Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

Here’s the thing: no one ever tells Americans that when they move abroad, even if they are empathetic and sensitive humans—even if they come clean about their genetic inability to learn languages, even if they consider themselves leftist critics of their own government—that they will inevitably, and unconsciously, spend those first months in a foreign country feeling superior to everyone around them and to the nation in which they now have the privilege to live.

I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity; for me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself, which, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all.

My lack of consciousness was dangerous because it exonerated me of responsibility, of history, of a role—it allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.

Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity, heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed because of their ignorance and misused power, they might actually be the losers within a greater moral universe.

If we are inhabitants of an unjust social order, it is likely that our own possibilities for thought will be tainted by the injustice we are trying to understand.

Baldwin once explained that what he meant when he said Americans lacked a sense of tragedy was that they couldn’t grasp that life itself was a risk, that there was no such thing as safety, that eventually we all suffer and die, and that the acceptance of this fact is precisely what empowers us to struggle and endure.

I blamed the country for Trump’s election because it was a country built on the rhetoric and actions of white supremacy,