A century ago, Gibran Khalil Gibran wrote a love poem to Lebanon, "You have your Lebanon, I have my Lebanon." He spoke of his affection for the captivating qualities of generosity and hospitality of the Lebanese people and the sheer beauty of the country and contrasted this with Lebanon’s petty, bickering politicians who sought nothing more than their own aggrandizement. When I read this poem, I saw parallels between the understanding of the contradictions at play in Lebanon and those in my country, the United States of America.
Today, many Americans are living in fear and even despair as they watch their president, seemingly unchecked, tearing down some of the foundations of democracy and gutting social and economic programs that have for decades provided for the safety, security, and well-being of millions. They ask: “How could this be happening?” and “Can our country survive this onslaught?”
But, as has always been the case in America, while some have felt hopeless, others are driven to respond. And so it was that a week ago, seven million Americans took to the streets in 2,700 cities and towns to demonstrate their resolve to save America’s democracy and arrest the drift toward authoritarianism.
All of this should serve as a reminder that there have always been these two Americas: one pushing to restrict democratic freedoms and the other working to expand them. Both have defined our history.
America, after all, was born with the original sins of genocide against native peoples, the forced enslavement of Africans, and the annexation and subjugation of Spanish-speaking peoples of the Southwest. As the country grew and attracted immigrants, these newcomers, whether they were Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, Jews, or Arabs were often met with discrimination, repression, and even violence.
This, however, was always only one part of America’s story. On the other side, for every racist, segregationist, anti-immigrant bigot, there were abolitionists who fought slavery, and organized movements that championed immigrants, labor, and civil rights for Blacks, Latinos, and Native peoples. And in the last century, for every xenophobe like Fr. Coughlin or Pat Buchanan, or segregationist like Bull Connor or George Wallace, there was a Martin Luther King, Caesar Chavez, and Jesse Jackson. And despite persistent bigotry and waves of recurring anti-immigrant bigotry, what remains are the core of Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech and the spirit of the Statue of Liberty’s words welcoming the “tired and poor, yearning to be free.”
This is my family’s story. While my father’s mother and siblings were all able to immigrate to America after World War I, he was delayed and then unable to secure a visa because Congress determined that there were too many immigrants from the Mediterranean region. (One Senator famously said, “We don’t need any more Syrian trash in America.”) Eager to reunite with his family, he got a job on a ship sailing to Canada and then crossed into the US without documents in 1923. He received amnesty in the 1930s and became a citizen in 1943. Four decades later I was serving as a deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign and was given to opportunity to place his name in nomination at the 1984 Democratic Convention.
Reflecting on my personal history as a metaphor for the broader American story, I noted in my speech that “I am the son of an illegal immigrant who is nominating for president the great grandson of a slave. Nowhere else but America could this happen.”
It’s important to remember that these two Americas are always with us. And we must never forget either one. If we forget the threats and challenges to freedom, we let down our guard and become vulnerable to the assaults when they come. But if we forget the promise of America and fail to recall the heroes and movements who in every generation have fought and won, then we lose hope and fail to meet the challenges before us.
And so, to those who despair and say that what is happening today is” un-American” as they witness efforts to gut voting rights, curtail immigration, use of military force to violently expel migrants and threaten freedom of speech and assembly—we must respond that we've been here before and we’ve always risen up to confront these threats to liberty. And we’ve won.
The bottom line is that we should remember that we’ve been through other dark periods in our history. In my lifetime, we’ve witnessed: the hysteria and repression of the McCarthy era’s manufactured anti-Communism scare; the racism and violence that followed the civil rights movement; the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Dr. King; the deeply polarizing Vietnam war; the national trauma of 9/11 and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes and government repression that followed; and the disastrous failed wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Each time, we rose to meet these challenges.
Given our history, I feel confident that in the face of today’s xenophobia, racism, repression, and hate, we will rise again. Like Gibran, we will assert: “You have your America, I have my America.”
