This article was cross-published with The Community Edition.
Some of my earliest memories are of Massachusetts. I cried for hours on the drive home after a week-long trip to New York City. I still spell “color” without the “u,” and when I watched this year’s Summer Olympics, I cheered Team USA despite having lived in Canada since I was four years old.
I love the Bangladeshi heritage of my parents and the Canadian culture I grew up with, but I have always seen myself returning home to the U.S. eventually. I would even argue that the plurality of my identity only makes me more American. What is America after all, if not a land of immigrants?
My feelings about being American grew more complicated as got older. I have seen how my government uses taxpayer dollars to unleash violence abroad.
I was born in Texas on Mar. 27, 2003—while my mother was holding me in her arms for the first time in the hospital, the U.S. was viciously invading Iraq.
Currently, U.S.-funded state violence helps Israel wipe out entire family lines and kill Palestinians like Rafeef Dayer— a 10-year-old in Gaza who was killed by a plane while eating lunch with her family in a garden near their home. Every time I read another headline in the news about the brutalization of another child, whether an injured bomb victim in Palestine or a child sexual assault survivor in the South forced to give birth to her rapist’s child, I wonder how on earth we got here.
Writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in this world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
It’s precisely because I care about America that I refuse to mince words when I say how disheartened and angry I feel. When I see just how many people voted for an administration that will actively endanger the environment, women, people of colour both at home and abroad, and queer folks.
Progress will not come from an institution or government, but from its people.
When I visited Minnesota last summer, I was surprised by how fast a crowd of mostly white country fans took me under their wing and invited me to dance with them. They asked me about my life in earnest and ensured I got home safe. They took me in and took good care of me.
I hardly know what to make of the fact that some of them might have voted for the same president-elect who will actively fuel violence against brown-skinned people like me.
What I do know is that, in their hearts, they are kind and decent—and that’s why I refuse to lose hope.
Donald Trump is many things, but, at his core, he is a conman. He duped America once again into believing that he can fix their financial woes even though Nobel Prize-winning economists agree that Harris’ plan for the economy was “vastly superior” to Trump’s.
Still, it is hard for me to fully blame the Southerner living in poverty who voted for Trump out of ignorance and fear. Combating evil, whether passive ignorance or outright cruelty, requires the long, soul-stirring work that goes well beyond casting a ballot.
The America I still believe in does not live within the confines of a government administration but rather in its inhabitants and the long-lasting connections formed between them in communities.
When my mother first immigrated to New York in the ‘90s, she told me that the women in her building, a French widow and a Pakistani lady, took her in and took good care of her. They went grocery shopping together and practiced English, they told stories.
We need to understand where real evil lives. It is not in one another, but in the ultra-wealthy and powerful who exploit our pains and fears so that we lash out against one another and stay divided.
America, for all its faults, was founded on a national promise to stand together against tyranny. The plaque on the Statue of Liberty is inscribed with a poem titled The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus.
“Give me your tired, your poor, /Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” the plaque reads.
I once read it as a promise. I now take it as a pledge.
The next four years ahead of us will be long and harrowing, no doubt. But these colours do not run from a fight—and neither will I.
