Ungrateful Americans

“Aren’t you grateful?”

I don’t remember when I was first asked that question, but before I was out of grade school I’d learned to expect it. It usually came after someone found out where I’m “really from”—by which they meant Iran, where my father immigrated from. Not Cincinnati, where I was born. 

I never knew how to answer. I knew only that the question made me queasy.

Because I was grateful. For things like snow days. And field trips. And when friends’ moms would get us chocolate drumsticks at the pool.

And I also knew that none of that was what I was supposed to say. The way that people avoided my eyes when I answered honestly—or shifted uncomfortably, or reminded me how great it was that I had medicine and freedom and electricity—told me as much. What I was supposed to say, I realized, was something like I’m grateful for the opportunities I have here. Or I’m grateful to have a safe home. 

But I couldn’t. While there was truth in those statements, they seemed like lies. 

It is only as an adult, looking back, that I realize why questions about gratitude left me feeling so queasy. These weren’t conversations in which someone wanted to get to know me. They were hostage situations, and the ransom was payable as reassurance. It didn’t matter that I’d never been out of the United States, or that I was so young I could count my age on my fingers. The people asking—teachers, friends’ parents, sometimes even my own white family members—felt calm and safe only if my gratitude affirmed for them that the rest of the world was the shithole they’d always imagined it to be, and the US of A really was as great as they told themselves it was. 

Encounters like these are just one way citizens like me are taught that our presence in the United States is precarious, contingent on someone else’s approval. Most of the other methods for imparting that lesson are far more violent. Concentration camps. Illegal deportations. Murder. Indefinite detention. When Americans bother to notice the abuses this country inflicts on its marginalized citizens, those crimes against humanity understandably get more of their attention. But as Moroccan American immigrant and novelist Laila Lalami argues in her 2020 essay collection, Conditional Citizens: On...