My dad once told me “I love this country, but I hate the bastards that run it.”
I was a kid at the time, and while I was mostly in awe that he had said bastard (a bad word) in front of me, I also recognized the depth in the statement. For my dad, a second-generation Mexican American, America represented a land of opportunities. It’s a place where people like his parents, my grandparents, could come for a better life, a place where they could find jobs and make money to support themselves and their children.
Clearly, what my dad said that day stuck with me since I’m here writing about it over a decade later. At the time, I thought, “Okay, the guys who run the country are the bad guys. They’re why things are bad, because they have the power to make the laws.” While that’s still true, as I got older, I also realized the gaping hole in my dad’s statement: The bastards that run this country alone don’t define this country. Sure, we’re all very much stuck within the laws set by those in charge (voter suppression, redlining, Jim Crow, minimal healthcare, etc). But there are millions of people in this country that run the day-to-day “American” experience.
It wasn’t politicians who hunted down and killed Ahmaud Arbery. It wasn’t a politician who murdered Trayvon Martin, nor was it a jury of politicians who acquitted his killer. It’s not politicians who are currently harassing, assaulting, and murdering Asian folks on the street all over the country, nor is it politicians who choose to stand by and do nothing while these attacks happen. These are just “normal” people. And it’s these people, along with the rest of us, who make up America.
It’s true we live in a time where we’re fresh off of a four-year term of an incredibly bigoted and racist president who spewed hate and sewed chaos at every turn, a president who encouraged and emboldened everyday racists to do their racist thing. But it’s not like that particular president made regular Americans racist. He was voted into office because millions of people put him there despite — or even because of — his bigotry.
He’s not even the most outwardly racist president that Americans have elected. Nor, I suspect, will he be the last racist American president. America has been racist from its very founding. The systematic destruction of Indigenous lives and communities. Slavery. Segregation. Internment camps. The subsequent whitewashing of these histories. Even the current “better” president has proven himself committed to upholding America’s existing (racist and elitist) systems.
Regardless of who America’s leaders are, I find it hard to love a country that operates with racism at its very core, where racists can live their lives largely unchecked. It doesn’t matter who’s in the White House or Congress when racism continues to be taught and learned in households all over the country. And as it stands, that’s not something that the people who run this country seem to be able to — or want to — fix.
I know most people aren’t attacking Asian folks right now. Most people wouldn’t think of yelling to someone to “Go back to your own country.” After his preview of this piece, my dad points to the wonderful people who (he says) mostly make up America, people who help each other and work to build ideas and a better world for each other, as the reasons he loves this country. Thanks to my brain chemistry, it’s hard for any good thing to outweigh the constant slew of bad, especially when I think of all the people who are witnesses to recent hate crimes and do nothing to step in.
If you, like me, are wondering how we can offset the bad, there’s a lot of work to do. For now, here’s a list of ways you can help the AAPI community, as well as some info on bystander training (both links found via The P Word, an incredible newsletter on politics by my wickedly smart pal Natasha).
America is hard to love for a lot of reasons. I just hope that in my lifetime, I get to see those who live here — you, me, the bastards who run it, and everyone else — make it suck less, so that future dads and their kids can simply say “I love this country.”