To My College Students

Abstract

I want to apologize. To my students who are new immigrants from countries on Trump’s list of banned peoples. To my students from Somalia and Iraq, Iran and Sudan. To those who came here as refugees from Bosnia, most of them Muslim, and also from Myanmar, also Muslims. I want to apologize to all of my Muslim students. And to my Nepali students who were forced to leave Bhutan because of their ethnicity and because they are Hindus. The Muslim ban affects them too, because it says that even here in America, you can be persecuted for your religion or your ethnicity, and that even your status here as legal residents does not protect you.These students—with their elegant head scarves, kangas, and long skirts, with their many languages, their musical accents, their dedication to learning and deep listening—are an essential part of our community and the Muslim ban has struck a deep wound into its heart. I say its heart, even though immigrants are a small minority, because the order offends the very idea of a public college, which has been the portal for immigrants into American life throughout our history. And I say heart in the sense of the part of us that feels sorrow and is the source of our compassion. These immigrants, especially refugees, are human beings, often traumatized from living too close to the existential edge. The threat against them looms over us all, as a harbinger of worse things things to come.I want to apologize for the lack of curiosity Americans show towards you, who will simply say about you, borrowing that formulaic phrase, that you came here because you “wish to have a better life,” as if it were merely better to survive than to be killed by a car bomb or an airstrike or to drown at sea.I apologize that we have allowed this to happen, that we have so poorly understood you. I apologize that we did not fill the streets and the airports—the way we did in response to the Muslim ban—when our government dropped bombs on your cities, or profited from the sales of weapons used against you. That we have done nothing to stop the fossil fuel burning that has turned your lands into deserts.I am sorry that we have been so ungrateful for the gifts you bring. I teach at this community college because of you. You lend meaning to words that I would never have imagined. I lost two cities. Lovely ones. Whole continents. Because you help us to see the world through new lenses; because you help us to see ourselves.Since the election, we have already been wounded by the assault on the values we uphold as educators—on curiosity, on learning, and on critical thought, and by the crude bludgeoning of language coming directly from the highest office in the land. And now, with the Muslim ban, there is a darker cloud that has descended upon the classroom, which no longer feels like a safe place for the exchange of ideas, where there is self-censorship and suspicion.I am sorry that you, immigrants who want so badly to learn, have arrived in this time and place, when we are so confused as a country that we have brought on this chaos and division, and that you, who share no blame in this, are caught in the middle of it.We have seen this before—when groups of people are singled out, marked, and excluded. Who are feared for their Otherness. That is why the Muslim ban has struck such a nerve. That is why we will not stand passively by. That is why a genuine apology will require so much more than words.