Raised on Everything
I grew up saying goodbye in Spanish and Italian, waking up to Japanese pop music. My closest friends were kids of immigrants, refugee families, Germans who’d thought beyond their own borders. Their food on the table, their holidays in my calendar, their entire way of seeing the world bleeding into how I understood things.
Being forced to think only in German, to let only one culture’s inheritance live in my head, would have killed something in me. Would have made me duller and smaller and less capable of anything interesting. Every thought I’ve had worth having, every thing I’ve made worth looking at, came from having people around me who saw things differently.
Racism is straightforward. It’s people being too lazy or too scared to actually understand something foreign, so they just hate it instead. It can be obvious—slurs, violence, being asked where you’re really from. Or it can be quiet: no apartment, wrong kind, not people like us. But it’s the same thing either way: cowardice looking for an excuse.
I read something once about someone deciding to celebrate openness not as some great moral project but just as a basic acknowledgment: it would be nice if we didn’t have to keep fighting this fight. If people could just let the walls in their heads come down without making a federal case out of it. We’re not there. Maybe we won’t be for years.
What I know is simpler: I am the person I am because of people from everywhere. Take that away and I don’t get a pure version of myself—I get nothing worth knowing.