Last night I received a compliment from a Taxi Driver! We were discussing people and places of our birth.
He stated , he had come from Ghana. We chatted and talked about values & Ghana’s National Currency. When I was a child I collected coins from Ghana. Ghana was the Banking Capitol of Africa in the 50’s. He thought & so do I, a trip to Africa and his Nation would be awesome. He also said , I’d find many nice people like him who didn’t drink or smoke.
I thanked him and told him his customs made me think he was Muslim. I was Jewish. He was astonished and became silent. When I asked , if I had offended him, he said no. He was surprised that I was Jewish. He thought I was American.
I am American. My grandparents came here from St. Petersburg, Russia & Odessa & Kiev, in the Ukraine, around 1905. By 1919 , when my parents were born, the United States, was massively deporting, their concept, “dissident immigrants & threats to society”.
Emma Goldman, a Russian Jewish Woman, was deported along with 1000’s of others deemed a threat to our Society. She was labeled an“anarchist” and J Edgar Hoover personally came to see her deported in the middle of the night, with many other “radicals”. They spoke briefly, according to an article in the New Yorker. “Hoover asked Goldman, if he had treated her fairly? “ Oh, I suppose you’ve given me as square a deal as you could,” she replied, two hours away from being ejected from the country where she had lived for thirty-four years and found the voice that had won her admirers around the world. “We shouldn’t expect from any person something beyond his capacity.” ( Quoted directly from, The New Yorker Magazine 11/11/19 entitled “ Those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it. When America deported its radicals by Adam Hochschild)
Many immigrant Jews and Italian Americans were deported unconstitutionally in those days. They were ordinary bakers, not realizing their name was inappropriately used on Communist or Socialist Club lists. The clubs were merely trying to increase their membership.
It wasn’t until Louis F. Post, a journalist, owning ” the New York Truth , was appointed Secretary of the Department of Labor, under Woodrow Wilson, that he could overturn injustice. He personally invalidated the deportation of 3000 immigrants for being denied their Constitutional Rights and ruled that any alien subjected to the deportation process was entitled to full Constitutional safeguards.
By 1928, the American Government was restricting the entrance of Asians to our Country. And so the brutal cycle of exclusion continues. Why?
Is it because we’ve lost our sense of self and Community. If we were comfortable in our own “ skins” , would we hate or fear others? What do you think?
The heart and pulse of “We the People “.