It is often said that the dominant culture of the United States is “individualist.” This is a tricky term, because the concept of individualism has its own history and context and is leveraged in many ways in our popular and political cultures.
I think that when the dominant white culture of the U.S. is said to be individualist, it has a flavor of Cold War ideology to it: the U.S., globally, stands for the rights of individual actors, preserved from the kinds of statist interventions associated with communism, collectivism. “We” are free because we prioritize the individual; cultures that focus on the collective, the communal, abridge the freedom of individuals to create their own lives, hold their own moral codes, garner the rewards of their own hard work and merited success.
I name this narrative white because there are so many peoples in the U.S. who come from families and cultures that do prioritize the community, and that have multiple models of how individualism and communalism can dance with one another rather than cancel each other out. So to say that the U.S. is individualist is itself a work of ideology: it flattens the reality of all the peoples who live here and the richness of how they see the world.
I’m wanting to challenge individualism because so many people tell me they feel despair, hopelessness and overwhelm when they consider the ways violence infuses our culture and our systems. They tell me they just want to check out. They don’t think there’s anything that can be done: it’s too late, too hard, they’re just one person, how can any one person make a difference when everything feels just so immense. I understand these feelings, and I also think these feelings are being reinforced by individualism: either there’s a bad guy who is responsible for all of this, who needs to be locked up, or there’s a good guy who is a hero who is going to tell us all what to do to make it better.
