My People Used To Be Not White

The headline is true — my mom’s people used to be considered less than fully white. For those who know me, this is an amusing fact. I am extremely white. Hockey is my favorite sport. I think you should act like you’ve been to the end zone before. Punk rock is my favorite music, even though I am too young to have lived through it in the moment. I think most rap is about on par with your average coffee shop poetry slam. I like both show tunes and Billy Joel — though, honestly, they might be the same thing (If you dropped Good Night Saigon into the middle of a production of Les Miz, how many in the audience would even notice? Half? Less?). I love mayonnaise. I am so white, in other words, that if I were any whiter, they would make me a member of the House GOP caucus whether I wanted the job or not.

And yet, when people from my mom’s part of the world first came to America, an entire political party sprung up to keep them out and to ensure that they remained out. In the 1920s, one of the goals of the revitalized KKK was making sure people who were raised in the same religion I was remained second class citizens. And yet, today, we are considered as white, and as American, as any one. So what’s the point?

Some on the right, led by joy vampire Stephen Miller, are arguing that some cultures cannot ever assimilate into American culture. They mean, of course, people from non-white cultures. Specifically, they mean Afghans as they attempt to use the attack on two National Guardsmen in DC (Guardsmen who should never have been in DC in the first place. The President’s wounded ego is not a justification for stationing troops in an American city) by an Afghan who had served with US troops in the war as an excuse to punish all Afghans. Putting aside the harm this does to American military (good luck getting anyone to help US troops ever again), it is entirely immoral. America is a nation of immigrants. Always has been and it always should be.

America is an ideal, not a border. People who come to this country generally already believe in those values. That is why the hardship of moving to another country is worth the effort. But even those who do not come here out of adherence ot those ideals find themselves, and their children, adopting them. American values are generally human values. People don’t want to be bullied — they want a say in ordering their lives. They don’t want to be afraid to speak their minds. They don’t want to adhere to someone else’s religion, they want to worship, or not, as they feel pulled to. They don’t want to hide who they are or who they love — they want to be free to live their life fully and openly. People are people, and the freedoms America offers are freedoms people have always valued, in every place, at every time. Claiming otherwise is just gutter racism, disproven by common sense and history.

Immigrants adopt American values. History shows us this clearly. Every group that has come to the United States has been reviled. “Rum, Rebellion and Romanism” (which, honestly, makes us sound so much more metal than we probably were) they said about my people, and now my people are held up as examples by the racists and bigots as “true” Americans. Twenty years from now, it will be true of whoever Stephen Miller and his fellow bigots are whining about today. Because Miller is wrong — America is not a place of birth. It is state of mind.