When Your Memories Are Gone, So Are You

" Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you." (~Annie Dillard)

Soon after 9/11, the media in the U.S. descended on American textbook publishers (mainly secondary school social studies ones) to get their perspective on how they would write about the event. At that time, I was the only high-ranking editorial director of a major textbook company who was a person of color and an immigrant. As the editorial head at one of the top three textbook companies, how and what we would write about in our American history textbooks to satisfy every side of this signal event was a mastery I welcomed.

I talked about the strength of American diversity, of E pluribus unum, out of many one, the celebration of American multiplicity and distinctiveness.

I said it with pride. I said it because I believed it. I said it because I was part of the lived history.

Since then, the rising tide and the cresting tsunami of Islamaphobia, the repulsion of the Other, and the most recent odium toward brown (yes, only the non-white) immigrants makes me unnerved, even after 54 years in this country.

Would I fit into this vast ocean of discrimination? I can’t loudly and affirmatively proclaim that today. That’s the unfortunate part.

The fortunate part is that it’s still not a gulag. And the proof of that is this. An account of a show at New York’s Beacon Theater last month with Ramy Yousef, Mahmoud Khalil, and Zohran Mamdani.

E Pluribus Unum

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