An America Conflicted About Outsiders

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/05/us/an-america-conflicted-about-outsiders.html

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In November, a veteran CNN correspondent was suspended for two weeks over a remark that she later acknowledged was “inappropriate and disrespectful.”

The Twitter post by the correspondent, Elise Labott, came after the House of Representatives had just passed a bill that would have made it much more difficult for Syrian refugees to enter the United States: “Statue of Liberty bows head in anguish.”

Even as critics of the suspension, like the journalist Glenn Greenwald, sped to her defense, Ms. Labott apologized for editorializing. She has not posted on Twitter since. Yet hers was one of those utterances that resist erasure, that linger. It spoke of a year in American life roiling with hostility to outsiders.

As millions of Syrians fled a shattered country, the United States departed from its own history to keep them at bay. “Please forgive our rudeness, but we have a war in our country,” a Syrian man said memorably to the BBC.

The United States wasn’t in a forgiving mood, though, and a majority of governors went so far as to oppose the settling of Syrians in their states.

And it was the year of Donald J. Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and for the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. And a year of surging nativism, in which Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Mr. Trump’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination and a son of immigrants, could run an advertisement bemoaning that people with “traditional values” now feel “out of place in our own country.”

And yet.

Amid those calls, another story line could be heard in American popular culture this past year: stories about the special powers of outsiders.

“The Big Short,” on the big screen, told the story of the 2008 global financial meltdown in a new way: by focusing on the odd ducks who saw it coming when few others did.

Virtually the entire world financial elite believed the housing market could never go down. It took a socially awkward loner, a pair of Colorado buddies shut out by Wall Street and an embittered, dyspeptic maverick to see what most of the whole world couldn’t.

“Brooklyn,” also from Hollywood, is the tale of an Irish immigrant in America, a portrait of the outsider’s inner life. She belongs neither to the place she leaves nor the place she goes.

Her life is a negotiation between old and new selves, trying on new versions of herself like one tries on jackets. She play-acts confidence until it becomes true. In her solitude, she finds a freedom to become herself, unburdened by history, that insiders will never know.

The New York theater phenomenon of 2015 was “Hamilton.” In the daring vision of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the Caribbean, incarnates the throbbing, reckless, lonely ambition of the American outsider.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose. But the outsider also carries a sense of loss that is often airbrushed away.

In an essay in The New Yorker, the writer Jhumpa Lahiri recounted her move to Italy and her brave act of starting over as a writer in a new language. An outsider to Italian, she finds herself becoming, in this new language, “a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a different way.”

Then there was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award-winning “Between the World and Me,” which sought to rob Americans of illusions about the American Dream.

It showed the power of the native outsider, a black man alienated from his own nation, to look at the same facts that the insider sees and interpret them so differently — and to use language to persuade them of his vision.

And there was Aziz Ansari’s Netflix comedy series “Master of None.” It got families across America talking with its achingly realistic depiction of a family in which the children, having grown up in the stability and comfort purchased by immigrant parents who sacrificed everything, can’t be bothered to teach them how an iPad works.

But in the show the parents resist anger. The callousness is a mark of success. The outsiders have raised insiders.

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