Whatever side of the culture war you’re on — and, unless you’re really not paying attention, you’re on one — this much seems clear: America is having an identity crisis.
We the people occupy different worlds. We read different newspapers, watch different TV shows, and hold up different heroes. We see one another as objects to be avoided or crushed, not reasoned with or understood. We feel increasingly certain of the other side’s madness. We have begun to lose hope, check out, and give up.
So it may surprise you to learn that a new 10-part documentary series about an Illinois high school is the Must-See TV of the moment. And yet three questions at the center of America to Me — which are literally posed at the start of the school year to a group of students still shaking off the languorous hold of the summer — strike at the root of our ongoing identity crisis:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
For the students of Oak Park River Forest, a diverse public high school of 3,200 students located at the edge of Chicago’s West side, these are the questions that contain multitudes. And for Oak Park’s students of color in particular, they are the questions that reveal the extent to which even a community like theirs, which was shaped by progressive housing and social policies, remains burdened by America’s original sin.
“Much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong,” explains NYU professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in his new book about identity, The Lies That Bind. And when it comes to issues of race, “not only did European racial thinking develop, at least in part, to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade, it played a central role in the development and execution of Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial projects.”
This is the toxic legacy under which we labor today. It’s what makes people see Colin Kaepernick as either a hero or a villain; it’s what sparks the messianic fervor at each new Donald Trump rally; and it’s what leads one of America to Me’s many student stars, a charismatic senior named Charles, to observe ruefully that “this school was made for White kids because this country was made for White kids.”
Yet the series outlines more than one set of truths. Its title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, Let America be America Again, in which Hughes writes that “America never was America to me.” Throughout the same poem, however, Hughes yearns for the other side of the American story, the one where “my land [can] be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.” And in the same episode in which we hear Charles bemoan the racialized design of his school, we also hear a teacher tell a group of incoming freshmen that “when you come to this house, represent who you are.”
Which is it?
Is Oak Park the rare example of a multiracial community in which all people can represent who they are in equal measure? Or is it just another example of how our country’s intractable, deeply ingrained ways of thinking about race (and one another) have yielded two opposite realities for White and Black families, and a schizophrenic message of which parts of oneself are truly welcome, and which parts are too dangerous, misunderstood, and feared?
The beauty of America to Me is that its answer is always “both/and.” The complexity of the problems we face are allowed to hang there for us to wrestle with, unresolved.
In its window into a modern American high school, for example, we see cringeworthy examples of unaware teachers, uninterested students, and uneasy reminders of the ways in which American schools remain unchanged by the tectonic shifts of the wider world. But we also see what makes schools like Oak Park so magical — the sheer variety of what you can explore and experience, the quality and commitment of the master teachers among us, and the ways in which each day can leave a student feeling seen or ignored, heard or silenced. As one teacher puts it, “I don’t think people understand how life and death this job can be.” And as another points out, as if to clarify the source of the stakes, “In this community, when we mention race, all hell breaks loose.”
Of course, they’re not alone. The shadow of America’s racial legacy is at the root of how we see ourselves and one another — all of us, no matter our color, our politics or our age. And in their willingness to courageously confront the third rail of American civic life as the cameras roll, the students, families and teachers of Oak Park have provided the rest of us with a precious and timely gift — an extended window into how far we remain from having the confidence and clarity to honestly confront, and then answer, the only questions that matter:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
A new episode of America to Me airs each Sunday night this fall on STARZ, or online at starz.com/series/americatome.
Robert Martin says:
Sam, Your stereotypes are just as real as the ones these kids face. This didn’t start with “the messianic fervor at each new Donald Trump rally,” any more than it started with Obama and his race-baiting remarks during his 8 year tenure. As a person of color, I am distressed that people like you keep things riled up. Yes, there are problems. Yes, there is inequity. Yes, there is injustice. No one promised that life would be fair. But let’s get back to the basics. Who put us in the ghetto? Who keeps us there? Why are people of color less likely to have a father or a child out of wedlock? We can point the finger at “whitey,” but let’s be honest. When we attend school, we all have the same opportunity. It’s what we do with that opportunity. It’s how we face the struggle. Even white people face struggles. Asians struggle just like everyone else. You’re right about sides. The problem is, there aren’t two sides, and it’s choosing a side or not choosing a side. It’s not about supporting an NFL player who lost his way, who forgot who he is and what he should be standing for. It’s that we are all in this mess together. We can be kind to one another or we can continue this ridiculous dialogue of hate and separation that our teachers and universities are thrusting on us at an early age. We can get rid of gangs if we choose to work together instead of believing that they have some inalienable right to exist in our towns and communities illegally. We can stop being puppets of liberals and hostages to conservatives. We can hold our media accountable for the truth and not the truth they want us to believe. This high school is just like any other: there are kids that feel (as so aptly stated by the young woman in the tralier) “on the inside, like I don’t belong.” That’s the high school experience. And we are doing a significant disservice to students, parents and society at large when we continue to promote a separatist attitude.
Dr. Armand Fusco says:
Nice piece. You might be interested in a book I published School Pushouts: A Plague of Hopelessness Perpetrated by Zombie Schools 2012. I am a retired school superintendent so I know what I am talking about. It describes in vivid detail the utter disaster of urban schools and no amount of research changes anything. A Zombie School (district) is one in which after nine years of schooling, not education, students still cannot read at a functional level. The result is horrendous to say the least because it leads to a problem that can be solved rather easily. Who commits 75-80% of crimes? 80% of inmates are school dropouts (this is a CT statistic, the national average is 65% up to 80%). Within 5 years, 80% return to their prison cells because of more crime. This shameful consequence of failed education does not even appear on the radar screens of schools, police departments, etc. My son, a retired detective, said in all the years as a police officer, this fact was never brought up at any conference, meeting, etc.
This was my second book, the first was School Corruption: Betrayal of Children and the Public Trust 2005, exposing the corruption that has been going on at all levels of education and continues to this day because schools will not admit the problem even exists. I was lambasted by my superintendent friends for exposing this information. In fact, no one tracks school corruption and it does not even appear as a topic in Education Week. Thought this would interest you. I am currently writing my next book, College Mythomania: How They Rip-Off Students, Parents, and Taxpayers.