Don't Look Away

On most summer mornings, I review my to-do list over coffee, and then Lee and I walk the dogs. Generally, I know how my days will unfold. But as I look around this country, I see so many others whose days do not begin gently over coffee.

On the news I read of peoples' fears of being abducted by the US government—afraid of going out of their homes after watching neighbors and family members thrown to the ground and handcuffed by masked ICE agents. Agents who do not seem to care if someone is working toward asylum or has a work or study visa. They take who they please and then change the rules. Again and again, we hear immigrants say they would like to stay inside and never go out, but they need to feed their families, so they must work.

It is hard for me to wrap my brain around what is happening. People are being racially profiled and grabbed off the street, deported to wherever without due process. You are an immigrant and have a tattoo, you must be a gang member. Members of my family have tattoos, but we're white, so no one is accusing us of belonging to a gang. 

I grew up mostly surrounded by white people in Maryland. When I entered elementary school, it hadn't been that long since schools were desegregated. There was one black girl in my first-grade class. I remember her hair tied back with ribbons and that she wore pretty little dresses.

Daily, I witnessed the cruelty inflicted on this girl by our first-grade teacher. I will never forget the insults, making her sit in a desk in the middle of the room with tall isolation barriers surrounding her, making her wear a dunce cap, telling her that she smelled bad, which was not true.

I wish I could say that I befriended her, but I merely hid—from her, from other classmates, and from the teacher. It took me until I went to college to learn to enjoy school after having that teacher in the first grade. I cannot imagine how that little girl ever recovered.

What does this have to do with immigration, you might ask? Mostly, it just was an experience that seemed to instill in me an empathy for others. I can feel for people, even if the terrible thing isn’t happening to me. I had assumed that somehow, most people acquire this ability.

I think that in the minds of many in the US, immigration is a bad thing, but in my role as an ESL teacher, I've seen how the diversity that immigrants bring enriches communities. It is a privilege to work with people from all over the world. I have helped my students strengthen their language skills in the belief that they would find sympathetic listeners who would take the time to understand and help them along their way.

Was I wrong? Apparently, there are many who are determined not to recognize the humanity we all share. It's probable that those folks are not reading my posts, but I have to say that some of the bravest, kindest people I've ever met were born somewhere else.  

In one of my favorite classes, I taught parents in an after-school program at Stephen Girard Elementary School in Philadelphia. Those mothers and fathers came because they were so stressed that they could not help their children as they truly wanted to.  

Now, more than 20 years later, I still hear from some of those parents from time to time. I receive pictures and text messages when they buy a home, or when their children receive a scholarship to a good university. But I remember those early days when they'd just arrived and didn't know how they would survive. They seemed to live on hope alone. Surely, that kind of hope is a scarce commodity these days.