Nobody Saw How Things Are Different.
I moved away 30 years ago.
I left behind friends and family and I went on to a place that became my new home. I became a mother and a wife, created my own family, surrounded myself with new friends. I had to learn to deal with a lot of people, much more aggressive driving, and accents from virtually every country on the planet.
I chose to live here not because it was my favorite place in the world. In fact, I was just stopping here on my way to a beach, somewhere warm and sunny. I didn’t even know that wherever I landed, I would stay.
I’d read, long ago, that someday white people would be the minority in the United States. I looked around me then and found it hard to believe that it would be possible. Then I moved here and my very white kids were the minority in their schools. I could hardly believe it when, one day, I looked around and thought: Huh. They really are the minority.
But they weren’t the minority in every school.
Back in my old hometown, life went on as usual. The same people lived in the same houses and all the families knew all the other families and the neighbors knew their neighbors because everyone had lived in the same town for the entirety of time.
There were no jobs in my hometown, so it didn’t attract anyone from outside. Few people moved into Pittsburgh. People who needed to work and couldn’t make do with what little was available … those people moved away.
So all the people in my hometown, and all the people in the tiny towns in Indiana and Iowa and Alabama, all those people just stuck around where they were, living the lives they always lived. They didn’t get to know any new people. Their kids went to school with all the other white kids and a handful of other ethnicities and their lily white hallways stayed pretty much the same.
Nobody moved, so nobody saw how things are different elsewhere.
In the places where things are different, where not everyone looks the same and not everyone acts the same and cultures are all stirred together in one giant pot, there is acceptance of the differences between people. There is a ton of acceptance, because there is nothing else in the world that can happen when your child comes home and says they’re new best friend is the most wonderful person in the world and you don’t find out for a month that the new best friend’s parents actually speak a different language in their home.
As a parent, you don’t say, “You can’t hang out with your new best friend anymore because they don’t speak English.” Because who cares if they don’t speak English? The new friend is a friend and there are loads of new friends to be found. And we find them here, everywhere, because friends are constantly moving in and moving out and moving around and exploring new places and discovering new things and sharing when they return, or sending emails when they don’t return, about how awesome it is in places where everyone just accepts everyone else for who they are and what they do and nobody questions what the other person looks like.
Sometimes, after 30 years of living here, I have to think, “Oh right, English isn’t their first language.” Or I have to recall, “Oh right, she’s probably been discriminated against because of the color of her skin.” Then I have to think: “What color is her skin again?” Because I’ve forgotten. Because what I know is the soul of the person, my friend, not that my friend is different than me. I see only the similarities.
But when I go back to my hometown, all of my white family and friends are still pointing out the differences. They’re angry because they have this phantom vision of what’s going on in the world. They believe:
The immigrants are taking jobs from the white people.
The government money that could have been given to me during my time of need was instead given to someone who snuck into this country illegally.
Working hard has gotten me nowhere, in a town where no new jobs ever open, and all I see are other people who feel exactly the same way as I do – so the government must be to blame.
People are trying to take from me all the things I have rightfully earned by working in a factory, or at a farm, or in a store, or as a truck driver, a teacher, a waiter. I’m going to lose everything because the immigrants are taking it all.
Yet the immigrants are just … different. And they don’t live anywhere near the people who work in the factory, or at the farm, or in the restaurant. The immigrants are mostly shoved into poverty stricken neighborhoods where they are desperately trying to feed their families and keep them sheltered and give them a chance at a life.
Many of the immigrants I know came into this country legally and learned how to speak English fluently and then, after much studying and hard work, took a test to become a U.S. citizen – and passed. They embody everything that is beautiful about the United States of America: they knew they were welcome here and that if they worked hard, they could be part of this welcoming community we call a country.
But the fear of the unknown has overwhelmed the places where nothing has changed. Whites are desperately afraid that somehow they will lose themselves if they are not the majority. They have the most increasingly irrational fears as they age that the world is spinning out of their control and that they will somehow, as simpleton white folk, lose all their rights if others are allowed to have rights, too.
The men, especially, seem to be terrified that the women will no longer nightly make their dinners, that their children will become transgendered and/or homosexual, and that the government will somehow destroy any modicum of dignity they found in being straight, white and male by funding solar energy.
It’s completely and utterly out of control.
And also, I get it. Nobody wants to lose what they believe is rightfully theirs.
But those of us who are here and who have had to deal with the extreme inconvenience of having to notice that the signs on the subway are sometimes only in Spanish … well, we haven’t lost anything. We’ve been living this way for decades and we have lost exactly none of our dignity. And we are living right here. We are living right in the heart of the city where a man with thick a African accent converses with a woman with a thick German accents over some Pho or curry or tabbouleh. We are living right in the midst of a city where lesbians have wandered arm in arm past a transgendered man who nobody even knows was once a woman, and our children have seen it. And they haven’t even noticed.
We have not only lost nothing; we have gained everything. We have gained the ability to see what life is like when accepting one another for what’s on the inside. We have discovered the beauty of brown and white eggs in the same basket. We know that living this way is not a contagion or a disease, that it won’t rob us of our souls to be near it, that we won’t lose our jobs or our government funding because we’re giving to people who came from somewhere else.
We have gained everything.
And nobody who has never moved has gained anything except fear.
And because there is no logic to counteract fear, those who care more about themselves and their hard-earned money than they do about anyone outside of their circle … those people are going to continue to lose their dignity without even knowing that it’s happening.
Because they’ve chosen to stay in a cocoon, they will never know that their fear has rendered them incapable of seeing the truth. They will continue to believe the lies.
And they will fight hard to hang onto those lies, even as the lies disintegrate in front of their faces.
And apparently, I will just continue to watch that happen because nobody will believe me that these are lies, that it’s all fear, that the raging and ranting and screaming and fighting and shooting are just expressions of that fear.
It’s all fear.
And my fear is that we will completely destroy ourselves – our inner souls – because of that fear, the one that’s being constantly stoked by the current administration.
We. Will. Destroy. Ourselves.
Why do I have to be here and watch this happen? What can I do to make it stop?
I am powerless. I will pray.