We immigrants owe a great debt to the African American struggle for equality
Opinion by Roya Hakakian
July 9, 2020 7:00 a.m. EDT
Roya Hakakian is the author of “Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran.”
A few days after I arrived as a refugee in America in 1985, when I was 18, relatives already living here came to take me sightseeing. My mother and I had resettled in New York, and naturally my relatives wanted to show me the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Instead, I wanted to see Harlem.
I had come of age in revolutionary Iran and was eager to see the America that the revolutionaries had peddled to my generation. In their Manichaean terms, there was one “evil-doing” America, dubbed the Great Satan, whose effigies they burned with pyromaniacal passion. The other was Black America, where African Americans languished under white rule, just as Iranians had suffered under the monarchy.
A few days after I arrived as a refugee in America in 1985, when I was 18, relatives already living here came to take me sightseeing. My mother and I had resettled in New York, and naturally my relatives wanted to show me the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. Instead, I wanted to see Harlem.
I had come of age in revolutionary Iran and was eager to see the America that the revolutionaries had peddled to my generation. In their Manichaean terms, there was one “evil-doing” America, dubbed the Great Satan, whose effigies they burned with pyromaniacal passion. The other was Black America, where African Americans languished under white rule, just as Iranians had suffered under the monarchy.
As immigrants, we often arrive believing that America’s past does not affect us. We may assume ourselves perfectly detached from slavery’s legacy and the injustices that continue to plague the lives of African Americans. That our paths hardly cross with those living beyond our enclaves, especially in the early years after our arrival, can further turn us inward. We tend to place our faith, first, in the miracles of the melting pot and, second, in the miracles of our own characters — our grit, diligence, education, resourcefulness, or the richness of the traditions we hail from. We likely think this alone explains why we achieve what we achieve.
But that explanation is incomplete. Society, too, must extend itself to receive us. It needs to have practiced the painful exercise of giving way to make room for another. This intangible quality that has made the United States, until recently, more amenable to outsiders than any other nation was instilled by African Americans; we immigrants owe them a great debt of gratitude. The current administration’s racial divisiveness and hostility toward immigrants cannot permanently undo a process that has been centuries in the making.
African Americans’ long fight for equal rights has thrust the presence of the “other” and the need for tolerance, however begrudging, upon this nation’s consciousness. With each boycott, act of civil disobedience, or lawsuit argued before the Supreme Court, African Americans have brought to the fore the debates that the United States would rather avoid — about racism and, by extension, about xenophobia.
It is into this maelstrom that immigrants enter. If the United States eventually and reluctantly makes room for us, it is because the country has had to eventually and reluctantly make room for another. This is a nation of immigrants, to be sure. But immigrants have resettled here more smoothly than elsewhere because they reap the benefits of those hard-won concessions.
In considering the melting pot, immigrants and the native-born alike often overlook the fact that the newcomers’ eventual acceptance in this country owes in great part to African Americans who have kept a steady flame of protest and demands for equality going under the pot. And in witnessing their struggles, we — who might ordinarily keep to the margins — begin to contemplate our own rights.
When members of an unwelcome immigrant community watch African Americans take to the streets, we see the wheels of American democracy turning before our eyes. Abstractions mindlessly memorized in preparation for the U.S. naturalization test suddenly become a living reality. In the end, they continue to wage their unfinished battle, while we inherit a more equitable United States, where we rebuild our lives.
Source: Washington Post
