Amanda Reid | National Bubble

Reid About | Fighting the Culture of American Insularity

By Amanda Reid 10/24/16 10:10pm

When I first came to Penn, one of the first questions I was asked about my home country was: “Isn’t Vietnam a democracy?” At first, it seemed like a harmless question, but after rethinking it, I saw the damaging knowledge gaps behind the query — the same lack of knowledge about the Vietnam War directly informs humanitarian disasters like in Iraq. So, to answer the question above, since the North Vietnamese Army won the war that America escalated, Vietnam is not a democracy.

I am both a Vietnamese international student and a passport-carrying American. Coming from this background. I’ve had to experience the repeating cliches of people questioning my fluency in English or people commenting on the exoticism of my hometown. The problem that I, and other international students like me, consistently observe is the problem of being viewed as a foreign other.

Though it’s normal that Americans should be curious about other cultures, it highlights a flaw in the American cultural sphere. Even in higher education institutions, American students live in an insular culture.

Other nations are viewed as unknowable entities; politically, we begin to understand international issues as the world’s problem, not ours.

Last week, The Daily Pennsylvanian published a full-page spread that affirmed its support for Hillary Clinton as president, and while the article endorses Clinton, it also acknowledges her email scandals: “It would be one-sided not to acknowledge Clinton’s shortcomings as well.”

“The fact that this one mistake has dominated the critical voices throughout her campaign also speaks to the fact that Clinton has fared relatively well over decades as a politician,” the DP Opinion Board wrote.

It’s true — our criticism of Clinton is disproportionately directed at her scandals and her unlikable personality, and less attention is paid towards her hawkish international record. In fact, during the recent debates, the candidates barely expressed anything but equivocal, throwaway statements on issues of international importance, like conflicts with Palestine and Israel, or Saudi Arabia and Yemen, both of which the United States is militarily involved with. As such, the lack of coverage of these issues allows us as viewers to passively ignore issues that are not exclusively relevant to us.

Moreover, the information taught in American high schools follows an American-centric narrative. For instance, one junior in Penn’s School of Nursing comments on their personal experience of insularity by describing how “it starts in elementary school, until you learn how to be conscious ... Even in high school, we focus on AP European History, AP U.S. History, but the rest of the world just gets AP World History — how insincere is that?”

Do we ever really morally and personally grapple with our contribution to a more hostile international climate? Do we ever grapple with how we view and contextualize — politically and socially — the foreign “other”?

American insularity occurs simultaneously with our country’s consistent inability to align our values with our actions. Though we believe in creating a safer America, our politicians consciously ignore how gun prohibition in other countries lowers rates of shootings. Though we know that we have been bombing innocent civilians in the Middle East for decades, we don’t know how to react to it responsibly (considering our current presidential candidates have either hawkish or xenophobic perspectives on international relations). Though government officials occasionally acknowledge the existence of global warming, they do little to acknowledge how MEDCs, like the US, profit from fossil fuels, and how climate change is linked to natural disasters like the hurricane that hit Haiti.

Though we may know this “outside world” through headlines and sound bites, we cannot confidently call ourselves engaged global citizens if we continue to willfully ignore the experiential reality outside us — and our hand in creating this outside reality. It’s not because we’re not humanitarians; it’s because we’ve been raised insularly.

It is a difficult thing to be an American and, at the same time, acknowledge our complicity in this system of violence and obliviousness. But the first step is to consciously force ourselves to look beyond our cultural bubble. America needs to shed its culture of insularity, and that begins on a micro level. Its people, specifically, must strive to gain a deeper understanding of this foreign “other.” In other words, we need to work to understand each other.

We shallowly understand other nations, cultures, experiences. But we must keep asking questions to understand experiences outside what we know and to understand the way we take for granted our relationships with the “other.” How do we combat ignorance? Ask, and ask, and ask again, until it’s no longer necessary to ask “Why is your English so good?”

AMANDA REID is a College junior from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, studying cinema studies & English. Her email address is amreid@sas.upenn.edu. “Reid About It!” usually appears every other Tuesday.