I grew up in a racist household. My parents and grandparents tossed around the n-word and s-word the way Lady Gaga tosses around glitter. I was discouraged from making friends who were not white. Hell, a mixed marriage when I was growing up, right outside Boston, was an Irish marrying an Eye-tal-yan.
I’ve worked hard not be afraid of men of color, because that’s what I was taught as a child. It was beaten into me, so that that it became an instinct. I’m proud to say my intellect has overcome my upbringing.
I have family that came through Ellis Island. When my sister was recently in town, she went to Ellis Island, where my father urged her to find a MacNamara that entered the country at the turn of the last century. Yeah, Dad, we said. That will be easy to find. All those Irish names. It’s amazing to think my people were once the trash of America.
I try to think about this when I think about the immigration arguments that are kicking around today.
I try to think about what it’s like to be so desperately poor and hopeless that I would strap my child to my back and pay a dangerous man with dangerous weapons my sad life savings so I could cross into American and crawl in the dirt and pick vegetables for the white people. I try to think about what it must to be like to show up in a new place, alone and frightened and unable to speak the language, and take a job cleaning toilets so I can send money back to my family. I think of how hard I have it learning foreign languages, and I think how it must be like to live in the shadow of the Tower of Babel.
Then I think about how crowded this country is. I found myself being annoyed when a commercial for a car dealer, with the voice over completely in Spanish, popped up on NY1, and I wasn’t quite sure why. I think we have to do immigration in a different way. I think we have to know who is in this country. I worry that too many children unable to speak English in our public schools isn’t helping the school system. I think in school system that’s stuffed like a feather pillow, maybe we can’t take everyone in.
And that’s when I worry I haven’t shaken off the chains of my family’s racist attitudes, and that I’m still one of them.
