Much of the debate about the federal administration’s approach to immigration has been about what’s legal. We also argue about political consequence—the potential impact on future elections and who holds which offices. And we shout.
We don’t spend enough time truly talking about what’s right—or about who we are and, as importantly, who we want to be.
I think most people take it for granted now that Americans have basically self-sorted, reflecting incompatible values and intentions.
But I don’t think that’s the whole story or, at least, that it’s a finished story.
There are still a lot of places for most Americans to find shared values and, with that, for genuine dialogue, reflection, consideration, and reconsideration—for all of us.
Sometimes that asks us, perhaps against our instincts, to center and prioritize what’s common rather than what divides.
Trying to do so doesn’t mean we’ll always—or perhaps even often—succeed in having mutual, authentic dialogue. There’s a lot to overcome.
We should try anyway.
So, let’s set aside the legal debate and partisan politics and recognize that right now, this year, today, we are commonly stopping and detaining brown people because they’re brown. We are choosing to make doing so, in effect, American policy.
When we criminalize ethnic and racial identities, we always regret it.
Which doesn’t mean we don’t do it again. We do. We are.
They’re stopping and detaining brown people because they’re brown. We’re stopping and detaining brown people because they’re brown.
It looks like traffic stops in Hispanic and Latino communities without individual cause, workplace raids of businesses with Latino workers, and families—children—and neighborhoods living in constant fear.
It looks like American citizens being harassed and arrested, learning and perhaps internalizing a lesson that they are “less than.”
Others are internalizing that lesson, too. It is happening day after day.
In my lifetime, it has looked like “stop and frisk” for Black people and, especially, Black youth. It has looked like the post-9/11 profiling of Muslims in the United States and those with Middle Eastern and Asian ancestry, with assaults on their rights and, even more fundamentally, on their humanity.
We are doing it again.
We are harming Latino and Hispanic people and causing genuine, lasting trauma.
This political and societal moment, like the ones before it, dehumanizes and diminishes us all.
The campaign around it is as impactful and harmful as the actions themselves—perhaps even more impactful and harmful. The campaign was created to be that way. We need to try to take care not to amplify it, and that is—at least—difficult and complicated.
We can be strategic and purposeful in our own actions, so we can effectively work to end, rather than to amplify, this campaign and time and to create a new consensus that moves us forward together.
We can strive for language and purpose that build on common ground. It does exist.
We all need to know: “They” are not doing this. We are doing this.
We need to stop.
And then we need to come together, choose differently, and be better.
