American Citizenship Is Not Whites-Only
I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, a town nationally famous for its laid-back, liberal mindset. Even there other kids weren’t afraid to tell me to go back to Africa. I spent years wondering why some of my classmates wanted to slingshot me back to the slave-trading swath of Africa’s west coast, before I realized that taunt for what it was: An attempt to tell me, a native Wisconsinite whose ancestors have lived in this country for hundreds of years, that I was too dark to truly be American.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump told Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—four American freshman congresswomen of color—to “go back” to the “crime-infested” and “corrupt” countries where they came from. Yet somehow he found time last year to encourage Norwegians to immigrate here, because they weren’t from what he considers to be “shithole countries”: majority-black nations like Haiti and those in Africa.
Trump’s taking the same tack that racists have for hundreds of years in this country: deciding that American citizenship is only for white people. We have a long history of this, from the 3/5ths Compromise to the Trail of Tears to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese American internment camps to the 1920’s deportations of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent to Mexico to the border camps Trump’s filling with brown people today. Racists love to wake up in the morning and decide that born heres, naturalized citizens, permanent residents and migrants who come in colors they don’t like aren’t American or have no right to become American. But racism doesn’t tell us who’s American. It just tells us who’s racist.
The Fourteenth Amendment tells us who’s American: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” The slaves who built the White House. The Chinese-Americans who put together the railroads. The Japanese-Americans and Central and South Americans who brought expertise and innovation to our farming industry. The Native Americans who taught us the land. But people of color don’t need a laundry list of achievements to be American. We have a national tradition of allowing in immigrants of all backgrounds, dragging people here via chill means like the Middle Passage, where African slaves were crammed onto boats to be traded for stuff like knives and sugar assuming they stayed alive, or allowing people to resettle in our country because they’d endured wars so devastating that we tried to right things by opening our doors (just ask the Vietnamese). As a descendant of slaves, I’m American because some white slave owners demanded I be.
From being born in the United States to getting a job in one of our states to asking our government for refuge, people of color have been and will always be Americans. We are the country of “bring me your tired, your hungry, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and though we haven’t always lived up to that ideal, this is a great time to fight for it.
Trump’s insistence that those four American congresswomen find some other country to go “home” to is another tired argument that non-white Americans don’t belong here. We Americans of color do belong here, and we always have. We’re just as American as everyone else, whether we’re inventing a computer or painting a masterpiece or engaging in the most traditional American activity of eating our weight in barbecue potato chips. And this is an era where we can’t afford to let anyone decide that we’re not. Between the existence of the border camps, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s history of detaining people of color indefinitely regardless of citizenship status, and Trump’s attacks on 14th Amendment birthright citizenship, the president has been clear. It’s not just that he doesn’t believe that Americans of color don’t count, it’s that he wants to yank Americanness out of our grasp, like a rope in tug-of-war. So his comments weren’t just comments. They were a reminder that Americans of color should always be prepared to defend our Americanness before we’re officially not allowed to be American anymore.
Kashana Cauley is a television writer and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and her writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone. You can find her on Twitter @kashanacauley.
Originally Appeared on GQ
