When did America stop being a country with open arms? The answer is it never really was one.
With the passing of Arizona’s new immigration law (Arizona Immigration Law SB 1070), possibly the most racially prejudiced statute since the ‘separate but equal’ philosophy before the civil rights movement, the United States appears to be less like a place of happy diversity and more like a melting pot with ingredients that simply won’t mix.
For a country that now prides itself in having one of the most liberal, democratic and tolerant peoples of the world, the past 10 years, at least, have been quite out of character.
Beginning with 9/11, racial and religious discrimination have run rampant in this ‘one nation under God.’ Although issues of race and religion are nothing new to our country’s narrative, the inflated bigotry that emerged after the plane crashes was nothing like what the U.S. had ever seen.
Perhaps it is a result of modernity that so much injustice is possible. A hundred years ago, airport security didn’t exist. The now popularized concept of Big Brother wasn’t introduced until George Orwell’s 1949 novel, ‘1984,’ and even then, the absence of the Internet made it impossible to truly monitor the activities of Americans.
Now, in the time of the Patriot Act, America has evolved into a threat to its own beautiful identity.
September 11, which inspired a wave of anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim sentiments nationwide, is the most typical example of an episode that has resulted in a particular ethnic group receiving widespread injustice.
Clearly, it has also impressed upon Americans that it is acceptable to use racial profiling as a method for distinguishing good from bad. Arizona’s new law is tangible evidence that the U.S. will continue to condone the very discrimination it was founded to ostensibly prevent.
However, modern society can’t be accused of creating a new tool of social injustice. Inequity has existed since America’s first traces in history. Columbus exploited the ‘Indians,’ and the diverse religious groups that later settled in the New World brought with them the roots of America’s religious intolerance.
Even though some of the most famous immigrant groups, such as the Puritans, Pilgrims and French Jesuits, sought freedom from religious persecution, they became the foundation of America’s modern religious discrimination.
While issues of religious disagreement once lay with the disparity between different Christian sects, they have since developed into an array of modern religious and racial dissent. The Alien and Sedition Acts, the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Emergency Quota Act can likely be found in the classroom of every U.S. history teacher. We are not in the first period of foreign fear in America’s story. It is also not the first story of unwarranted maltreatment of a specific cultural group, nor will it be the last.
How the leader of multiculturalism has become so unwilling to embrace multiculturalism is not such a secret. It’s entwined in our nation’s history. One excuse or another is always conveniently used to rationalize the disrespect bestowed upon a minority.
What is unfamiliar is scary, and what is scary is a threat. If this holds true, then some ethnic group or another will forever be under siege from the rest of the population, some of who may belong to a minority that was once unjustly targeted, as well.
The ‘Pluribus Unum’ of this great Western state needs to start focusing more on becoming an educated, harmonious ‘Unum’ and less on the fear of the unfamiliar.