Big Think

Topic: An Immigrant's Perspective on America

Peter Beinart: My parents are . . . came to the United States just before I was born from South Africa.  That’s where they both grew up – in Cape Town.  It’s where they were married.  That’s where their parents lived throughout my childhood.  So their experiences – people coming from a different country, a more troubled country to the United States first imbued me with a great sense of gratitude to them for having made a decision which, in many ways, was harder for them, but made things much easier for us; but also I think allowed me to see America through foreigners eyes because my parents still saw themselves as foreigners when I was a child.  But also I think to appreciate what it meant for me to be an American in a particular way because I . . . I was surrounded by people who had not grown up here.

South Africa where my parents came from was a hyper-politicized society in a way that America is not.  It’s a society in which the consequences of political decisions pressed up against people’s lives and constrained, and often brutalized their lives in a way that, in today’s America, doesn’t happen as much, thank goodness.  So in South Africa, having a political stance was . . . was an inevitable consequence of the decision . . . of the way you lived your life.  Even to try to be apolitical was itself a very profound political statement if you were living in the middle . . . in the midst of a really monstrous apartheid system.  So I think it was from that recognition that I realized that the consequence . . . the profound consequences of illiberal, anti-democratic politics on people’s lives; and also then later on once I was in college in South Africa over through apartheid, the extraordinary liberating possibilities of a more democratic politics.

I grew up in a family of people who did not consider themselves Americans – for whom America was, in some ways, a perplexing place – wondrous, problematic, but also confusing – understanding why Americans were the way they were, which was not the way that my parents were necessarily.  And for me that process of trying to understand America at a deeper level; to understand the deep structure of the traditions and principles that tend to inform the way America thinks about its relationship with the rest of the world, but also the way America thinks about itself, because those things are so intertwined; looking at the way that’s played out historically, and trying to use that to have some understanding of why we act the way we do is, for me, a source of great revelation and fulfillment.

Recorded On: 09/12/07