I find the term "ordinary American" very grating because the definition is often extremely ethnocentric. People who wax poetic about "ordinary Americans" are often really referring to Christian heterosexual whites from rural towns, a notion of "Americanness" that doesn't fit statistically speaking, as Paul Waldman pointed out this week. Central to the argument is the idea that these "Real Americans," by virtue of cultural and historical heritage, are entitled to be treated differently from those who don't fit the mold. This isn't exactly racism -- it's really a kind of rational narcissism: I am normal, I am an "ordinary American," therefore those who are different from me are not.
Kathleen Parker has long been fond of ethnocentric notions of Americanness. During the 2008 election, Parker suggested Obama wasn't a "full-blooded American," which was about "blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values." (The final criterion explains how people like Alito, Thomas and Scalia, despite not having the former two, can be counted by virtue of embracing conservative ideology.) As Paul noted the other day, Parker leveled a similar criticism at Elena Kagan for her Jewish, New York roots. She also wrote this:
These facts ultimately may be more anecdotally interesting than significant in terms of how a justice might perform. Then again, spending one's formative years walking past the infamously crime-riddled Murder Hotel en route to school, as Kagan did -- and, say, walking past the First Baptist Church to ballet class -- are not the same cultural marinade.
The latter hypothetical is proffered only for the sake of contrast and metaphor. It seems remote to unlikely that a woman whose life has involved Baptist churches and ballet slippers would find herself on a track to today's Supreme Court, though that ought not to be the case. Women are not of one cloth. (As a footnote, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor grew up between El Paso and an Arizona ranch and is a famously good dancer.)
This vaguely religious, cultural, and gender-charged image struck me while I was reading about Kagan's experience trying to get Bat-Mitzvah'd in her Orthodox New York Synagogue today:
“Elena Kagan felt very strongly that there should be ritual bat mitzvah in the synagogue, no less important than the ritual bar mitzvah,” Rabbi Riskin said, referring to the rite of passage for 13-year-old boys. “This was really the first formal bat mitzvah we had.”
But while Elena, the brainy, self-assured daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, asked to read from the Torah on a Saturday morning, just as the boys did, it was not to be. Instead, her ceremony took place on a Friday night, May 18, 1973, and she read from the Book of Ruth, which she also analyzed in a speech.
What matters about this story isn't that Kagan is an observant Jew. What matters is how it tells a specific story of one person negotiating gender-based and cultural expectations -- something Americans face whether they live in New York City or El Paso. This story is no less universal for being specific. Paradoxically, being specific is what makes it universal.
Parker's column isn't just deeply pernicious because she's wrong about "ordinary Americans" being rural small-towners in a statistical sense. It's also troubling because Parker's own narrow-minded provincialism prevents her from seeing anything of herself in someone because their anchorage, their port of call, is a synagogue rather than a Baptist church.
-- A. Serwer
