Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

One of my main fears during the Trump administration was that Trumpism would outlast Trump. Frankenstein's monster had escaped the lab and turned on its masters. Hate and fear still sell. They work. They feed a 24/7 news cycle. They prey on rage and pain and ignorance and loss. They have a fertile playground. All hate needs is a new host, a new avatar, someone who is more polished, more competent, less prone to gaffes, and not compromised by debt or self-destructive tendencies. We all have to rise up together and stop this because it will affect our present and future generations.

I compared Obama to an Etch A Sketch. You could impose upon him whatever you wanted. He was your American dream. That was the beauty of the hope and change message emblazoned on his face. He was the promise of what America could be and become for everyone if the nation overcame its racism and cruelty. A scrawny kid born to a Muslim Kenyan father and a white mother, who grew up in Indonesia, ate biryani with his Pakistani roommate in college, and graduated from Harvard Law School, ended up being one of the most beloved politicians in the modern era and the most powerful man in the world. Maybe a Pakistani kid could become president? If America voted for Obama twice, then why not our kids? That was the power of Obama. He allowed the nation to imagine "What If?

If we analyze white supremacy from the philosophical lens of Star Wars, then it is all the Sith Lords, the Empire, and the First Order commanded by the Dark Side of the Force. It wants to dominate and impose its will on all galaxies, even those far, far away. Let’s just call this insidious force THE WHITENESS. The Whiteness’s ability to inspire fear and anger is so strong that it corrupted many well-​intentioned people, including people of color, to vote for an incompetent vulgarian in 2016 and 2020. It deludes many liberal and “moderate” whites into believing that they are the “good” ones who are committed to social justice as they talk about white privilege but never actually give up any of it. Still, they’ll have these discussions about racial equality with their white friends in establishments with white patrons from white neighborhoods—​without including the rest of us. The Whiteness has always played for all the marbles. It’s not interested in diplomacy, a representative government, free and fair elections, equitable pay, and a delicious buffet of meals from a multitude of countries. It needs a border wall, a Muslim Ban, and affirmative action for wealthy white students at Yale University. It’s a system, a structure, a paradigm, an ideology whose ultimate goal is domination and submission by any means necessary.

The wealth gap between America's richest and poorest families has doubled in the past thirty years. If the systems don't reform, they will eventually collapse under the weight of their corruption or be torn down by masses who will rightfully view them only as architects of their oppression.

You don't have to be a super soldier like Captain America or infused with photon energy like Captain Marvel to make an impact. In fact, deferring to a solitary hero or leader to save us from all our problems brings us authoritarians and strongmen. We tap out, wait on the sidelines, and outsource all the work. When people come together around shared values, investing their time and talents to create solutions to a problem, that's when movement and change happen.

In fact, I've yet to encounter anyone in America who has openly admitted to being a racist. Nothing is more offensive to an American than being called a racist. We'll forgive you sooner for punching our mother in the throat or kicking our beloved puppy in the face. Even white supremacists don't consider themselves to be racist. They're just "racial realists" or "American Identitarians" who believe in preserving the purity of the white identity.

Historically, whenever Black people and people of color made progress in America, the demons of white rage would rise with a fury to choke and wrestle this country back to 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It was inevitable that Obama's election would unleash and invigorate the same malevolent forces that had always existed and corrupted America's promise for the rest of us. I knew it. Many people of color knew it and lived it. Even Obama knew it.

In America, communities of color have always put our "economic anxieties" second to placate the economic anxieties of "real Americans" from the "Rust Belt." We just pray and hope they will do the right thing and vote for a qualified candidate who doesn't want to put babies in camps. Sometimes it works, and other times we get Trump. If we are to be honest with ourselves, the group that has historically always played identity politics is white voters, and the rest of us have been hijacked by their rage, fear, and anxiety. Theirs are the grievances of "regular Americans from the heartland." When we voice our concerns, we are "playing the race card," engaging in victimhood, not pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, abusing political correctness, and enforcing cancel culture and affirmative action.

If President Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim, let me assure you the dude is the worst Muslim of all time. He eats bacon openly, drinks alcohol, never recites the Quran while facing Mecca, believes Jesus Christ is his savior, goes to church, and says he is a Christian. It's safe to say we won't be naming him our caliph after we take over America one Subway and halal food cart at a time.

The dominant culture is white and Judeo-Christian, and everyone who isn't part of that tribe is just assumed to know everything about it, because privilege is often blind to its own power and to those around them who lack it.

Hope can be dangerous because it means exposing yourself to the possibility of success, to allow yourself to imagine a happy ending, only to be confronted by cold, brutal disappointment.

When a loved one is incarcerated, it's like an atom bomb falls on them, obliterating everything in an instant. Their freedom, their movement, their livelihood, gone. But the bomb's shock waves spread out and envelop close family and friends too. The prison industrial complex eats incarcerated people as the main course but also feasts on their relatives, relationships, and communities. Its appetite is voracious.

If you are what they call a "person of color," it seems your path will be beset with more challenges, setbacks, and villains than the rest. In addition to climate change, cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, and hypertension, this thing called racism--which some claim no longer exists--apparently also kills. Men of color, especially Black men and especially those who are poor, die younger than the rest.

The Patriot Act vastly expanded our domestic security apparatus and allowed the government to surveil Americans under the guise of combating terrorism. Americans are historically fine with castrating their own civil liberties, because we'd rather feel safe than actually be free, especially when our illusory feelings of safety can come at the expense of people of color, immigrants, and Muslims--you know, "them.

The "model minority" myth is a dangerous drug manufactured and promoted by the Whiteness. It ignores all of our diverse experiences and narratives, eliminates all nuances, and lumps us with a convenient stereotype that always renders us as foreigners. It overlooks the discrimination, bias, and hate experienced by our communities and, perhaps worst of all, uses us, Asian and South Asian immigrants in particular, to launder systemic racism and discrimination against poor Black and Latino communities. Why can't they be "models" like us? Because they are lazy freeloaders who don't take personal responsibility, whine about racism, and refuse to pull themselves up by their bootstraps! The system turns us into enforcers and defenders of Whiteness, promising success and safety in exchange for loyalty and obedience. But it's an abusive, toxic relationship, in which the system has always betrayed us on a whim, without remorse or hesitation. Being a "model minority" doesn't live up to the hype.

When I visit countries around the world, I'm usually asked the same four questions about America: 1. Why do you all love guns so much? 2. Why doesn't your government give you free health care? 3. Why did you vote for Trump? 4. Why does America hate Black people so much? I assure them I don't own a gun, I'm all for the government providing affordable health care, I didn't vote for Trump, and the country has a diseased history of racism and anti-Blackness that it has yet to truly confront and acknowledge.

Whiteness, like herpes, lingers forever. If you travel across South Asia, for example, you'll look at all the ads promoting beauty products and ask yourself why everyone looks like a white person from New Jersey with a summer tan. In fact, beauty is still often measured by saaf rang, or clean skin color, which refers to "light skin tone." Fair & Lovely cream sells like hotcakes all around South Asia, even though everyone knows it's bullshit and doesn't help make you either "fair" or "lovely." You can never wipe off the brown no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you pray, but, still, people aspire and hope maybe, one day, one bottle will contain a magical elixir that takes them to Whiteness.

Fair & Lovely cream sells like hotcakes all around South Asia, even though everyone knows it's bullshit and doesn't help make you either "fair" or "lovely." You can never wipe off the brown no matter how hard you try, no matter how hard you pray, but, still, people aspire and hope maybe, one day, one bottle will contain a magical elixir that takes them to Whiteness.

Proximity to Whiteness can help immigrants and people of color literally survive in this country. Your othering will be minimized, and if you're lucky, you can be spared from discrimination, profiling, and ending up on the wrong registries.

Nearly 30 percent of the enslaved were originally Muslim, which means Muslims' stories, labor, tears, pain, and dreams have fertilized this country's soil from the beginning.

Years later, while I was in college, my Dadi asked my mom what I was studying for hours at night, reading all those thick books. My mom said I was most likely going to major in "the humanities." Dadi froze. We feared she had had a ministroke. She slowly covered her shocked mouth and said, "But in Pakistan only the duffers and idiots do the humanities.

The Whiteness doesn't want us to be American. But since it can't remove all of us, it will always find ways to dominate the rest of us and make our lives uncomfortable.

But I already knew that, in America, if you aren't writing your story, your story will always be written for you. If you aren't telling your story, your story will always be told to you.

As a person of color in America, you need to fly to reach the hallowed gates of wealth and mainstream success while others can just walk. "Good" is not good enough. You have to be exceptional, especially when you don't have the legacy admissions, the generational wealth, the mentors who look like you and come from your communities, and an entire system that benefits one skin color and gender at the detriment of others.

This entire experience, although seemingly harmless in the grand cosmic scheme of life, was a perfect microcosm of the American dream. The good minority earned his rank by beating up the bad minority--a tale as old as the founding of this country. You try to gain as much proximity to whiteness and as much distance as you can from Blackness or the villain of the day, in order to become accepted by the mainstream.

The reality is that most people of color learn early in America that we will have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and when we fail, no one will help us fall up. Immigrants, people of color, and women learn early that in order to make it in Amreeka you have to daft punk it through life. You have to do everything harder, better, faster, stronger, and smarter. Those are just the rules. The streets of Amreeka aren't paved with gold; they're paved with blood. As an immigrant, you'll take a beating but you'll be like Rick Ross and keep hustling. if Bob works eight hours a day, you work ten. If Samantha works late on Friday, then you work on Saturday. You go twenty feet just to get to ten feet.

There are forces that have always attempted, and ultimately failed, to make America static and rigid. But America has proven to be elastic. Our ancestors have always had to push and stretch America to accommodate its many residents and communities. We now have to do our part. If any of you have been active students of US history, you know that with every two steps we march forward toward progress, we always get pushed one step back. The racially anxious men and women with hoods, tiki torches, and business suits will do everything in their power to violently chokehold and drag America back to 1953. This is the year before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. I'm convinced that 1953 is also the year that many enemies of diversity and progress believe America was allegedly "great.

With the resurgence of radicalized white power movements, many are now forced to confront the reality called white supremacy that the rest of us have had to deal with our entire lives. For many, resisting meant protesting. For the rest of us, our resistance is simply walking out of our house and breathing, just holding our head up, smiling, having hope, and telling our children that America belongs to them. For us, surviving is an act of resistance.

I'm about as American as chicken korma, apple pie, and chai, but even after forty years I'm still told to "go back." Where, exactly? In America, who (and what) are you when you're both "us" and "them"? When I'm a native but seen as a foreigner? When I'm a citizen but also seen as a perpetual suspect? When I'm your neighbor but also seen as an invader? When I'm a cultural creator but also seen as an eraser of white identity and European civilization?

Like many great works of theater, I believe America is simultaneously a riotous comedy and a heartbreaking tragedy. Our hamartia, our fatal flaw, is racism. It haunts us every day.