America “Exactly as It Is”: Representing Diversity and Inequality in the Fulbright Program

• In Event: The United States at 250: Neo-Patriotism, Propaganda, and History

Abstract

As the U.S. approaches its 250th anniversary under an administration that brands critical
discussion of racism, sexism, and oppression as false, “corrosive ideology,” questions about
what kinds of representations of the U.S. are and/or should be allowable take on a new
importance. In this paper, I examine how U.S. citizens interpret and represent the “image” of
the U.S. in the context of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Program (Fulbright), a program
currently experiencing controversy over censorship. Drawing on 99 interviews with Fulbright
alumni and program advisors, current grantees, and current applicants, I track in real time how
U.S. citizens interpret being a U.S. representative before and during President Trump’s second
administration. I find that guidelines about how to represent the U.S. are not new. Prior to
2025, Fulbright rewarded grantees’ abilities to represent diversity. How grantees approached
this depended on whether they felt they could represent diversity personally, as well as how
critical they are of structural inequality. For grantees who emphasized the U.S.’s implication in
domestic or global inequality, whether structural critique was seen as allowable by Fulbright
depended on organizational practices of local Fulbright administrators. When critique is
endorsed organizationally, grantees frame dissent as essential to U.S. identity and therefore a
positive feature of the U.S. to represent. When critique is discouraged, grantees largely
refrained from engaging in structural critique; when they do engage, it is interpreted as a part
of their own goal rather than part of U.S. cultural ambassadorship. Ongoing longitudinal
interviews with current applicants and grantees will reveal how these dynamics are changing,
but the first waves of data suggest that applicants anticipate overt censorship of ‘key words’ by
the Trump administration and frame this censorship as antithetical to Fulbright program values.

Author

• Hye Jee Kim, Stanford University