The White Reverie of Iowa Nice
“The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him. In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values. In the period of decolonization, the colonized masses mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.” — Frantz Fanon
In 1846, the Iowa territory became a bona fide state. And like all of America’s territories, its formation was the direct result of a genocidal military campaign into indigenous land. The area that would later become Iowa was seized upon the defeat of Sauk warrior Black Hawk’s raiding brigade in 1832, and then other subsequent native struggles. In the decade following these unsuccessful resistances, the U.S. military pushed further west, past the Mississippi River, and steadily removed the various tribes inhabiting the region. By the 1860’s, nearly all of the original Native Americans that had occupied this section of the Midwest were either pushed out, bought out, or killed and the fertile Iowan prairie was colonized for incoming homesteaders.
This imperial march established Iowa, and in time, the culture of “Iowa Nice.”
What is “Iowa Nice?” Essentially, it is a Midwestern variant of “Southern Hospitality,” an understanding that Iowans are unanimously cordial and welcoming people. The specific phrase, however, became popularized by a regionally viral YouTube video circa 2012. Made in response to the Iowa caucuses, and the often condescending gaze national media outlets direct towards the state during this event, Scott Siepker’s “Iowa Nice” spread the Hawkeye mantra now declared ad nauseum.
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLZZ6JD0g9Y
The not-so-subtle irony of the video is its smug acrimony veiled by the veneer of Iowan faux-affability. It aptly illustrates much of the Hawkeye experience, perfunctory pleasantries and good manners shrouding the choleric demeanor of a good portion of the state’s populace. To be blunt, many Iowans are actually some of the angriest, pettiest people in the world, but this vitriol is usually repressed with ranch dressing and How I Met Your Mother reruns. Nonetheless, there are moments in which the Iowa Mean evinces.
My first exposure to explicit racism occurred in the lunch room of Colfax-Mingo Elementary School. It was an election year, Bush vs. Kerry, and even though we were 4th graders, many of us had been regurgitating some of the election cycle talking points our parents had probably also been repeating. I don’t recall which one of my peers broached the subject of borders and immigration, but I do clearly remember a lunchmate announcing with a harrowing assurance that he simply “just did not like Mexicans.” I imagine this xenophobic interaction recurred across the state, within every age group, every county, and every political congregation. How a 9 year old, who probably didn’t even know what Mexico was a few months earlier, suddenly decided to detest a minority is an attestation of Iowa’s unsaid bigotry. This would not be my last encounter with the reactionary conditioning of the state’s culture.
Growing up in a mostly wisteria white state, microaggressive and jokingly chauvinistic behaviors were commonplace. Uttering caricatured accents or calling someone a homophobic slur for wearing hot pink were typical and fine. But the prejudice did not stop at offensive humor. Underlying cultural certitudes were always informed by white supremacy: Latinx Iowans were probably illegal migrant workers, the northside of Des Moines was a nightmarescape of black-on-black crime, and poverty was solely the fault of degenerate lifestyles. Regardless of one’s affiliation with Democrats or Republicans, a distinct set of racialized class animosities were considered natural law.
All of these examples, however, are personally anecdotal. In order to fully expose the fraudulence of Iowa Niceness, it’s necessary to examine the disastrous policies cranked out by the Iowan business and government classes on a statewide scale.
Here’s an appallingly notable selection:
The institution of an ethnic cleansing bill.
A local bar’s monetization of stomping on a Colin Kaepernick jersey.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/...kaepernicks-jersey...bar/93977738/
Governor Branstad’s refusal to accept Syrian refugees.
https://www.bleedingheartland.com/2015/11/17/branstad-joins-rush-to-slam-door-on-syrian-refugees/
Iowa’s apartheid prison system.
A local suburb’s rejection of a mental health facility.
As evidenced by my medium page, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon, and maybe slightly pessimistic. Because of this, I’ve honed my ability to see through bogus amenity. That being said, it doesn’t take an anthropologist to ascertain that Iowa is not culturally driven by a milieu of kindness. Like all of America, the people of Iowa act in response to material reality, and material reality is determined by the oppressive hierarchies of capitalism.
“Iowa Nice” has been established as the state’s unofficial slogan and general character, but beyond Scott Siepker and Stick’s furniture, what is it really derived from? In Edna Bonacich’s “Class Approaches to Ethnicity and Race,” the sociologist elaborates on the Super-Exploitation Model of nationalism.
According to Bonacich:
“One segment of workers, typically dark-skinned, are more oppressed than another, the latter typically of the same ethnicity as the exploiters. This enables the dominant bourgeoisie to make huge profits from the former segment, enough to pay off the more privileged sector of the working class, who then help to stabilize the system by supporting it and acting as the policeman of the specially oppressed.”
“Iowa Nice” is not simply a colloquialism. It burgeons forth as an expression of this violent relationship.
Clearly, Iowa and its government is not especially nice to the most marginalized in society. But, to be transparent, the value of Iowa Nice does not apply to these groups. This congeniality is reserved for the white, the well-to-do professional, the suburbanite, not the socially demarcated ethnic other. Fanon consummately describes Iowa’s settler-descended state of being in his still essential work The Wretched of the Earth; “The settler’s town is a well-fed town, an easygoing town; its belly is always full of good things. The settlers’ town is a town of white people, of foreigners.”
“Iowa Nice” is a proclamation of the white Iowan worker’s subservience to the white ruling class. It is an affirmation that we are amicable, compliant, and patriotic members of the advantaged white stratum, separate from Latinxs, Muslim refugees, black people, and indigenous Americans, those who must necessarily be exploited, rejected, imprisoned, and pushed to the perilous fringe of society. The motto is mainly enunciated by local chamber of commerce heads, state politicians, and other well-off types as a bourgeois commandment of civility, a moral edict that just so happens to not apply to them. Observe a random resident of Waukee interact with a service worker and there’s a substantial chance one will see this sanctimony in action.
In our modern lives, it may seem like we have long passed the colonial era, but this is historically inaccurate. This state (and all of America) is still economically operating as a cruel settler enterprise. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are stigmatized as illegal laborers, black Iowans are coerced into the overarching carceral system, Muslims are deemed dangerous extremists, and Native Americans are completely erased from both history and contemporary discourse. Iowa may have been settled 172 years ago, but that does not mean the brutality has ceased.
I am aware that this article comes off as perhaps overly furious considering the superficial acknowledgement that I am assessing the connotations of a locally memetic phrase, but I must stress that I am not criticizing or really concerned with the literal meaning of “Iowa Nice.” One must delve deeper than the outward definition and investigate the sociopolitical conditions and relations that have lead to the manufacture of Iowa Nice as not just a saying, but an idiom representing a more potent, disciplining cultural force.
How do we combat Iowa Nice? Firstly, white socialist organizers, myself included, have to reckon with our class position. We are the descendants of settlers, and therefore, we have benefited from stolen wealth. This unfortunate reality has to be continually recognized in our circles. Additionally, we have to pursue inclusivity as a principal objective. Socialism is a populistic movement towards true freedom and democracy for all people, not a clique for the white intelligentsia.
And finally, with solidarity. With Iowan, national, and most importantly, international solidarity. I don’t want to just be nice to my fellow kind, I want to advance, learn, and live mutually with them. Iowa Niceness only offers agreeability between comfortable white yuppies. Solidarity offers reparation and prosperity for all.
