Another Kind of American Abroad : On Freedoms
Professor John Huston Stanfield
Director ASARPI
Mauritius
April 29, 2024
While living abroad all these years one staple of my ongoing life is to remind foreigners I encounter in their lands that I am not just American which usually means white American in their mindsets since that is what the projected global image of America was long intended to be. I even have to correct the otherwise well educated and traveled occupying high places in their nations that I am not just any American not a white American especially not a white American from the elite policy determining governing class.
I come from that segment of America with a long ancestral history of being brought over by slave ships in chains against our will; long unjustly incarcerated in chain gangs; and lynched. Just the other day at a fancy reception I had to correct a barrister who jokingly said I was probably CIA ignorantly not realizing I came from that segment of American society which for generations has been spied on as citizens always suspect of being shady and disloyal. Not knowing or caring that I am the son and grandson of men who went away to fight in wars only to return broken to a nation of broken promises never able to find decent jobs but somehow survived anyways. A nation in which you learn early as a black boy to keep your head down when the cop comes to the car window or when the teacher scolds you as usual rather than praises you all because society including your own sees you as a bad person.
Even when in recent decades we had one among our number elected as President of the United States and to other elite places in American society it made little difference beyond the symbolic while other groups benefited since though historically underrepresented or stigmatized their dominant voices clamoring for justice are white. I come from that segment where immigrants looking like me more or less are being selected over those of us from former slave backgrounds for highest places since they pose not the threat that we would. They come stumbling down unable to cope or understand at the end of the day as Malcom X reminded the Harvard brother that day, you are a nigger too.
I come from that segment where you are demeaned as less than and a failure, assumed to be at the bottom than at the top of your class to be a devil than a saint on earth. It is assumed that men like me load baggage on planes rather than fly them and are the servers of food rather than the head guy at the head of the table. We strive to sing and dance, it is assumed than write Pulitzer or Nobel Prize winning books.
But with this all said, as I live abroad after setting people straight about what kind of American I am staring at me confused or in disbelief:a Black man with an American accent because I am – not from the UK or South Africa. I am an American native born and raised. And even if I was a much more recent voluntary immigrant, I would still be an American though naturalized and thus still usually stared at in confusion or disbelief.
And being American as a Baby boomer raised in a time when democracy shined brightly even with all of its discriminatory warts meant I grew up embracing the value of freedoms be it speech or movement or in my right to exist and to prosper. It is why my parents taught me to speak up and insist on my rights to be treated like a human being, my right to be educated, and my right to pursue justice if done wrong. It is why my heroes and heroines in American history have been Americans from various salts of the earth who took the US constitutional declarations seriously and struggled and still struggle until those human rights become realities. So I come from the segment of American society who sees , hears, and feels freedoms from another angle.
Namely as my soul which is never taken for granted so must be struggled for each day to sustain. It is a place in American society I hail from which makes me appreciate being American one weaned on the promise of freedoms always to be reached for which sets me apart in the foreign lands in which I have resided. It is because unlike the society in which my values and identity took root and blossomed , I have found places where I have lived to lack the deep abiding sense of what it means to be free and to daily struggle to be free and remain free. There may be efforts to promote freedoms by governments, civil societies, and individuals but that is not the same as growing up in America as flawed as it is where freedoms or the quest for them is flowing everywhere you go. It is in the air Americans breathe and in the water we drink even today as polarized as we happen to be.
It is difficult to get most foreigners to understand this American freedoms value and identity. Even those who have vacationed or studied in America or study America and boast about such when they return home never learned about this abiding deep American value and identity about freedoms which goes much deeper than the constitution and electoral politics , wearing tee shirts, watching movies ,and eating hamburgers. Not understanding this is the reason why so many foreigners who return home from America with their academic degrees and tourist experiences or who have never been there though are seeped in our popular culture are afraid to express themselves and in other ways to be free since to do so is frowned upon or dangerous to do so.
This is all to say freedoms like democracy in general are not magical pill taking rituals but instead are value and identity formation and sustaining human development experiences which marks who I am as an American though of a different kind. Always struggling. Never giving up to make freedoms real wherever I happen to be.
It is then not the money many people erroneously assume most Americans have or our popular culture so many people around the world so eagerly strive to embrace even in these dismal times for the US in world affairs but it is who we are as freedoms people and the quest to become such when like where I come from you are not free but struggle each day to make that happen.
In fact that daily struggle to be free and to stay free is what
bonds all Americans no matter who we are as we strive each day to become
an even more authentic inclusive free society.