“Headphones in, eyes up, and keep walking forward.”
This was the advice my parents gave to me before I made my first trip into the city alone.
I had a plan: exit from Port Authority, turn left, walk down a few blocks, and do not talk to anyone. When I arrived at Penn Station I would meet up with my friend, and if I got lost I would find a police officer. I hummed this mantra in the back of my mind, following each step and instruction to a tee. I was hurrying down the street when I heard it.
“Go Back to your Country!”
I could not believe what I had just heard. It felt as though the Earth had fallen out from under me, or as if every last bit of air had been pulled from my lungs. I stood there in shock, only returning to reality after a stranger pushed me aside.
I convinced myself that it was just one angry man taking his frustrations out on me, that it would never happen again. But then it did, only a few months later.
I have grown up with stories about my family’s experiences with xenophobia, and have seen my brothers and sisters, analogous in struggle, fall victim to verbal assault through viral Instagram clips. I have watched my loved ones carry their trauma around like open wounds, and have witnessed my government pass legislation to damage immigrants until they’re broken-hearted and battered. I know of the hate that permeates the thread of American society, but I never thought that I would be “Un-American” enough to be targeted. I was born in this country, as were my parents, and my grandparents have lived here for most of their lives. We are what it means to be a nuclear family, as American as football and apple pie.
I have come to realize that true citizenship is not in the eye of the law, but in that of the beholder. That even though we are a nation of immigrants, there is still a standard to which we all judge “Americanism.” I have seen it in my grandparents, who practiced English until their mother tongue felt foreign, and pulled on scratchy clothing in the name of conformity.
It is impossible to know how it feels to be deemed irrelevant, unimportant, and less than by a stranger until it has happened to you. To be immediately appraised based on appearance and told to leave this country never to return is a feeling that no person should experience–a psychological torture that brands your skin and twists your stomach. Yet, it happens. It happens to the people who do not have the luxury of being born American, to the people who don’t wear Western clothing, or whose accent is a little too thick. It happens to all who dare to diverge, to those who do not fit the cookie-cutter molds, and defy societal norms. But I’m just a teenage girl living in Mountain Lakes. How could I ever dismantle the fundamental prejudices of countless Americans?
Frankly, I don’t know, but I do know one thing: all whose hearts are heavy with hate will never prevail. I have hope that the greatest nation on Earth can stand together with all of our uniquenesses, and love one another until that man’s hate becomes an infinitesimal blip in a sea of harmonious differences.
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