Can I ever truly be “American”?

The clip above is from the TV show Scandal, and it features an exchange that any non-white immigrant kid should find familiar. In it, main protagonist Olivia Pope, a crisis management expert, gets lectured by her father that “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have!”.

The version of this talk that came from my parental units was less dramatic and didn’t take place with a private hangar with a limo and Learjet in the background, but the message was the same: You’re not white, and they’ll always see you as an outsider, interloper, or intruder, even if you’ve lived here longer than they have.

The “you don’t belong here” message is still there, although in this civilized era, it’s now encoded in actions, such as the police assault on Sureshbhai Patel, whose only crime was going for a walk while being Indian. He was visiting his son in Alabama (there’s your warning right there) to help with a newborn grandkid. While out on his morning walk, a local got freaked out about a dark-skinned man in their neighborhood and called the cops. Between Mr. Patel’s limited English and Officer Eric Parker’s limited policing ability, Mr. Patel got walloped and wound up partially paralyzed in the hospital:

Can you imagine a white European with limited English skills getting the same treatment? Or even being reported to the cops?

On the national level, this comes in the “dog whistle” form of accusing a black president of not being American enough. It started with the Birther conspiracy:

• Rudy Giuliani said that he does “not believe that the president loves America“.
• Ann Coulter called him a “Manchurian Candidate”.
• Dick Morris worried that he might not be “pro-American”.
• He’s been accused of “undermining this country’s national defense on purpose” by Representative John Fleming of Louisiana.
• Donald Rumsfeld said that he “actually switched sides in the war on terror”.

Meanwhile, this guy, who’s figuratively in bed with the family business masquerading as a country that’s been aiding and abetting extremism, is a true patriot:

I’ve had dates with less physical contact than this. Can you imagine the furor if there’d ever been this kind of smooch between the late King Abdullah and President Obama?

“Not porno tongue, but church tongue.” Or maybe mosque tongue.

Here’s the money paragraph from the New York Times piece titled Why Giuliani and Other Obama Critics Play the ‘American’ Card:

Whatever his intentions, Mr. Giuliani’s statement reflects the ease with which people dissociate Mr. Obama and other African-Americans with American identity, especially those who don’t like him. A 2005 study examined this pattern using the Implicit Association Test, which measures the associations between concepts using differences in response timing during a categorization task. People tend to respond faster when categorizing paired stimuli that are congruent with their implicit associations (for instance, “thin people” or “good” versus “fat people” or “bad”) than those that are incongruent (the opposite pairings). In the study in question, the authors found response timing patterns that suggested that African-Americans as a group are “less associated with the national category ‘American’ than are white Americans” relative to the category “foreign” — a pattern that holds for other nonwhite groups such as Asian-Americans and Latinos.

Yours Truly, stopping to enjoy the view during the Toronto-Tampa drive last year.
Click the photo to see it at full size.

In less than a fortnight, I’m marrying an American. As the husband of a U.S. citizen, I would be eligible for a green card, and eventually, citizenship. I’m also the direct descendant of a U.S. citizen, but I’m told it’s easier to get it via my wife rather than my great-grandfather, James O’Hara. One option is to stay here in the subtropical climes of Accordion Bay, which may mean that someday, I might apply for citizenship.

I come here bearing goodwill, skills in the areas of technology, writing, and rock and roll accordion, cultural and language skills that surpass those of many of the locals (it’s Florida, man!), and a jacket (pictured) that cannot possible be any more American than it already is. I have what it takes to be American. But the question lingers in my mind: will Americans ever consider me to be one of them?