It's *Our* Party
If you have not already immersed yourself in the news of Lawrence, Kansas embracing Algeria’s World Cup team…what in the heck have you been doing???
It’s a beautiful American story that made me trust a bit more my gauzy memories of the Bicentennial, which my family experienced as brand new arrivals to the U.S. What a relief: I hadn’t completely imagined the warm embrace. Our new neighbors in Cincinnati had in fact welcomed us with open arms. And homemade brownies. (I remember my mom telling us that, to be polite, we would need to eat this tragic chocolate cake that had so obviously failed to rise.)
I’ll say it before you do: we were white South Africans. Even in today’s America, we might be welcomed. Right now, under Trump’s absurd policy, white South Africans—mainly Afrikaners—are the only “refugees” being allowed into the States.
But at the risk of sounding all hopped up on “Free To Be You and Me,” back then it wasn’t our whiteness that made us feel welcome. In elementary school and beyond, I bonded with kids from Cuba, Mexico, Iran, India, China, Korea, and the Philippines. Few immigrant kids had it easy—and most had it much harder than I did—but what I remember is this: on the country’s last big birthday, immigration was widely understood as positive, as additive.
Racism was of course alive and well—and many of my non-white friends endured cruel slurs over the years—but together we grew up within a cultural framework that very much included us. As a kid in Cincinnati, Ohio, I remember feeling not just that the U.S. tolerated immigrants; I remember feeling that immigrants were viewed as essentialto the story of America.
In 2021, when Cincinnati elected Aftab Pureval, the son of an Indian immigrant and a Tibetan refugee, to be their mayor, I, for one, was not surprised. For the place that provided my first taste of America, this wasn’t a departure; it was a logical outcome in a land—however flawed—of very real opportunity. And it was no “woke” blip: last year, on the strength of his first-term performance, Pureval won re-election, thumping none other than JD Vance’s half-brother by a margin of 78% to 22%.
This is just to say: as you celebrate America’s 250th this weekend—and I hope you do!—don’t let this president tell you where we’ve been, who we are, or where we’re going. Both in this moment and as we work to shape the next 250, that’s ours to decide.
Image: My dad, my brother, and me atop The Empire State Building. My mom snapped the pic. If Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America” is not automatically playing in your head as you look at this photo, here’s a link.
(For more from me on the magnificent Twin Towers—captured in the background—here’s a short piece from years and years ago.)
