

Yeah, I guess, Adam, I guess I mean.

You can't be a Norwegian American, but you can be a white American.

It's very interesting.

Well, I can't be a white American, not that I mind, but I can tell you to stick around because we'll have more with Alex right after this.

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Alex, I'm curious, the other side of this story was your investigating

your mother's lineage and the side.

I haven't even gotten to that yet.

And there you found a different story.

I mean, you found, but a different story that rhymes in some fascinating ways with the story that you found in Iowa.

But in investigating your mother's lineage, you found that the Burmese side of your ancestry encompassed a group of people who were themselves high status in that place.

By the way, after the dice of colonialism got rolled, your ancestors ended up with a pretty high hand in that context.

And what did you take away from that about the way that status and identity work, both there and here?

In the most succinct version, it's basically brown people don't get a pass, which was what I came away with researching my Burmese side.

I mean, I think the story my Burmese family had set told itself was: we escaped exile and oppression, and we came here, and through tenacity and the largesse of America, we made it, and that was it.

But what I realized- Burmese immigrant origin story, perhaps.

And I think, you know, we had told ourselves this tale of exile and woe that was iced with the frosting of success and assimilation.

But truly what I realized was what we left behind in Burma were the

sort of deep nationalist roots that became, I think, painfully obvious to me looking at what is happening in Burma right now with the genocide of the Rohingya Muslim minority in western Burma.

And the attitude to most Burmese who were educated, the quote-unquote good Burmese, the kind of people my mother and grandmother consorted with, maybe the kind of people I would have been friends with.

Those people are Burmese nationalists and largely supportive like Aun San Suu Kyi, who is the country's de facto leader and was the head of the pro-democracy movement, a hero around the world.

There's a huge appetite for this kind of vicious, bloody nationalism.

We in the West are shocked and scarred by the idea that Buddhists would be perpetrating such horrible, horrible crimes against humanity on their own countrymen and women.

But inside Burma, no one particularly cares about this Muslim minority.

And indeed, most people are generally supportive of the politics that further marginalize them.

So, what I realized was that, you know,

we had thought of Burma as a place that we left behind and had failed.

But in fact, in the end, we had failed too.

And some of the roots of that failure were very much still with us.

One of the things that distinguishes this book is your willingness to excavate the sides of your ancestry that aren't entirely flattering.

A lot of memoirs, particularly memoirs about ancestors, are driven by the instinct to find a sort of empathy for one's ancestors or to smooth out kind of the more troubling aspects of a person's history.

But your your search drew you in basically the opposite direction to find some of the wounds and the scars that your family had bandaged over in the way that it retold its stories.

Why was it important for you to excavate the darker aspects of your story?

I think we can all sort of

understand that there's a lot of

finger pointing makes it sound too tangential, but there's a lot of us versus them that's happening in our society right now.

And I think

sometimes when I think about the most poisonous voices in our political world, I have an, it's impossible for me to be in any way empathetic or to find myself in that community, even though the people that are saying some of these poisonous things are Americans.

So what was interesting to me about the story is I actually wanted to find the darker, the worst parts of our story and to try and see myself in those places, because we all have a certain poison inside of us in one way or another.

And to find that poison in your own family, I think is to begin to, those are the sort of like DNA building blocks of empathy.

Even the Burma stuff, you know, I realized that there was, my family could have been the ones wearing the red trucker hats that said, make Burma great again, right?

And to see that in my own family tree is actually important in terms of understanding the basic humanity that we all share, but also also beginning to understand how people can get to a place

where they are saying the things that they are today.

And it was a very useful exploration in that sense.

And I don't know if you guys, Adam and Jeff, have looked,

have you tried to look within yourselves to better understand what's happening on the outside with other people?

I actually just look inside Adam.

It's just easier that way.

Well,

I think you hit on something really profound, Alex, which is that empathy requires a certain level of humility.

And I think that the sort of nationalism that you're describing doesn't leave room for that,

which sort of explains

why people who are

in the thrall of that sort of nationalism can do the things that they do.

I mean, my family is really weird because on my father's side, they're Jewish immigrants, and on my mother's side, they're African-Americans.

We don't have, I mean, I haven't excavated enough to

find out, you know, whether there are any sort of shameful secrets in the family.

The one ironically quote-unquote shameful secret is that my great-grandfather may have been a white guy who was passing for black.

And I know that sounds weird, but the reason.

It's the reverse of what usually happens.

The reason that, so he's

counter-opportunism.

We have pictures.

He's extremely, he's extremely light, he's extremely light-skinned.

And so the rumor is that because interracial marriage was prohibited in Georgia at the time, in order to marry the woman that he loved, he pretended to be a black guy.

He pretended to be like an Octaroon or something.

Wow.

And so we actually don't know if that's true or not, but that's the

Atlantic.

That'd be a good story.

Future Phase 2.

Future Phase 2.

This time it's personal.

As long as Adam writes it and I don't have to, I'm good with it.

She just wants to get us through Future Phase 1.

We're just getting through that.

Yeah, exactly.

No, I mean, I think we've talked before on this show about West Indian immigrants and African Americans, to use the hyphenation.

And the fact that

for those of us who came to the U.S.

from...

the West Indies, for example, like my family,

we did sort of get to choose how we wanted to situate ourselves with regard to black America.

We could emphasize that part of

our origin story that was the West Indies.

It was the islands.

We could play up our accents and in some ways take advantage of the discrimination that had been levied against African Americans before we came and after we got here.

That's so interesting because when I was growing up in my

school district area, a lot of African Americans and I remember

the Caribbean Americans looking down, my friends looking down on the African Americans or those native-born African Americans

and

finding it troubling and

mysterious until I realized that

the Jews had spent, the Russian Jews had spent an awful lot of time in America being looked down upon by German Jews.

You know, I mean, going to some universal theme here, it's that,

you know, no one is innocent of really anything, especially when it comes to these questions of identity and ethnicity.

And people are always, there's a human desire to parse and separate and divide and rank.

And all of these things are manifesting themselves in really

interesting and sometimes unpleasant ways in America right now, which is why this book is so relevant and important

and should be read

and should be read, but more importantly, bought.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It also falls smack into this argument about identity politics and nationalism and liberalism that folks have been having for some months now,

for years, I guess,

but has been touched up recently after the election of President Trump.

Mark Lilla, famously in the New York Times, argued that identity liberalism needed to come to an end, saying, quote, the white lash thesis, white lash, quote, is convenient because it absolves liberals of not recognizing how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored.

Just the other day in the New York Times, Yasha Monk argued that liberals need to reclaim nationalism, that so long as nationalism is associated, quote, with one particular ethnic or religious group, it will serve to exclude and disadvantage others.

The only way to keep the destructive potential of nationalism in check is to fight for a society in which collective identity transcends ethnic and religious boundaries, one in which citizens from all religious or ethnic backgrounds are treated with the same respect as citizens from the majority group.

This argument, should

identity be...

Should we use identity?

Should we use the darker currents of identity to fashion a form of identity that all of us can somehow, no matter what our background, find ourselves within?

Or do we need to downplay our identities?

Do we need to

figure out another way of making politics?

The argument is often made about identity politics as though it

just is this thing that was invented by

Americans who come from an ethnic group that was not, say, German-American or Scandinavian.

Part of what I think the falsehood of the white immigrant origin story suggests about this argument is that it's actually asking the wrong question.

Do we use identity politics?

Do we not use identity politics?

Identity politics for white folks kind of subsume into just politics in the same way that white Americans get to just be Americans sometimes.

Isn't it all identity politics?

Isn't it?

I have a conservative friend named Michael Brendan Doherty, who, you know, this was a conversation we had years ago.

I think it was on blogging heads.

And he's like, you know, how does a mob make decisions?

Right.

I mean, you do it in part by saying this person is like me, and so I trust them.

And I think, you know, the truth is, is that for

what's unusual about this particular time period is not that there's like,

you know, a manifestation of nationalism that is very exclusive.

It's actually, I think, that it's confined to one party.

I think that's what's a little weird.

I mean,

if you look at like the Democratic Party in the Obama era, like, you know, there's no white America, there's no black America.

I mean, all that stuff that Lilla and Monk are talking about is already there.

What's different about now, I think, is that Trump has...

You know, and I think the same was true, at least rhetorically, of the Republican Party in the Bush era.

I mean, there's a reason why they had that gospel choir at the 2000 convention and like Colin Powell.

And, you know, they were trying to say, like, we too are for this America where anybody can be American.

I mean, he tried to pass a comprehensive immigration bill in 2006.

I mean, I think this question of identity politics, it sort of weirdly starts with asking people of color, why do you care so much about your identity, as though, you know, they were the ones who made it a big deal in the first place.

I also am really,

can liberals reclaim nationalism, which is, I guess, like the second half of that question.

And I don't know.

I mean,

I just think,

Jeff, what do you think?

What do I think about what?

Can liberals reclaim themselves.

Can you make nationalism liberal?

Wait, are we really going down this rabbit hole?

Well, all right, here we go.

Yes, because, I mean, let's use an example I know very well.

I think that Zionism and liberalism aren't necessarily contradictory.

Liberal Zionism is under siege.

I mean, I've been writing about this for a long time.

But I would even bring it closer to home.

I think creedal nationalism can be wonderful.

I mean, if you are...

To be an American, I mean, the beautiful thing about a naturalization ceremony in America, right, is that everybody gets up there and they're from 100 countries and they swear allegiance to a set of ideas.

And as soon as they do that, as soon as they take that oath, they are as American as George Washington.

That's the principle.

Do Americans honor this notion today?

Some do and some don't.

But creedal nationalism is fine.

And I have no problem with a certain kind of ethnic nationalism that says, you know, I take care of my family and then I take care of my larger family and then the family, my tribe through which I've traveled history i've come across history with them and we share language and culture and religion um but you can be tribal and you can be universalist at the same time some people have a problem with that ausang su chi comes to mind obviously right alex as someone who has not figured that out to her detriment and to the detriment of a lot of innocent people but sure i mean it is i mean the the the the the question asked in the in the largest possible way is is it possible to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in your mind at the the same time and be fundamentally moderate in your approach to the world?

The answer is, of course, yes.

I think maybe one of the great examples of creedal nationalism is like Jesse Jackson's speech.

I think it's at the 1984 convention where he's doing the quilt and he's like, you know,

your patch isn't big enough, workers.

But your patch

is not big enough.

Your patch is not big enough.

Adam and I both know.

How is it possible that Adam and I both memorize the same Jesse Jackson speech?

Because that's a great speech.

That is like the classic, like your patch isn't big enough.

That is the classic proto-Obama politics speech.

It's so important for like understanding like where Obama gets his politics.

Slave ship, immigrant ship, but we're all in the same boat tonight.

Keep hope alive.

Yeah.

We're keep hope and live.

I mean, that's

alive.

Ironically, that Jesse Jackson is sort of associated with quote-unquote identity politics, but his biggest sort of rhetorical contribution is laying this blueprint for how to be black and universal at the same time.

I think the actual line is, my ancestors came over on slave ship, yours came on immigrant ships, but we're all on the same boat tonight.

Keep hope alive.

Keep hope alive.

I like Jeffrey Goldberg channeling Jesse Jackson.

Hey, wow.

Covered him for 30 years.

I can do a reasonable.

By the way, the other thing Adam and I have in common, same Chinese restaurant on Christmas Eve.

Just saying.

I mean, just saying, we could both drop Jesse Jackson lyrics and we eat in the same Chinese restaurant.

You got to go get Chinese on Christmas Eve if you're Jewish and you know, Maywaz is Maywaz is.

Let me tell you something, guys.

I'm not Jewish, at least I don't think I am, and

I have been known to eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve after going to Christmas Eve.

I'll say this, though, not very American thing to do now.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, right, right.

The Gentiles are taking Jewish Christmas from us.

It's really...

The Burmese are.

In part, Alex, what you've done with your book is to ask the question of what might an America look like that was fully informed by the darkness of its histories.

And I highly encourage all of our listeners to go and check it out the moment it hits bookstands on April 17th, 2018.

Thank you very much for

the wonderful book.

With it, with this, I am going to turn to keepers, the point in every episode where I ask you what you've experienced recently that you do not want to forget.

We'll start this week with two listener keepers, one sobering and one uplifting, and both about animals.

Hi Nat, love your show.

My name is Pamela Hansen.

My keeper is the image of Sudan, the last male white northern rhino, being comforted by one of his caretakers moments before he died.

With only two females of the species remaining, Sudan's death could very well mean the extinction of this species.

And the reason why this is a keeper for me is that it serves as a wake-up call.

While humans share this planet with millions of other species, we are the most destructive.

But there are things that we can do to change this, to protect animals and the habitat and the planet that we share with them.

So here's to hope.

Thank you.

Hey, Radio Atlantic.

My name is David Weitsch.

For my keeper this week, I just wanted to give a shout out to dogs and in particular my dog, Evie, who is staring blankly at me right now.

But

I think that oftentimes when we talk about dogs, people focus on the unconditional love aspect that they give us, and that that's certainly nice, but as a grad student and someone who has been relentlessly focused on myself and my goals in the past years or so, I think um I just wanted to give a shout out to dogs in the ways in which they take us outside of ourselves.

I think in a society where we're always told to focus on ourselves and to better ourselves and to be really individualistic, I often find that the things that make my life better are really things that take me outside of myself.

So, my keeper this week is dogs.

Thanks so much for the podcast and have a good one.

Thank you to Pamela for that bracing wake-up call and to David for being, as a lover of dogs, clearly a person of good moral character.

As a lover of my kitties, I will say that they too have the capacity to take us beyond ourselves.

Cherish your pets.

Alex, how about you?

What do you not want to forget?

Listen, guys,

things get a little emo-core in my world sometimes.

And, you know, you can probably tell that by my deeply emotional.

Can you explain that to the listeners, please?

You know, like, you know, I, things, sometimes it's just that there's a lot we process

in this world as journalists and as podcasters.

And times can get dark.

Times can be troubled.

And as I found, we've discussed this many times on this program, music is a real balm.

And throughout the writing of this book, I kept returning to this one song, which became for me like Dvorak's New World Symphony, only it's not.

It's Wapongo by José Pablo Moncayo.

And if you listen to the recording by the Southwest German radio Kaiserslauten Orchestra from 2007, it is triumphant music with which to start or end your day or just get through some of the gnarlier passages of life.

Wonderful.

Thank you for that.

And

we'll drop that reference in the show notes.

Adam, Serwer, what would you like to keep?

So I recently, for work-related reasons, had occasion to read a book called Black and White, Land, Labor, and Politics in the South.

It's by a guy named T.

Thomas Fortune, who was a black radical who was born into slavery and became an intellectual.

And he's been sort of forgotten because even though he was a sort of leftist kind of guy, he wanted to eliminate private ownership of land.

He also became Booker T.

Washington's sidekick, essentially, and ghostwriter.

And so he became sort of, even though he was this radical, he became associated with the most accommodationist wing of the black rights movement at the turn of the century.

So he's been sort of orphaned by everyone.

But his book is fantastic.

I really enjoyed it, and I think you should read it.

Nice.

Excellent.

Jeffrey Goldberg, my esteemed co-host, what would you like to keep?

A little light reading.

Stephen Zipperstein's new book called Pogrom, which is a history and explication of the Kishinev Pogrom, 1903, which changed the world as we know it.

It sent the Jews scattering.

We're going to stay on the theme here,

across the world.

It triggered all sorts of events, including the founding of the State of Israel, the rise of the Soviet Union, the great wave of immigration from

Eastern Europe to America.

I'm halfway through, I will admit, I'm not all the way through,

but it's the best single-volume treatment of a seminal but under-discussed event in modern history that I've read.

Excellent.

Almost as good as Future Face.

Still the hype, man.

Yeah, Future Face, now with more programs.

Awesome.

For my part, I am going to

mention Amy Goldstein's book, Janesville, about Janesville, Wisconsin,

in the years after.

This is Paul Ryan's, the district that American Congressman Paul Ryan hails from in Wisconsin.

This is, in this book, Amy Goldstein reported on the aftermath of the closure of the GM factory that was the economic engine of this town.

She goes through, the book is structured chronologically.

Amy Goldstein reports on what happens in Janesville year after year after the factory closed from 2009 to 2013.

And it is a deeply perceptive book.

And as an example of where it is most perceptive, I want to talk about one moment.

when a young girl who's a sophomore in high school is struggling one day in class and her teacher asks her what's wrong.

The teacher says, hey, why don't you stay after class just for a moment?

Let's talk.

And

as they sit down, this girl starts crying.

Tears just come out of her.

The teacher says,

and she says, you know what's happening?

She says,

I'm just dealing with a lot right now.

And the teacher says, can I show you something?

Walks her across the hallway and opens the door to this closet known as Parker's Closet, a door that this girl had passed by many times before and had never noticed.

Behind the door is this room that's stocked high with jeans and shampoo and conditioner, all of these things that

she had come to think of as luxuries in the years after her father had been laid off from the factory.

And what's so perceptive is that Amy Goldstein records not just the girl's surprise at seeing that this room exists, but her sudden knowledge that

because it exists, other students in the school had been going through a version of what she'd been going through the moment that she was introduced to her own class and the class of those around her, which is a moment that if you ever experienced something like it is

absolutely a pivotal moment in one's life.

Anyway, the book is filled with these rich kind of moments like that.

And so I highly recommend it.

Amy Goldstein, Janesville.

And with that,

we have reached the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Alex, congratulations on the book.

Thank you, guys, and thank you for the support.

It is a feat and an accomplishment.

Jeff, Adam, thank you, as always.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And to our listeners, we'll see you next week.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

Future Face, by my esteemed co-host Alex Wagner, is out in bookstores as of April 17th.

Congrats to Alex on her excellent book, and thanks to Adam Serwer for joining us.

Our executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts is Catherine Wells and our dazzling theme music is by the dazzling John Batiste.

We want your keepers.

Tell us what you don't want to forget by leaving a voicemail message at the number 202-266-7600.

Feel free to tell us how we're doing as well.

And speaking of not forgetting, don't forget your contact info.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch our show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But

more importantly, thank you for listening.

May you come to an understanding of your own history.

And may that understanding help you shape a better future.

We'll see you next week.