Race, immigration, stories about the people of color and immigrants have been brimming my reading list for the past few months. Is it because the current state the country prompts more writers to write about these subjects, consequently these books make frequent appearances on the reading radar of the public? Or is it because as a person color I am drawn more and more towards these subjects to understand the present state of affairs?
Or is it because it is my current special interest topic? Hurtling down the rabbit holes of some peculiar topic which is of no interest to anyone else comes to me naturally. I have devoured pages on reincarnation and biology and diligently followed Dr. Ian Stevenson, consuming every bit of his research and documentation on life after life. Before Netflix started making a killing out of true crime, there was a period when I was reading up everything I could find on serial killers and social deviants. Maybe race, racism, immigrants and life stories of people of color might be my new interest. Will have to see how long will this phase last.
While on the topics of race and immigrants in the US, I recently finished reading Laila Lalami's Conditional Citizens. Lalami was born in Morocco, educated in Rabat and London before finally earning her PhD from University of Southern California, Los Angles in Linguistics. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction and she currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Conditional Citizens is a collection of essays on the subject of American identity and citizenship from a non-white immigrant's perspective. Lalami's definition of conditional citizens (in America mostly) goes like this, they are,
- people whose rights the state finds expendable in the pursuit of white supremacy
- policed and punished more harshly than others by the state
- not guaranteed the same electoral representation as others
- more likely to be
expatriated or de-naturalized.
- living in a terrible reality that their relationship to the state is at least partly determined by the color of their skin, nature of their creed, their gender identity or their national origin.
She gives plenty of examples from history and contemporary scenes played out in the US of A as to how a constitution written by white men for white men has been instrumental in trampling the rights of all the conditional citizens of this country in its pursuit for white supremacy. If you are interested some of the examples she gives that can be explored further through Wikipedia are - Slave Bible published in 1807 (a special edition of Bible printed for use by plantation owners to preach to their slaves omitted mention of Israelites’ flight from slavery in Egypt as well as other references to freedom), Bhagat Singh Tind, Expatriation Act of 1907, Richard Nixon's war on drugs launched in 1971 and escalated by successive administrations, United States creating the largest prison industrial complex in the world and other such supporting evidence.
NOTE: Direct quotes from Lalami's book are in italics
Lalami gives a great explanation of the term white privilege - "White privilege doesn’t mean that white people have easy lives – it simply means that whiteness does not make their lives harder. Blackness by contrast has a statistically measurable and negative effect on the outcome of individual efforts in employment, housing and education."
She also dissects the so-called assimilation required of the (non-white) immigrants - "after a period of time, which usually lasted several decades, each group of immigrants was judged to have successfully integrated into the mainstream and become hyphenated: Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans. Because assimilation revolves around power, however, descendants of white immigrants typically skip the hyphenation and are simply referred to as Americans.
.....the settlers didn’t assimilate to indigenous tribes, learn their languages, and adapt to their cultural customs. It was the Natives who assimilated, coercively and violently into the settler’s culture. The same government that wanted to conform indigenous people to white society worked hard t ensure that enslaved people could not be assimilated. In southern states, a slew of laws made it illegal for whites to teach slaves or freedmen how to read."
There are also other essays in the book that touches on topics like Barack Obama, Christine Blasey Ford and the Opioid Epidemic. Some relevant passages are below.
ON OBAMA : Many white people saw in him only figments of their imagination. White liberals treated him like another MLK., a savior who would deliver the nation from any and all ills. Shepard Fairey’s Hope poster is perhaps the purest expression of this view. White conservatives, meanwhile, though of him as a young Malcolm X, a radical who would never compromise on anything. Neither perspective quite captured the fact that Obama was first and foremost a skilled politician, successful at the art of the possible.
ON CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD : When a woman, a citizen of the republic raises her voice against a man who is being considered for a position as chief interpreter of the laws of the republic, she is met by senators who tell her she must be mistaken. A man’s story is seen as inherently more authentic than a woman’s story. It is disbelief that under-girds the question: Why didn’t she report him sooner?
....this is a very old trope about the value about the value of a woman’s word and it can be traced back to foundational texts. Under Athenian law women could not be litigants, and if they had cases to put forward they were to be represented by Men. Jewish law mandates that only men can serve as witnesses in court. Although women were among the earliest followers of Jesus, the apostle Paul counseled that women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission. And the Qur’an advises that in case of legal conflict, two men should be brought as witnesses, but if there are not two men available then a man and two women from those whom you accept as witnesses so that if one of the women errs, then the other can remind her.
ON THE OPIOID EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA : The opioid epidemic in today’s rural white communities is being treated very differently from the crack epidemic in urban black communities in the 1980s. Back then the state’s response was to expand the police presence and to pass draconian criminal legislation like three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentencing. An entire generation of black men and women was sent to prison for substance abuse. Nowadays, though, the government’s approach to opioid addiction is to treat it as a public health issue, with state politicians asking federal funding for drug treatment and counseling. This is a good development – drug addition should be treated as a disease, but the different response only serves as evidence that despite the fact Donald Trump disturbed the silence on whiteness, white Americans can still largely escape the disadvantages of race.
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