A NYT op-ed titled “What Happened to the Country That Made Us Citizens?” by Naureen Khan begins:
The day my parents took their oath of citizenship…
You can pretty much predict the rest.
My family immigrated to the United States in 1993 from Bangladesh when I was 5…”
She says that, for the most part, growing up in Plano TX (while perhaps a bit boring) was pleasant, with general acceptance by the locals. She provides examples of how nice whites were to her.
So, why then, the need for this NYT op-ed? Why the foreboding sense of doom and dread?
Given this country’s painful history, in which even incremental racial progress is always met with ferocious backlash, I should have known better. I should have known that the polite acceptance our neighbors showed us, their tolerance for the drippings of our culture, didn’t necessarily signal a deeper acknowledgment of our humanity.
What gnostic layers has Khan, like Neo from The Matrix, peeled off of the inner, demonic, Dallas reality? It all begins in Nov 2016:
A majority in Collin County — the place where I was a parking lot attendant at the annual hot air balloon festival, the place where I dropped out of mosque school because it was so boring — voted for Donald Trump, a man who has aligned himself with white supremacists.
Since taking office, he has fired off a series of attacks against immigrants. He calls us animals. He inflicts unimaginable cruelty onto the children of migrants…
In the days after the election, someone wrote “Build that wall” on a walkway at my former high school.
Yes, naturalized Bangladeshi, please lecture white Texans about how awful they are. America is such an awful, racist place, why do people from shitholes like Bangladesh pine to get here?
Will the NYT ever print an op-ed with, I don’t know, a somewhat different perspective on things?
“Naureen Khan is a writer and senior researcher at “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.” She lives in Harlem.”
