I am from American flag bumper-stickered pickup trucks, from strip malls and Subarus, from parish picnics and poolside patio parties with the neighbors. In my Catholic grade school of 200 kids in a town of population 4,222, nearly every face I saw made me reflect on how different mine was, that is, after I came to realize I was different.
Within my nearly entirely white hometown and fifteen minutes down the freeway to my all white all girl’s Catholic prep school, the question of “Do I fit in?” naturally arose. After the 2016 presidential election that tore my eighth-grade class apart and destroyed many of my parent’s long-term friendships, I began to think of this question in a new light: “Am I American?”
What constitutes if someone is “American” or not? Clearly, it’s more than just a birth certificate or a voter registration card. When the idea of being an “American” is centered around the Anglo-Saxon citizen, how can the “other” possibly remain patriotic?
I think I relate to Hugh and Bob in their questioning of where they belong in America and how they operate as “others” in society. While I recognize that I do not face, nor will never have to face, a plethora of prejudices and struggles they have, I also understand their feeling of discomfort and cynicism towards patriotism.
“It was just that [the average over patriotic American] didn’t think I out to have these feelings. They kept thinking about me in connection with Africa. But I wasn’t born in Africa. I didn’t know who anyone was,” Bob says. Even after generations of living in America, working at American companies, speaking with Californian slang, and even, later, joining the army, Bob is not seen as fully American because of his skin color and heritage. But oddly enough, those who are white are no longer associated with their heritage. “…the aristocratic blue bloods of America have forgotten what they learned in history—that most of their ancestors were the riffraff of Europe—thieves, jailbirds, beggars, and outcasts” (Himes 152).
America, then, sits at an oddly hypocritical crossroads: it is both a melting pot for cultures who are lured in by a shot at “The American Dream,” and standoffish to those non-whites who try to grasp it.
Even Hugh, who has most certainly captured as much of an “American Dream” that could be possibly for a dark-skinned family in the 1960’s (they are well educated, stay in well furnished, “elegant” and “large” hotels, and have homes with guest rooms), acknowledges that despite being American, his system will not serve him in the same way it would serve a white man. His mother is “convinced that only Arizonans were to be esteemed,” and has a certain sense of “loyalty” towards the desert state (Hughes 29). How can people manage to remain loyal to a place that is so built against them?
This makes me think of La Casa de Amistad where I volunteer every Thursday, helping Spanish speaking immigrants with studying for their citizenship test. The students’ first question is always, “Where are you from?” When I reply, “St. Louis,” they want to know where my parents are from. And when I reply again, “St. Louis,” they are unsatisfied. What they really mean is, “Why do you look like that? Where is your heritage?” I am not a midwestern girl to them, I am Filipina, and when I relent that my mom was born in Manila but came here when she was 2, they nod in understanding. One man followed me up with asking about the history and politics of the Philippines, to which I admitted I knew roughly nothing about. “I am American,” I announced firmly. But I could say it as many times as I wanted to—the fact of the matter was that like Bob, I was associated with the country that my features reflected, not the country I was raised in.
My personal experiences and the books we have read have assured me of this: Everyone, even those desperate to be an American citizen, sees the concept of “American” as white. Patriotism for a non-white American is either a denial of the prejudice and “othering” they face, or a stubborn attempt to prove that they belong, which will, as seen with Hugh and Bob, not succeed. Stubborn as he was, Bob could not defeat the system that was inherently pitted against him, shipping him off to the army for a crime he did not commit, even when the system knows that he is innocent. Similarly, Hugh acknowledges that in America, “[his] color is…against [him]” (Hughes 131).
Hugh and Bob prove that to be patriotic for a person of color in America is to live in a false reality. I think of the love that I have for my hometown despite all of the discomfort and often blatant racism I faced there. But this love isn’t patriotism for Missouri or for midwestern America, it is a sense of nostalgia for the picket-fenced farm my house sits behind and the memories my sisters and I made chasing the geese that sat by the lake.
I think this is where Bob and Hugh sit as well. They can be nostalgic for their experience in America, for the homes they have forged despite obstacles, but they can never be truly patriotic for a country that does not love them back.