800-lb Gorilla Explained

With political fragmentation at home and distrust abroad, how can Americans successfully advocate for themselves? Several contributors for Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation explained at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference what they feel are the factors underlying foreigners’ skewed perceptions.

“The stakes for understanding America could hardly be higher. For better or worse, America is the 800-lb gorilla in every room in the world. When it has an itch, the world scratches,” write the editors of Understanding America. “Today, American politics often seem to be polarized between those who see this country through the eyes of a hard-core liberal or a rock-ribbed conservative,” they argue.

Martha Bayles, a Boston College faculty member and cultural critic, argues that Hollywood and the entertainment industry have abandoned their original “tacit understanding” with the government that, in exchange for open foreign markets, they would represent America positively abroad. Many of the misperceptions of American culture are perpetuated by this industry, she argues. She said of television shows that Americans “are often portrayed as single people, people on their own, mavericks, renegades, people with no particular ties to any kind of community.” She added, “Now that is—we adjust for that in America…But I think it is a severe distortion to people overseas.”

Reading from a study of 60 Mexicans’ views on the U.S., Bayles quoted the author as saying

“People who watch U.S. television shows, attend Hollywood movies, and listen to pop music cannot help but believe that we are a nation in which we have sex with strangers regularly, where we wander the streets well-armed and prepare to shoot our neighbors at any provocation, and where the lifestyle to which we aspire is one of rich cocaine-snorting decadent sybarites.”

This perception is so prevalent that Hollywood pokes fun at its own violent messages. In Rush Hour 3, the French cab driver refuses to drive Detective James Carter around Paris because he reviles Americans’ violent behavior. For comedic effect, the cab driver later adopts a “super spy” attitude and revels in the the glory of—like an American—being willing to shoot strangers for no reason.

Professor Orlando Patterson believes that foreigners are likely to misperceive American racial politics because, unlike in many other nations, African-Americans have been significantly integrated into the elite classes. “The contrast with America is striking and we have a long way to go in terms of claiming integration of our elites, but the role of Blacks and other minorities in our political life has no parallel elsewhere,” said the Harvard Professor. “The myth of black homogeneity and the myth of persisting racism, as well as the opposing myth [that racism has ended] …they are all things which confound foreigners. The point is that there is persistent racism in this country, but there has been extraordinary change in white attitudes in this regard,” he argued.

Patterson observed that African-Americans have been primarily embraced culturally but not socially. This leads to their dominance of the arts. “So these are the paradoxes which I explored and which puzzles outsiders because, as Martha pointed out, if you are a foreigner you would think that America is at least 50 percent black if you are exposed mainly to its popular culture,” he said.

Professor Linda Waite’s research unearthed a surprising conclusion—America is not exceptional for its birth rates, but the beneficiary of immigrants’ large families. “So you can argue—and we do argue—that, in a sense, this American exceptionalism is free-riding on the fertility of immigrants, on their labor, on their values and on their time. And that is especially true for Mexican-American immigrants,” said the University of Chicago professor. She later continued, “And so in a sense, I argue in the paper that American exceptionalism, certainly in fertility, is really Hispanic exceptionalism.” According to Waite’s presentation, the average U.S. fertility rate is at 2.1, but when broken down by racial categories, the Hispanic dominance becomes apparent.

• Hispanic fertility is 2.82,
• African-American 2.02,
• Asian Pacific is 1.9,
• and Caucasian is 1.85.

However, as Waite discussed, when Mexican-Americans are measured separately, their fertility rates jump to 3.02—above average even for Hispanics. “So much of this higher fertility of Hispanic immigrants is due to the higher fertility and family orientation of fairly recent immigrants. It is really a flow of your immigrants into this country, not the fact that there are people who were born some place else and moved here when they were infants,” she said.

In other words, Professor Waite argues, it is Latin-American immigrant populations that keep America’s workplace young and its economy vibrant.

Bethany Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.