If you recall, last summer in the thick of the campaign we had Cokie Roberts chiding then-candidate Barack Obama for going on vacation to that foreign country known as Hawaii.
Well it looks as if another Real American from Real America was a little uncomfortable with Hawaii's foreign-ny-ness.
Palin, though notoriously ill-traveled outside the United States, did journey far to the first of the four colleges she attended, in Hawaii. She and a friend who went with her lasted only one semester. "Hawaii was a little too perfect," Palin writes. "Perpetual sunshine isn't necessarily conducive to serious academics for eighteen-year-old Alaska girls." Perhaps not. Palin's father, Chuck Heath, gave a different account to Conroy and Walshe. According to him, the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable: "They were a minority type thing and it wasn't glamorous, so she came home."
The passage above is an excerpt from Sam Tenenhaus' review in The New Yorker of "Sarah From Alaska" by journalists Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe.
Last year when Cokie Roberts suggested that Hawaii was a foreign country, I wasn't totally clear if she was just commenting on Hawaii's tropical surroundings, which more resembles some far-off South Pacific island than the typical American landscape, or if she was referring to the very Asian composition of the Hawaiian population and culture.
I've always suspected it was the latter.
Obviously Palin doesn't speak for Cokie Roberts, but let's not kid ourselves. Palin and Roberts are both from "real America" - Roberts was born and raised in Louisiana, and her father was Congressman Hale Boggs, who among other things voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act - that part of America in which whites are still the vast majority, or at least where the culture of white Protestant America still dominates.
Clearly the State of Hawaii, where Asians make up 40% of the population and where whites make up just 27%, does not fit that description of "real America". When Palin's father explained that she left Hawaii because it was too much of a "minority thing", I think the real problem was that in Hawaii, whites are the minority and white Protestant culture is not the dominant culture.
I'm not accusing Palin and Roberts and everyone from "real America" of being white supremacists. I'm sure they both have "Oriental" friends and I'm sure they don't advocate the re-imposition of Jim Crow.
But at the end of the day they simply feel more comfortable in a world where white Protestant culture reigns supreme, where persons of other ethnicities are only sparsely present, where those few ethnics who are present quietly and very privately observe their cultural traditions, while at the same time they very publicly and enthusiastically assimilate into and adopt the dominant white Protestant culture (see Michelle Malkin).
The State of Hawaii and President Barack Obama on the other hand represent a very different kind of America than the "real America" of Sarah and Cokie. It is an America that embraces and celebrates diversity of ethnicity and culture, one that recognizes our differences and adjusts accordingly rather than denying or suppressing them, and most importantly one that does not recognize the white Protestant culture that has long dominated American life – or any other single culture - as the senior partner.
Why else Hawaii is considered too foreign but Alaska is not? They both entered the union in the same year, 1959. Between the two, it is Alaska which is the less tamed, less civilized, more independent and frontier-like. It is Alaska that has a not so insignificant demographic that favors secession from the United States. Sarah Palin would know, her husband belonged to a party called the Alaskan Independence Party.
Yet I'm certain that Cokie, whose father perished in a mysterious plane crash in Alaska in 1972, and certainly Sarah would never mistake or describe Alaska for a "foreign" land.
The reason is obvious, just look at the ethnic composition of both states: Alaska's population is 70% white, while Hawaii's is 40% Asian-American and just 27% white.
Considerations of race in the difference in which Hawaii and Alaska are viewed can be found in Senate deliberations over whether to grant them statehood. In Master of the Senate, by historian Robert Caro, about Lyndon Johnson's tenure as the Democrats' Senate leader from 1953-1960, there is a passage about issues that arose when the Democratic Policy Committee took up the Hawaiian Statehood Bill.
"Liberals were anxious to make the bill a party issue, believing that it was clear-cut. But the South saw the bill differently, feeling that admission to the Union of a racially mixed Hawaii would mean another two votes in the Senate for cloture, and (Georgia Senator Richard) Russell raised objections in the Policy Committee, which as the minutes tersely reported, finally took a position that blurred the issue: 'The Committee discussed the Hawaiian Statehood Bill, and generally agreed that an effort should be made to amend that bill by granting statehood to Alaska as well.'" - Master of the Senate, page 509
So when I think of Sarah and Cokie and their views (which they certainly won't admit) about how Hawaii isn't as American as Alaska because, you know, of all the minorities, I think about how there really are two Americas in conflict with one another right now.
In one respect, I understand the apprehensions of the white Protestant America that Sarah and Cokie belong to which has dominated for so long. It can't be easy seeing the country you remember and grew up in changing into something unfamiliar. I think this nativism, which is not unique by any means to our country, drives much of the animosity toward President Barack Obama and liberals, which represent the minority-type thing America that Palin couldn't stand.
But as for where I stand on this issue, let me just point out that Hawaii's two U.S. Senators, Daniel Akaka and Daniel Inouye, who are Japanese-Americans, can claim something that would more define them as "real" Americans than either Sarah or Cokie can ever claim, namely that they served and bled for their country in World War II. This is especially significant given that Inouye and Akaka fought to defend America despite the injustice that America visited upon their friends, relatives, and other Japanese Americans when it confiscated their property, put them in concentration camps, and designated them all as the enemy based only on their nationality and ethnicity.
That people like Senators Inouye and Akaka would still risk their lives for America despite this travesty is a testament to their American-ness. Inouye lost one of his arms for America. You cannot get more American than that, that is as real as it can possibly get short of losing one's life in defense of country.
The America of Inouye and Akaka is the America I want to live in, and it is just as real as the rest of America, despite what Sarah Palin, Cokie Roberts, and other like them believe.