By Dionne Ford

It doesn’t make sense. I’m a black woman married to a white man with two biracial daughters, living in a town known for its diversity and open-mindedness. I see myself as accepting, always wanting the best for everyone, respecting people of all kinds. So why does the topic of immigration enrage me so?

When the radio and TV pundits call for immigration reform, laud pro-immigration marches or anti-immigration rallies, I scream, “Why so much fuss about them? No one has ever cared so much about us! They come here and they think they’re better than black people anyway.” I whine like a forgotten stepchild and storm out of the room. Not about illegal immigration, but the topic as a whole triggers a black hole of anger, free-floating and unspecified, that scares me because I don’t understand it. Afraid I’ll get sucked into the vacuous hole, I push the topic from my mind, but one day my neighbor catches me off guard, forcing me to confront my immigration rage.

“Are you going to any of the pro-immigration marches?” she asks. We’re standing, as we do every day, at the school bus stop, waiting for our daughters to come home. My response—that I am definitely not going to any of the marches and that I am sick of hearing about immigration which is, in my mind, a non-issue—surprises her. “After all,” I say, “rules are rules.”

I cringe as soon as the words are out of my mouth. The fellow mom is Asian-American. I remember her saying that her family had emigrated from Korea. “I didn’t mean you,” I want to assure her. But that’s no better than all the times people say something racist about blacks, then try to backtrack by saying they weren’t referring to me.

“We’re all immigrants,” she says, her normally wide smile fading.

She reminds me of the pundits. Looking up into the maple tree I respond, “I’m from here.”

She cocks her head, studies me, and frowns. “But where were your parents from?”

“Oklahoma, Mississippi and, briefly, from Bakersfield, California,” I say, each syllable more terse than the last.

She looks puzzled. “But where did their parents come from? Weren’t they from the islands?”

“No,” I snap. “They were from a continent.” That’s not entirely accurate, because my family has been here for at least four generations and who knows how long it’s been since any of my ancestors was really from Africa. I once saw a picture of my great-great-grandmother, a Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma with long, gray, braided hair rolled into a bun at the top of her head. No one remembers how she hooked up with our great-great-grandfather, whether he was a sharecropper or maybe a runaway slave.

But I don’t share this with my Asian-American neighbor. I cross my arms across my chest to discourage her from asking any more questions. Normally, we’re smiling about volunteer duties and gossiping about who got smashed at the latest fundraising dinner. But she presses on.

“Slaves were immigrants, too,” she declares, as her little dog barks.

The bus pulls up, saving me from having to respond.

Back home, I am angrier with the dirty dishes than they deserve. I rehearse how I will ignore this neighbor from now on. I’ll come late to the bus stop, and I’ll drive and sit in the car, windows up, eyes focused on the rearview only to see when the bus is coming. My hands steeped in darkening dishwater, I wonder when I became so bitter. And why.

How could I, having grown up near military bases in a neighborhood that resembled a mini United Nations, harbor so much animosity toward immigrants? I think of a friend, who says, “If you’re hysterical it’s historical.” So I go to my history.

I remember my frustration when, a decade ago, America momentarily embraced the young Cuban immigrant Elian Gonzalez  in one moment but turned its back when another boat came from a little further south, its occupants not brown, but black. We let the Haitians drown.

There was my college boyfriend, an Ecuadoran-American who took to calling me things like “black bitch” and “affirmative action baby” after he’d moved on to my blue-eyed roommate.

There was the time when my childhood friend Angie Rameriz’s mom, told me in broken English, “you, black girl, get out my house,” but let the white-looking, biracial girls stay. Based on these experiences, immigrants equaled those Latinos who had planted the time bombs in my childhood that were exploding inside me now.  But recently, there’s been more fuel to ignite my rage. A Polish girl having recently emigrated was referred to us for a housecleaning job a few years ago. We were all ready to hire her until she told us her town wasn’t nice like ours because it had, “Too many blacks and Spanish.”

Are they teaching Racism 101 in the citizenship classes? Even the newest arrivals to American shores seem to know how to treat blacks according to our history: unfairly, relegating us to the bottom social and economic rungs.  My childhood impression that Latinos considered themselves better than me was revised to include all immigrants and simmered into the rage I feel today. Hearing the popular assertion that “The US is a nation of immigrants,” only adds fuel to the fire.

I can’t really explain all this to the other mom at the bus stop. But I can check my facts. So, I turn to the dictionary for some definitions:

Immigrant—one who or that which immigrates; a person who emigrates into a country as a settler.

Migrate—to pass from one place to another, to be transported; to move from one place of abode to another; to remove to another country, town, or college.

Slave—one who is the property of and entirely subject to another person whether by capture, purchase or birth; a servant completely divested of freedom and personal rights; One whose condition in respect of toil is comparable to that of a slave; An ant captured by and made to serve ants of another species.

I type up the definitions and pray for courage to give them to the other mom, saying simply, “I have a little something for you,” hoping that will be enough to make us good neighbors again. I won’t tell her how surprised I was to see that “slave” derived from “the Slavonic population in parts of Central Europe having been reduced to a servile position due to conquering;” how I read this origin of the word over and over with a magnifying glass until my eyes watered, the Polish girl circling in my mind; or  how I tried hard to see where the meanings of “immigrant” and “slave” might converge, but that detailed phrases in the Oxford-English Dictionary, while coming dangerously close, never quite collided. Not on the page, not in history, not in my mind.

Maybe one day they will, when I can see blacks judged solely on the content of their character and not the color of their skin. The late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. might not approve of my attitude which, I’m embarrassed to say, seems more focused on blacks and not the rights of all people who come to the USA. But I’ll keep examining my attitudes, as well as the racism and inequality that keep these tensions brewing, not just in my heart, but in millions of others as well.

Dionne Ford is a writer living with her family in Montclair, NJ.  Her blog, “Hooked on Writing,” is at dionneford.blogspot.com.