When Barack Obama officially became president one year ago today, we at nuPOLIS inaugurated him as America's First Transnational President. We argued that his global roots and ideals exemplify a new type of American experience and identity. We speculated that "the nation’s changing demographics and culture, and perhaps its changing politics—as well as the unprecedented blood lines and experiences of its new president—suggested that an American experience and identity were emerging that included, but also transcended, what being an 'American' has meant."
A year later, we stand by our story. The evolution of a transnational American identity is a slow-motion affair along a ragged edge of change.
- Obama's visible appreciation of other cultures--contemporary Native American pottery now in the Oval Office--his embrace of multilateralism, and appointment of an Hispanic Supreme Court judge model a version of transnationalism that makes sense to many Americans. But for others it's just a part of an East Coast-European-elitist framework that is wrong headed.
- Obama's administration backed off on pushing for immigration reform in its first year, and the prospects are unclear for changes that will affect the standing of millions of non-Americans living and working in America.
- The manager of Where the Buffalo Roam, a souvenir shop in Obama's Chicago, reported that fascination with Obama has declined. He's marked down $20 Obama T-shirts to $5 and says that European visitors, not Americans, are buying them.
Perhaps, though, the Obama effect is less important than the seemingly inexorable demographic dynamics that are underway in the US. The Great Recession has slowed down immigration worldwide and led to anti-immigrant tension, but in recent weeks demographers reaffirmed estimates that by 2050 a majority of the US population will be non-Caucasian. And Latino immigration trends have turned the American South into the first region in which a majority of children are both minority and low income.
Transnationalism isn't just a matter of immigration; as Alvaro Lima explained in a comprehensive report, it's a social, economic, cultural, and political phenomenon driven by the behavior of tens of millions of people. National symbols like the election of Obama matter. National policies matter--some are transnational-friendly, others are unfriendly. But even if politics lag behind the curve of change, the shifts in who is an American suggest corresponding shifts in what an American is. |
