Where They From?
Here is something I wrote much earlier this year but still applies to our daily reality of living in this era of sudden forgetfulness of the American Dream.
Where They From? (with apologies to Missy Elliott)
January 17, 2018
In the week before Martin Luther King Day, the sitting president* of the United States made a disparaging remark about who he believed should be allowed to immigrate to the United States. Launching a controversy that has played out in the news for days, he called the countries of Haiti, El Salvador, and the entire continent of Africa “shithole countries,” meaning they are poor and produce desperate and undesirable people who he believes are unfit for American residency or future citizenship. In the same meeting, he named Norway as a country whose people would be welcome to settle in the United States.
It was around this time that the president* also was reported to have lied about his own ethnic heritage. While it is well known that his mother was an immigrant from Scotland who worked as a domestic servant in the United States, it is less well-known that his father was descended from Germans. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in these facts. But the president* so admires the people and culture of Sweden, and probably the lack of melanin in Sweden, that he has for many years and in one of his (ghost-written) books claimed to have Swedish heritage.
In the same period, there was also a report of the president* asking an intelligence analyst where “your people” were from. When she replied “New York,” he was unsatisfied, and she specified “Manhattan.” The question he was really trying to ask was which Asian country did her ancestors come from, and when he finally heard “Korea,” he wondered why “the pretty Asian lady” from the job was working on a deal with Pakistan on behalf of the United States because she would more useful in negotiations with North Korea. I guess we should count our blessings that he assumed that her Korean background didn’t disqualify her for negotiations with Korea because he imagined that she might have misplaced loyalties.
“Where are you from?” is also the conversation opener and dog-whistle of John Lithgow’s Trump-like character Doug Strutt in the 2017 film “Beatriz at Dinner.” This is after he has mistaken Beatriz (Salma Hayak), a Mexican-American massage therapist, for a waitress and asked her to refill his drink. The wealthy mogul Strutt has come to a dinner with real estate business associates and underlings and is surprised to find a stranger there who is unlike like his business associates and their wives. When Beatriz tells him she is from Mexico, he immediately asks if she came to the United States legally. It is an awkward moment, and one that anyone who is not white or has a foreign accent has likely faced. However, as many of us know, the people who feel like they need to ask you these questions right away can make you uncomfortable, even when they mean well. And Strutt does not mean well. Asking Beatriz if she is in the United States legally is his way of asserting dominance in the situation. The subtext is that he is checking to see if she is a criminal or another kind of freeloader, taking away resources that his tax dollars support. The other dinner guests allow Strutt this casually racist remark because he is their boss and therefore allowed to be coarse and because they probably wonder too how she came to America and why she is among them, eating gourmet food in a mansion near the ocean.
The question “where are you from” can also connote a friendly, old-fashioned opening introduction, as the president*’s supporters claim is the case. My grandparents and mother would ask or be asked that question in gatherings in the Midwest, which would lead to pleasantries about the differences between the local foods, weather, and ethnic communities in Western Wisconsin vs. Eastern Minnesota, Illinois, or the Dakotas. As an elderly former boss of mine in Minneapolis joked in the early 1990s, a “mixed marriage” used to be considered one between a Norwegian and a Swede. As I understand it from movies about New York and friends who grew up in cities, “where are you from” can connote something between wondering whether a “West Side Story” or “Godfather” kind of tension between tribes will ensue, or a way to know what kind of person you’re talking to-a Long Islander presumed to be greatly different from someone from Queens or the Bronx or Brooklyn. It’s part of what Missy Elliot is getting at in her 2015 song WTF (Where They From) and why rappers sing praises to their neighborhoods or declare rivalries with natives of other parts of the city or the other coast of the country.
In a tweet thread that went viral over the weekend, former Obama staffer Gary Lee wrote about the meaning of the president greeting him in his parents’ native Korean language, and the deep meaning and kindness of such a gesture because of the respect it showed about his parents’ immigration and struggles in America and about the fact that their son was working in the White House and leaving for a Fullbright Scholarship in Korea. It was encouragement and a gesture of inclusion, particularly coming from the nation’s first African American president.
Growing up in the Upper Midwest in the 1970s and 1980s, my elderly grandparents (a “mixed marriage” of sorts because one was German-American and the other one was Swedish-American) socialized with other old folks that the president would now declare to be ideal candidates for America as he envisions it. They and their friends were born in the United States, but many of their parents had been immigrants. My Swedish grandfather’s father came to the United States in his mid-teens, near the turn of the 20th century, leaving Sweden on a boat to avoid indentured servitude, the lot of poor children in those days. He married a farmer’s daughter and continued to farm. The elderly Norwegians’ parents came to the United States for a better chance at earning a living and had worked as maids and mechanics. They all lived frugally, worked hard, and moved up in terms of social class. They kept speaking bits of their language even in old age and were proud of their native countries, even though their families had hard live there. Like the president’s mother, who came as a teenager from Scotland and worked as a maid, their economic betters in Wisconsin probably looked down on them at the same time as they needed their work. But even in those days of American robber barons and rampant child labor, there was never an American president who referred in an official meeting to places where poor newcomers originated as “shithole countries.”
My father fled from an impoverished childhood in China, where he worked as a child in a tobacco factory, during the Revolutionary War, to Taiwan, where he continued to be poor. He came to the United States as a graduate student in engineering, after serving in the Taiwan military. Like many of the foreign students and young professionals coming to the United States now from African, Caribbean, Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, he earned coveted positions in Midwestern American universities because of his high grades and exceptional promise. Both the neighborhood where he was born and the one where he spent his adolescence were poor and filled with other poor families. As much as his poor childhood made him yearn for prosperity and success, and as much as he probably experienced racism in America, he would balked at staying in a country where the official line was that he and people who looked like him came from “shithole countries.”
Even when I was growing up in the 1980s, being asked in my Wisconsin hometown “where are you from?” felt like a loaded question. I believe that 99 percent of the time, the questions were meant to show kind and polite interest. But as a native English speaker with a Midwestern accent, I knew that “where are you from” means was code for “You’re not from here, really, because otherwise you would look like me. What race are you?” (In those days “ethnicity” was probably only a word in sociology textbooks.)
It’s hard to characterize all the ways in which calling where our immigrants come from “shithole countries” are damaging, disrespectful, and show no understanding of the reasons people leave their home countries. It’s damaging to our relationships with other countries and in the long run, could put American citizens traveling abroad at risk. It’s ignorant of the entire history of the United States and callous in the extreme to the individuals who have risked lives and left difficulties and often brutal circumstances to come to our country and who often continue to struggle here for many years.
There are people on all parts of the political spectrum who have been talking, often braying, about the need for civility and the damage of partisan rhetoric and the idea that in conflicts like the 2017 white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville “both sides” had fine people as well as a share of the blame. But I don’t think a lot of the people saying these things really think about what respect for others looks like. It’s listening, sure. It’s also being truthful about where we are from and where “our people” are from, and understanding that “our people’s” reasons for leaving home and their struggles in their new country are no different from anyone else’s. And respect is also about paying attention to the ways that the ones we call “our people” now are helping or making matters worse, instead of turning away as if we don’t see or have no power to challenge them.
* I use this notation that Charles Pierce uses in his essays in Esquire magazine because for a lot of reasons, I think that this shameful administration deserves an asterisk
