"Futureface" with Alex Wagner

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2018

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why is everyone taking DNA tests to find out about their heritage? While Americans are fueling an industry selling them a story of global identity, the country’s President is spreading fear and hostility about non-white immigrants. Trump seems to have an idea of “Americanness” that is limited to those of a certain ethnic inheritance and anyone from places like Mexico or South America or Haiti is fundamentally foreign and ‘other’. The most obvious fact remains that the overwhelming majority of us came from somewhere foreign, that at some point, our heritage was ‘other’. This is the intersection Alex Wagner explores in her new memoir, “Futureface”. It’s a story about how we think about who we are based on where we come from and how that fits into our conception of our own “Americanness”. Read more at NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why is the country in the midst of this identity anxiety right now?
0:04.5	I think it's twofold.
0:06.0	One I think it's demographic churn, right?
0:08.2	I mean, there are studies that pack this up that there is a fear that white Americans
0:12.9	are losing and that they're way of life as they know it, which is probably some airbrushed
0:18.3	version of reality is going away and the brown blob is like coming.
0:23.4	But I think there's also a sort of socio-cultural answer, which is that we are isolated from
0:29.5	each other.
0:33.5	Welcome to Wise This Happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:40.2	So we're having a big national debate right now about what it is to be American.
0:44.7	I think it's fair to say.
0:46.0	Now, you could say it's the debate that stretches all the way back to the country's founding
0:52.5	about what it is to be American who gets to count as an American.
0:57.6	It was a great line written by, and I'm now not remembering I should have it in front of
1:01.0	me, but it was I believe it was some state department official, I think, who I think was
1:07.6	resigning when Donald Trump was being sworn in.
1:13.0	And he had this line that I always remembered that he said, the dream of the US is a white
1:18.1	republic.
1:19.1	White man's republic died at Appomattox.
1:21.7	The idea being that in some ways the, for all the aspirations included in both the Declaration
1:27.4	of Independence and the Constitution about free people and self-determination.
1:31.6	The US is a kind of cradle nation.
	...

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