This Trump phenomenon has also been referred to as “white fragility,” but white fragility is not just the problem of conservatives or red staters. White fragility also prevents elite white Americans from accepting—even with their meritocracy and Ivy League degrees and good intentions—that they, too, might not be exceptional, that they were the beneficiaries of a period of unprecedented national prosperity and military might, and that they, with their ignorance and even exploitation, had contributed to the anguish of foreigners and the pain of their own people. After Trump’s election, the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote in The New York Times, “Empires rot from the inside even as emperors blame the barbarians.” He could see America so much more clearly than so many Americans could.
From abroad, when I used to hear President Obama say that America is the greatest country on earth, I never felt contempt. I felt like I did as a child, not wanting to admit to my parents I knew there was no Santa Claus. When I consider giving this book to my parents—and to my figurative parents, the older Americans far more invested in American myths than I ever was—I feel a physical pain in my heart. The hurt is automatic, it is from me, I cannot control it. It is common to say Watergate shattered American innocence, that Vietnam shattered American innocence, that September 11 shattered American innocence, that Trump shattered American innocence. But this was all wishful thinking. American innocence never dies. That pain in my heart is my innocence. The only difference is that now I know it. If there was anything fully shattered during my years abroad, it was faith in my own objectivity, as a journalist or as a human being.
I might know, too, what Baldwin meant when he said only love could assuage America’s race problem, but I can only grasp it when I think of romantic love. I did, after all, fall in love with Turkey. I fell in love with Istanbul, with Rana, with Caner, with all the Turks and Istanbullus who welcomed me; I fell in love with foreign men, with the cats of Cihangir, with the Anatolian roads, with even the smell of burning coal in winter. When you are in love, you feel a superhuman amount of empathy because, crucially, it is in your self-interest to do so. It wasn’t until I loved like this that I could understand why only love could solve America’s race problem, and by extension its imperial one: that it is not until one contemplates loving someone, caring about that person’s physical and emotional well-being, wanting that person to thrive, wanting to protect that person, and most of all wanting to understand that person, that we can imagine what it would feel like if that person was hurt, if that person were hurt by others or, most important, if that person was hurt by you. Only if that person’s suffering becomes your suffering—which is in a sense what love is—and only when white Americans begin to look upon another people’s destruction as they would their own, will they finally feel the levels of rational and irrational rage terrifying enough to vanquish a century of their own indifference.
Who do we become if we don’t become Americans? We are benevolent and ordinary and we are terrible things, too; we are missionaries and oil speculators, racists and soldiers, bureaucrats and financiers, occupiers and invaders, hope mongers and hypocrites. The American dream was to create our own destiny, but it’s perhaps an ethical duty, as a human being, and as an American, to consider that our American dreams may have come at the expense of a million other destinies. To deny that is to deny the realities of millions of people, and to forever sever ourselves from humanity. I went abroad for the same reason everyone else does: to learn how to live. Whoever Americans become after this time of reckoning, it will, hopefully, not be about breaking from the past but about breaking from the habit of its disavowal. If this project of remembrance requires leaving the country, then so be it, because it is not an escape; we will find our country everywhere, among the city streets and town squares and empty fields of the world, where we may also discover that the possibility of redemption is not because of our own God-given beneficence but proof of the world’s unending generosity.
NOTES
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INTRODUCTION
Soma’s main street looked like many Turkish towns: Quoted in Suzy Hansen, “It Had the Strange Light of Hell,” New York Times Magazine, November 26, 2014.
“King Hussein of the Hejaz Enjoys the Crane Bathroom”: David Hapgood, Charles R. Crane: The Man Who Bet on the People (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2001), 79.
“Americans and especially American policy-makers were not well enough informed”: Ibid., 91.
“Each man will be undertaking perhaps as difficult a task as there is”: Ibid., 92.
“You do not know and cannot appreciate the anxieties that I have experienced”: Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 215.
“the least harmful solution”: Quoted in Patrick Kinross, Ataturk (New York: William Morrow, 1969), 188.
“genuinely democratic spirit”: “Report of American Section of Inter-allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey,” August 28, 1919.
“knew the Fourteen Points by heart”: Hapgood, Charles R. Crane, 60.
“an awesome spectacle”: “Report of American Section of Inter-allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey,” August 28, 1919.
“celebrity complex”: Alison Lurie, “The Revolt of the Invisible Woman,” New York Review of Books, May 9, 2013.
“tragedy”: James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Random House, 1961), 12.
“This is the way people react to the loss of empire”: Ibid., 25.
“headmistress of our country”: Russell Brand, “I Always Felt Sorry for Her Children,” Guardian, April 9, 2013.
“There’s an America that exists”: Quoted in “Freedom of Speech, the Second Person, and ‘Homeland,’” New York Daily News, October 24, 2012.
“which decides what price some other country’s civilian population must pay”: Quoted in Kamila Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire,” Guernica, February 1, 2012.
“dependence on empire for their prosperity”: Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 279.
1. FIRST TIME EAST: TURKEY
“‘I’ve been traveling around our country for a year’”: Quoted in “Why America Napped,” Suzy Hansen, Salon.com, October 2, 2001.
“because it’s being pitched to the world as righteous retaliation”: John Edgar Wideman, “Whose War,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2002.
“reality instructors”: Clifford Geertz, “Which Way to Mecca?” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003.
“to arouse the West”: Ibid.
“If all Turkey’s leaders come from the same Islamist background”: Quoted in “Sex and Power in Turkey: Feminism, Islam, and the Maturing of Turkish Democracy,” European Stability Initiative, June 2007.
“driven out ‘bag and baggage’”: “Christians and the Turk,” New York Times, June 21, 1896.
“a community of individuals who have in common”: Quoted in üner Daglier, “Ziya Gokalp on Modernity and Islam: The Origins of an Uneasy Union in Contemporary Turkey,” Comparative Civilizations Review, vol. 57 (2007): 58.
“republic must be forced through”: Quoted in Kinross, Ataturk, 379.