Fwd: My Adopted Homeland:
Khaja Afeef
Begin forwarded message:
From: Junaid Afeef from Junaid’s Substack <junai...@substack.com>
Date: July 2, 2024 at 4:06:29 PM CDT
To: khaja...@gmail.com
Subject: My Adopted Homeland:
Reply-To: Junaid Afeef from Junaid’s Substack <reply+2f207b&36tpn3&&04a0cffb01a125aa97e5df56eb107afc...@mg1.substack.com>
I love my adopted homeland. I moved to America as a child 50 years ago and became an American citizen almost 40 years ago. I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1988. I still get goosebumps when I hear the National Anthem and America the Beautiful. This is my home.
I show my deep love for America like the great Black poet and philosopher James Baldwin did. He said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” I don’t criticize for the sake of being negative. I do it because I understand that America is an experiment. In his first inaugural address, George Washington said that our form of democracy is an “experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Experimentation involves trial and error, collecting and evaluating data, and working towards a solution.
The solution sought in the American experiment is liberty and justice for all. Liberty and justice for all did not exist at our founding, and they remain elusive for many today, so we continue the struggle to form “a more perfect Union.”
There are many things I love about America. My community’s public school district rapidly diversified in the ten-plus years we’ve lived here. That’s wonderful. However, in that time, there have been painful episodes of bigotry and intolerance. We rallied in response. The “we” includes everyone - Black and white people, people from various faiths, ethnicities, sexual orientations, gender identities, varied learning abilities, immigrants, and even people with contrasting political views. Detractors are convinced that diversity is code for disunity, and others clutched their pearls, wondering what will happen to white European heritage in the wake of our celebration of our diversity. We didn’t let these views derail our efforts. We came together. This is what I love about America.
Another thing I love is that we are beginning to understand that context matters. For example, the gross over-representation of poor people and Black and brown people in our jails and prisons is not the result of a collapse in morality among the poor, Black, and brown communities. Centuries of slavery followed by Black Codes, segregation, lynching, redlining, Jim Crow, and the so-called “war on drugs” devastated Black and brown communities and made them poor or kept them poor. The criminal justice system keeps these communities from growing stronger and seeking accountability. At least now, we can speak and think about these issues more openly.
“It ain’t all sunshine and rainbows,” but “we keep movin’ forward.”
There is still a lot of hate in America. We make progress, and then we backslide. We claw and climb to return to where we were, then move ahead more. It’s a struggle and slow, but we are making progress.
Growing up, I saw hate firsthand as a brown immigrant child from a Muslim home in a white, predominantly Christian suburban community in the 1970s and 1980s. Things improved in the 1990s for some in the immigrant Muslim community as we learned to organize and engage in the civic and political processes. Then came 9/11, and it washed away a lot of the progress.
We were told that the terrorists hated us because of our freedoms; racial profiling and torture gained cache as reasonable responses to safeguard us from the evil deeds of “jihadists.” Many Americans rallied around the flag, but many also relegated six million American Muslims to a “fifth column,” suspect class. I didn’t give up then, and I’m not giving up now.
I love that today, we try harder to respect the Indigenous People who lived in North America long before Europeans reached its shores. We acknowledge that the European settlers colonized North America; under the guise of “manifest destiny,” millions of Indigenous People were killed and permanently displaced.
These truths are “rediscovered,” and that’s a good thing. When I learned American history, this was not in the curriculum. Today, more students are learning a sobering version of how America came to be. An accurate history of America does not make me love it any less; it inspires me to build better for future generations.
We’re still not perfect. While recognizing the historical injustices done to the Indigenous People living in North America, we continue to turn a blind eye to the injustices that are being carried out against the indigenous people of Palestine with our tax dollars. The Palestinian people have deep roots in historic Palestine. While we finally recognize the importance of context when thinking about how America has treated Black and Indigenous People, we resist seeing the context in which the Palestinians today struggle to survive throughout historic Palestine (the modern state of Israel, the illegally-occupied and unlawfully settled West Bank, and the besieged and bombed out Gaza).
Even domestically, some of the most recent gains are temporary. I ran into a friend who helped me in 2020 when I ran for prosecutor on a criminal justice reform platform. We reflected on the progress made after the tragic murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement later that summer. My friend pointed out the backsliding that has taken place in criminal justice reform since then. Furthermore, in just the past few years, we’ve also seen an erosion of women’s rights and the rights of the LGBTQ community.
We’re not there yet. The experiment continues. These are among the things that are so disappointing about America, but despite what some may suggest, the choice is not “love it or leave it.”
The choice is between loving America or not loving America. To love it is to see it get better. To love it is to work to fix what is broken. To love it is to heal the wounds. To love it is to challenge it to live up to the high ideals of its founding.
I will wave the flag, fly the colors, sing the National Anthem, embrace America, and pray that God Blesses America, and then do my share of the work to see America fulfill its potential. Happy Independence Day, America.
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