Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US.

This is the thesis of the piece. The rest is an extended critique of Americans.

I have difficultly buying into the thesis, so the rest of it reads like a very long-winded opinion piece with the standard throwaway charges about how the U.S. is horribly bad.

This seems to be a perennial topic and folks all over the world eat it up. It's nice to see it done in such a talented way. Just not my thing.

View on HN

I think "throwaway charges about how the U.S. is horribly bad" lacks charity for what the author is getting at in this piece. While exploring shadow narratives to American exceptionalism may not be everyone's cup of tea, you must agree that it's rare (and even refreshing) to see an identity politics op-ed that relates to the foreign policy and conduct of one's country, rather than one's own gender, sexuality, or ethnicity?

Perhaps it's just me, but it seems the overwhelming majority of op-eds I read these days are outrage screeds pertaining to the latter.

>This seems to be a perennial topic and folks all over the world eat it up.

Probably because they have also eaten bombs, interventions, pressure etc for a century or so before that.

Merely a century?

Well, before that they were eating that oppression from the British, French, etc.

Indeed. Therefore it seems a bit much to pick on America now given that it's doing no worse than what every powerful country has done throughout history.

>Therefore it seems a bit much to pick on America now given that it's doing no worse than what every powerful country has done throughout history.

Well, I don't think the above information would be much comforting to the people affected.

Maybe we should be picking on all of them, but even more so to the one actually doing it at the present (and for near a century)?

Especially since "picking on" (criticizing negatively) seems like the lightest of responses about the abuses and harm from a powerful country to others.

What I really meant was something from a different vantage point, like

> It seems a bit much to expect America not to throw it's weight around since there's no superpower in the history of humanity that has restrained itself like that. Instead it would be more productive to learn to to live with and mitigate it.

It's certainly going to be an easy sell to the bulk of the Guardian's readership.

Can't see them publishing the equivalent article about the prejudices of, say, the north London elite.

Yes. This is a case where I upvoted the article for the work and clear thesis, but would downvote the editorial staff if I could. They gave this author a bit of a softball pitch and could have cut this way down. Column-inches aren't worth sacrificing quality over.

As an American, I've noted the popularity of this kind of "America still sucks!" media material. I've seen it for 40 years and I imagine it'll still be going strong 40 years from now. It's not that I have a problem with introspection and going over all of our faults and thinking about where we could be better. It's after a couple hundred of these things? I'm not seeing where a lot of them are adding any more to the discussion.

It gets to have more of a feel of a religious sermon or catechism, where the material is well-known by both the speaker and audience and held dear, but over time the ritual of pronouncing and consuming the material can become more important than the content itself.

Still, given the caveats about the genre, points for style and cogency.

I think that's fair.

Not sure who was challenged by this piece apart from the author. Sometimes that can be interesting of itself though.

Perhaps a difference of expectations? In the UK we have overtly opinionated print press and "neutral" TV while I believe in the US it is generally the other way round?

Different days, new audience. I think that the fact that this same writing is going 40 years strong says something about the past 40 years, don't you? In contrast, if said writing had evaporated, that would be an interesting data point as well -- or do you not agree?

It's a genre. Like all genres, there are rules.

I don't think you can compare across genres. Over a period of centuries you can observe which ones come and go and which ones stay. Disaster stories, for instance, seem to come and go on regular intervals. This "I am observing so many things about my upbringing that were invisible to me until X" story? It feels to me a much older genre, one that originally had roots in verbal story-telling, not books.

The interesting question (to me) is how the genre changed moving from a verbal interaction to an essay form. You could extend that to this particular writer. Have they had experience with this form of story-telling, perhaps in a religious or social setting?

So looking at these multiple genres with the same theme, yes, it says something. There's something powerfully true about the human spirit at work. But 40 years of seeing this in <FORMAT_X>? Nope. At least not for me. Too soon. Check back with me in a hundred years or so. :)

ADD: You know who this type of written story reminds me of? Emily Dickinson. There's that same feeling of turning your life inside-out and looking at it from the outside. That's about as far back as I can go with the written word, but my Kung Fu here is quite weak.

It's also reminiscent of the flagellants, which had much the same message and delivered it verbally to whomever would listen.

Actually I think they probably would. The Guardian's schtick is quite full of "Oh god we're all so awful, we must repent". Although you may be right - it's more likely to be aimed at everyone they consider less enlightened than them.

All that said, there certainly is something in what she writes, particularly about the naivety of people growing up with little world perspective like that.

Her assertion that world geography is not taught to US high school students shocked me.

Yes, me too.

I had a fairly sheltered upbringing in the UK, but we did at least do some world geography and the GCSE curriculum in the early 90s required a little bit more social geography, concentrating on the southern parts of West Africa (not that I remember much of it now).

Without any world geography at all, well it seems criminal to set up an education system, that way.

Yeah, and swathes of the conservative / alt-right movement currently running things want to get rid of the (Federal) Department of Education altogether, so I read. I've even seen people on Twitter claiming America would be better without any college system at all.

The DoE has only existed since 1980. American public schooling did just fine without it for centuries. Why is it beyond the pale to consider eliminating it?

Who else would enforce standards in geographic education?

Presumably it was the responsibility of the individual states?

At least from the perspective of someone who deals with teaching disabled students. The federal DOE determines allocation of resources and ADA compliance of schools. Without federally mandated special needs services many districts could stop offering these services all together.

These just sound like laws that should be enforced by the courts and the regular legal system. Why do we need an additional federal bureaucracy to administer them?

The question isn't if the ends are desirable. It's whether it is acceptable to merely consider whether the DoE as currently-constituted is the best way to achieve them.

It's not beyond the pale, but typically when I hear something like "we must eliminate the Department of Education", it is attached more to a philosophical reasoning (eg: "government has no business in education" / Constitutional arguments / individual freedom arguments) versus arguments over what the DoE actually does.

As far as I can tell, the Department of Education's role (https://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html) is largely limited to certain funding (eg: student loans), statistics, certain anti-discrimination legal enforcement that is applicable at the national level, and "[identifying] major issues" (eg advocacy). Plus some items related to the No Child Left Behind act.

A lot of that seems okay to me. In particular, I think having a centralized statistical department (what this department's role largely was before elevation to cabinet level) is absolutely worthwhile. Student loans would in my opinion be the most interesting topic to explore of the above, but it's more or less worth a debate over it... not "eliminate department due to Reasons".

How about not taught properly?

How many US high school students can pinpoint even fairly known countries on the map?

(Come to Austria, meet the Kangaroos)

I see this accusation leveled at the U.S. all the time, usually in highly contrived scenarios (random people picked off the street, asked to locate landmarks in another country, then the worst/funniest performers made into a gag reel). It shits me because it's so hypocritical. I'm not from the U.S. and I have no idea where your capital city is (let alone state capitals and whatnot) and I really don't give a crap, so why should you care about mine? It's just "hurr, durr, murkins are stupid" so that equally stupid people can feel superior about something.

>(random people picked off the street, asked to locate landmarks in another country, then the worst/funniest performers made into a gag reel).

Only it's not like that. You can ask random people yourself to verify, or you can trust one of several surveys and/or studies in the subject. E.g:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/0502_060502_...

>It shits me because it's so hypocritical. I'm not from the U.S. and I have no idea where your capital city is (let alone state capitals and whatnot) and I really don't give a crap, so why should you care about mine?

Well, it's exactly the "don't know, don't care" attitude we're arguing against here.

A basic knowledge of geography is not only essential in the modern, globalized world, but also indicative of a lack of knowledge in other areas, including history and current world affairs. And that, for a country that's intervening left and right, and whose citizens are trusted to vote, rally for, or oppose parties that will perform such international interventions, diplomatic actions, etc, a lack of such knowledge is shameful.

Not as if lack of knowledge was ever some kind of badge of honor.

Memorizing names and locations of cities and landmarks in a far-off country that you have no plan to visit, when those names and locations are instantly publicly available and there is an infinite number of more useful things to learn instead, is a waste of time.

Don't conflate being able to recite geographic info with knowledge. It's not knowledge, it's just... data.

>Memorizing names and locations of cities and landmarks in a far-off country that you have no plan to visit, when those names and locations are instantly publicly available and there is an infinite number of more useful things to learn instead, is a waste of time

Which would be relevant if anybody had asked them to do that. Nobody suggested people should "memorize names and locations of cities and landmarks in a far-off country that you have no plan to visit".

I (and others, including classical education) suggested a working knowledge of work geography -- what the continents are, what the major countries are, major cities. They should also know a thing or two about their history. You know, the history of human civilization, even if they have no plans to contribute to it.

And the "instantly public availability" of information doesn't make one smarter. Only the information already accessed (and even more so, evaluated and assessed) does. Things you know are there in your mind, available for your thoughts and comprehension, can help you follow a discussion, can be used to make judgements etc. Things one can merely look up do not inform your worldview -- they are absent from it.

>Don't conflate being able to recite geographic info with knowledge. It's not knowledge, it's just... data.

Knowledge itself is just data plus understanding them in context. Without data there's no knowledge. Don't conflate potential access to data with actually knowing things.

a working knowledge of work geography -> a working knowledge of world geography

My school taught world geography in 7th grade (US public school). We learned every country and a capitol, every mountain range, desert, ocean and river across the entire globe. I think maybe only 50% of that has been retained nearly 20 years later, but still we did learn (well at least temporarily memorize) it.

> We learned every country and a capitol, every mountain range, desert, ocean and river across the entire globe.

This sounds like a very shallow style of geography, did you not do any social geography?

He did say 7th grade.

7th grade is about 13 years old, right? I think I did social geography when I was about 13, I definitely wasn't any older 14 because I didn't do GCSE geography.

Edit: In case you were interested this[0] is an example of the kind of stuff we learn when we're 11-14 in Britain.

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/subjects/zrw76sg

I am British (31 now).

I can't remember year 7 and 8 geography very well, though that all sounds familiar.

>We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before.

It's really just a generalized statement based on her personal experience.

Here's some anecdata:

In 11th grade I took a world cultures class that spent a lot of time in Russian and Chinese history as well as a broader overview of various parts of Africa (mostly sub-Saharan, if I recall correctly). This was a couple of years after doing a world cultures class that was a bit broader and shallower, but I do remember it having a pretty extensive introduction to the bigger world religions. We learned the Five Pillars of Islam as well as some of the basic principles of Hinduism and Buddhism.

In elementary school, the gifted kids would put on a thing called "International Day" where they'd each pick a country, write to embassies for info, get into the CIA World Factbook on the World Wide Web, wear clothing from the nation, bring in their food, etc. It was a nice way for kids to try tzatziki sauce, listen to Slovenian-style polka, say hello in Mandarin, or see someone wearing a ghoutra or kaftan.

While this was a good school district, it was nothing remotely resembling an urban or cosmopolitan one. I have to think that plenty of Americans had similar experiences like this.

Where on earth did you go to school? Was it a public school? I moved around a lot as a kid and no where did I learn any of the things you mentioned.

Public school, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh.

The "we're so awful" business is usually of the "why do we british do/think X" variety where X is something popular with a largely separate subset of people to Guardian writers and readers. Then we can pat ourselves on the back.

It's increasingly cack but still the best of a bad bunch

Yeah, very much agree. I read it quite a bit, but I do occasionally shake my head in disbelief while doing so!

I love the Guardian (I read a wide range of other sites and papers/magazines), but then I am a dull lefty - but this felt like a bit of a jump the shark moment to me: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/...

I knew it would be avocado related but was expecting the "overcado" piece

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/oct/05/the-avocado-...

Hah, I read the Guardian a lot, but let's be honest here -- they're just as capable of liberal hand-wringing and self-blame too.

The opinion pieces really make me wince sometimes.

Oh god yes, the Guardian was the last newspaper I read regularly (well that and the FT sometimes) but I gave it up because I just couldn't take the horrible whingey whiny columnists any more.

It's got worse though, now seems like they won't publish a piece unless it has a snide reference to "neoliberalism", or some comment about evil bankers causing financial crises, or some such, no matter how off-topic it is.

Pretty sure this piece was written by a second-year college student.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com