So I came across this article and it gave me enough thoughts to write this out. Criticism is welcome.

History matters. A simply enough concept but one whose ramifications are frequently misinterpreted or even dismissed. But it does matter, in ways we often fail to see. I will not use the language David Brooks used to talk about the emergence of a more heterogeneous America. What I will say is that he is correct in his observation that America is no longer the receptacle for Europe’s masses. And yet I outright reject any assertion that our nation will proceed into a more diverse future without a serious recalibration in our national culture about our social expectations of newcomers but also our understanding of ourselves as a supposed nation of immigrants. So I must ask you, David Brooks and the millions of other Americans who agree with the heart of both of your sentiments to please complicate your analysis.

A couple weeks ago, I received a letter from a distant relative who had finally sat down and written our family history, as far as he could of course. The names that appeared on those pages are not well documented, believe me when I have sought them out. In contrast, they are names that have survived as long as they lived in the mouths and minds of others. Mouths that moved only in laughter, prayer or anguish; minds preoccupied with daily survival and a maintenance of some remnant of order. There is no Ellis Island for these people, and that is important for a seemingly obvious reason. America is a land of desirable immigrants.

Now what does desirable mean in this case? Flashback to the nation’s first naturalization law enacted in 1790. The required traits of potential citizens as free white persons of moral character should not be lost on any American today. America has grown into a conglomeration of former European holdings with closed legal doors to anyone not white. But of course there are Americans that have been here for generations that would never be mistaken for white. My ancestors were some of them, along with the millions of enslaved Africans and their descendants. As are the ancestors of the millions of modern day Indians that reside within the country’s borders. So we started off as a nation of indigenous refugees, African slaves and European migrants. It isn’t a welcoming depiction of America’s roots.

And yet, all three of these groups have closely defined and gated for fear of subverting what many of our populace, educated or not, thought it to be the preservation of a racial hierarchy. Nativists have been a vocal part of this coalition for white supremacy since our nation’s earliest days, and I would be lying to think that our existence of an Eurocentric society doesn’t color some of the modern day opinions held about our transformation into a browner America. Now to those Twitter warriors you talked about, I agree that new immigrants will not acquire the same national identity of immigrant waves before them. But that is because these new waves are less likely to agree with our cultural beliefs of white supremacy or the inferiority of other groups, themselves included in those labeled subordinate.

The borders of whiteness, blackness and indigeneity have never been as simple as looks. All were created as political terms and continue to be. So when we see people like Elizabeth Warren identifying as Indian or Kathleen Cleaver identify as black, one must step back and question what those words mean to different people. Millions of Africans and Indians lie in the family trees of white Americans but one must be clear that this fact isn’t just due to colorblindness. Our nation as a former colony expanding its territory and as a former slaveholding society are prominent reasons for this. The parity of interracial relationships was a matter of freedom or enslavement. To be born of a free white woman and an African would ensure the emancipation on any children conceived from that union and all descendants forward. The slant in these interactions even today remains largely between white men and other races of women at rates multiple times higher than what could be explained through straightforward demographics. I won’t say anything anymore about these couples, only that it may be a good idea to interrogate the means through which our nation has become more racially ambiguous. Ambiguous is the word, and I will state it here that any hope of being post-racial is generations away from today. We can have hope for such a future. However, it would be the equivalent of our country relearning how to walk and talk at such a fundamental level that I don’t believe we as a people would be able to sustain it. I won’t probe your examples of Japan and Turkey too much, but it must be restated that we will have to seek our own unique past to this goal, shaped by our history and our agreement on what all Americans should be entitled to. Turkey exists today as the heir of not only the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires but also a crossroads of Eurasia for more than a thousand years. The ethnic coexistence of its citizens was allowed, encouraged and reaffirmed and in empires and rulers long since passed. On the other hand, Japan has an extensive isolationist and imperialist history that has not only alienates many of its ethnic minorities but also its neighbors such as South Korea and China.

But I digress. A better example to study in order to get where we want to be is Brazil, but as a guide to avoid. Its self-image as a racial democracy are greatly exaggerated, and this is very clear within its preparation for the World Cup and protests against the billions spent on new stadiums rather than education or health care. It is a society that has also promoted itself as a nation of immigrants from Europe as well as Asia and the Levant. It too is a society that says that race doesn’t matter, and the only color that people care about is green – or the various colors reais banknotes come in. But any cursory study of Brazilian institutions reveal the same pattern, white citizens on the top and black and brown citizens on the bottom. In its government, cities, schools, work force and prisons, this holds true, and it should be very familiar for Americans to see.

How is such a society created? Through conscious advertising that race does not exist legally and unconscious and unchecked racism socially. And that cognitive dissonance of recognizing racism as a ubiquitous practice in our country but a complacency within most of us to not acknowledge the many racist ideas we are fed nor to disarm their power. But while I agree that a more diverse country may make it harder to ensure government spending on key issues, I don’t think that is the prominent cause for our current misgivings for federal spending. America has a low threshold for what it believes its citizens should be entitled to, lower than almost all its Western peers and lower than a few in the global south. A stable access to healthy food, good housing, adequate health care and a quality education has been a hard bargain for our political system to agree to. It still is. These ideas of what citizens are should be entitled to also carry over to the concessions immigrants are expected to fulfill in order to peacefully acclimate themselves to their new home. Concessions that often require rather little of the country receiving them.

To which I must clearly come back to the construction of who is seen as white and who is not. I have held off talking about the history of white immigrants and there should be no hidden meanings inferred from this. The path to becoming white was an arduous and violent task, not in bloodshed by them, but in the forcefulness with which many separated themselves from the cultures of their homelands. Anglicizing names or changing them altogether, isolating children from their ancestral languages and denouncing religious beliefs can all be traumatizing when they are not completely voluntary but instead decisions specifically made to allow the assimilation and opportunities of future generations of family. Truly, American perceptions of multiculturalism rest of a selectivity of being temporarily exotic but not too foreign. Feel free to practice your spiritual beliefs hidden from view unless you’re a Christian, then be as vocal as you please. Feel free to cook whatever you want from the old country but I don’t want to hear you speak your mother tongue because that would be too foreign. The assimilationist, rather than the accomodationist nature of American naturalization has some tangible effects on our outlook on the rest of the world. For a nation of immigrants, we have a large blind spot of politics and cultures outside of our own. It pervades our often condescending interactions with the rest of the world.

America’s future as a demographically evolving society rests on its ability to finally eradicate racism, legally and socially. Intermarriage and other tactics that hope to alleviate racial bias by making it harder to differentiate races make an essential distortion of what racism is. The future source of our immigration pool securely lies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Just making personal relationships more accessible between different races won’t cut it because racism is not about just hurting the feelings of others. Despite black people living next to white people for hundreds of years, that hasn’t necessarily encouraged them to be any more vocal in the expansion of their civil rights. Rather, it is necessary to strip the means available to wield power over other groups of people. Our perceptions of immigrants as quiet, hard-working people, says as much about their work ethic as it does the many ways we as a society silence their worries and concerns of whether the American dream exists for them. An invisible existence is often the preferable choice to being a visible but persecuted reality. And yet that goes against the core of our vision of what a participatory democracy is.

Whatever nationalism that could to unite our country, our current form will not suffice. A national identity that revolves around its presence of a military power, or as the wealthiest country in the world are not traits to be all that proud of, especially if those truths come from the exploitation of the people we want to come here. History matters and when we commit ourselves to unpacking and addressing it, I may be able to express the same optimism you do about our future as an immigrant nation. But until that happens, I ask that you please complicate your analysis.