Today, my heart is heavy.
Facebook notifications flash across my screen, my phone buzzes incessantly with urges from Twitter, NBC, Snapchats of people happy and sad and traumatized and euphoric.
You have newly elected representatives. Find out who represents you!
Today, my heart is heavy.
Growing up with skin that looks like mine, you fear the world. How could you not? The world tells you that you are not enough from the moment you are able to understand it. You’re barely a person; in fact, you exist solely as an unplanned and unwanted variation from the whitewashed norm. A genetic accident, as it were. Everything about you is inauthentic: your name, your hair, your clothes, the things you like, and the things you don’t: you’re the cheap knockoff being sold on the streets of Manhattan on cold winter nights, just outside the glow and warmth of the store that sells the originals.
I grew up thinking that I would never be good enough. What was the point? If my brown skin could slide off of my body as easily as a snake’s, it would pile up on either side of me in the shape of a ball and chain. My bones would eventually snap, too weak and too frail and lacking the proper nutrition to make mobility possible.
I have wonderful parents.
Beautiful, strong, resilient people.
Beautiful, strong, resilient immigrants.
Imagine a little girl, dark skin and dark hair and dark eyes staring at her mom who’s crouching in front of her and her sister on the kitchen floor so she can look them in the eyes:
You are American.
You are American.
You are American.
One of the most important lessons of my childhood was that I was one hundred percent, without a doubt, American. I was born in this country and I am a citizen of this country and no one could ever take that away from me. No matter how many, “Yeah, but like, where are you from?”s I got, the answer would have to be here. I am from here because I was born here. I am a brand new line of American citizenship and I shouldn’t have to wait decades and decades before it becomes valid. I was taught that in this country, I would be discriminated against. Things would be harder for me. My skin color meant that my intelligence would be contested, that my society would never consider me “beautiful”, that my talents and achievements were not products of my own hard work and practice but happy accidents. Every single day, every moment, every time something that you want is taken from you or challenged, there’s a forceful whisper: You are American.
It comes with a sense of entitlement, don’t you think? I deserve to be here and I deserve this and I deserve to be treated such and such way because I am American and isn’t that what America stands for?
I’m not a political person. I don’t care for it much and I choose to rely on faith in my God over the mishaps of man’s political agenda, but today I woke up to a world that confirmed all of my childhood fears. I woke up to a world screaming, screaming, screaming:
You. Are. Not. Good. Enough.
You are not welcome here.
We never wanted this, and now, we have the chance to fix it.
This is what I understand of today’s politics. This is what I understand of our democracy. I see progress being scraped off, nails screeching against chalkboards, pulling with them any sort of development I had hoped this country had made in regards to race relations, in regards to equality and acceptance and coexistence. Not because of what will happen, no, but because of what this entire situation has exposed about the state of this country right now.
As someone who truly believes in positivity and goodness, as someone who enjoys being hopeful, I am shocked. I am unsettled. But I am not done. We, as a country, are not done.
