Feeling hatred is a given, rejecting it is a choice. It is not enough to disagree privately; we must vocally remind ourselves that every person has value, regardless of origin.
My friends from shithole countries were pretty incensed by the president’s comments last week. When I first heard his words, I stopped for a second and wondered if Egypt, my country of origin, would be considered a shithole country by his standards.
It’s safe to say that, without the pyramids, Egypt certainly would be among the brown and black countries that Trump, and many people, find inferior. But, with this designation comes a certain sense of pride because I know that immigrants will persevere despite this perception of us.
Yet, I can’t always shake the way the president’s words resonante with me when I look in the mirror. Sometimes, I do feel like I’m from a shithole country. I see violence, the restriction of freedoms and a lack of prosperity.
What I must remind myself is that every country struggles on some levels with these issues. There are historical and sociological reasons for the circumstances of each country. Although we can’t always mute self-hatred, it’s our responsibility to respond to it with positive reinforcement—both for our own sake and for others.
I thank God every day that my parents immigrated to America. Because of that, I was born in what is, for me, the greatest country in the world. However, with that blessing comes a lot of strings.
America has a way of reminding you of all the ways you’re different. This isn’t always a bad thing, and the individuality and creativity it promotes is part of what makes it great. Still, I know from personal experience how easy it is to conflate being different with being less.
A sense of belonging is not the most natural impulse when nobody in your lecture hall looks like you. It’s hard to feel heard by representatives who don’t tune in to your narrative. Caring about headlines 12 time zones away, asking your parents questions about America they don’t know the answer to; it’s part of the territory of being an immigrant.
It builds character, and I’m at peace with the difficulty of it. I believe it makes me a stronger person, more ready to raise kids here and continue the experiment of being an American.
We learn every day just how heterogeneous our society can be, and how many different walks of life can be accommodated peacefully instead of rejected violently. What it means to be American is always in contention, and our responsibility is to affect that meaning positively.
I’m not personally upset at what the president said because that’s how many people feel. I’m upset because, for a moment, I felt the inferiority that somebody else determined for me. The young immigrants who hear these remarks may feel worse about themselves, and all of us – whether we were born here or not – might fail to reassure them that these voices of self-hatred are false.
How much worse would my mom feel, as a child-arrival bullied for the food she ate and the clothes she couldn’t afford, if her president reaffirmed the negative feedback she was getting at school? Would my dad find the same success if he saw other immigrants as rivals instead of allies?
I can imagine both of them being invigorated by the president’s comments, as my friends are today. It’s not impossible to succeed in this country as a minority, but self-hatred fuels those moments of ambiguity when I question whether or not I belong here. Even though it’s unhealthy, it’s natural to question whether I can fit in and stand out at the same time.
I wouldn’t run into these feelings if I never left Egypt. But America is the greatest country in the world for me because it has potential beyond any other. America’s core values are ambitious and future-oriented; the spirit of self-improvement is woven into our flag. No country is quite like us in our melting-pot culture and our character of accommodation.
Yes, such grand visions are easy to fail, and quite often they’ve backfired horribly. It’s easy to contemplate giving up, settling for the kind of homogenous, closed-off country we’re used to reading about in history — the same country some of my neighbors crave, where everyone is from the same shithole country instead of many.
Until the moment I’m dragged off this soil, I’ll continue demonstrating my value to this country. It’s a shame that the success of immigrants is political, but it’s on us to see in ourselves and in each other that we belong here.
Andrew Mekhail can be reached at mekhail@umich.edu