Padma Lakshmi is an ACLU Artist Ambassador for immigrants’ and women’s rights, and a host and executive producer of “Top Chef.”
Wednesday night at a rally in Greenville, N.C., a sea of white faces in red hats bellowed “Send her back! Send her back!,” referring to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee who disagreed with the president on policy.
It was a sickening escalation from Sunday, when the president tweetedat Omar and three other congresswomen of color who were born in the United States: “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” It was a longer version of the classic racist taunt “Go back to your country!” During the chanting on Wednesday, Trump watched over the crowd, seemingly satisfied. What followed, too, is now classic Trump — saying briefly that “he didn’t like it,” only to say later those very same chanters were “incredible patriots.” It’s Charlottesville 2.0. He has long been dog-whistling to white nationalists, and as he ramps up for 2020, that whistle has become a battle cry.
Those words, those hurtful, xenophobic, entitled words that I’ve heard all throughout my childhood, stabbed me right in the heart. They echoed the unshakable feeling that most brown immigrants feel. Regardless of what we do, regardless of how much we assimilate and contribute, we are never truly American enough because our names sound funny, our skin isn’t white, or our grandmothers live in a different country.
It’s hard for many white Americans to understand how hurtful the language the president used this week is to many of us.
In elementary school, we used to sing, “This land is your land, this land is my land.” But out in the playground and at the arcade, we heard another tune: that no matter how hard we worked, and even if we kept our heads down, many in our nation were never going to accept us as equally American as our white fellow citizens. They snarled and smirked as they reminded us that they could yank away our identity at will.
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