This summer, Donald Trump (who, just in case you needed
additional proof that American politics is merely a farcical tableau vivant
rather than a functional institution, has decided to actually run for president) voiced his opinion on immigration the
only way he seems to know: through racism. He stated, “The U.S. has become a dumping
ground for everybody else’s problems…When Mexico sends its people, they’re not
sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and
they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing
crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Not only is
this an absurd generalization devoid of statistical evidence, it’s a testament
to Trump’s belief in the inherent superiority of those who are like him
(wealthy, fortunate, and white) over those who immigrate to the U.S. (who may
be any number of things other than drug addicts, rapists, and criminals). And
while Trump is one of the more verbal holders of this opinion, he is by no
means the only one. Has there ever been a time in all of human civilization
when our societal infrastructure hasn’t depended on the presence of a power gradient?
Perhaps it is a curse of the human condition, this need to emphasize
what makes us different from one another. Or perhaps it’s just easier to try to
understand our environment in terms of the “other”, native and foreign, friend
and enemy. After all, our own bodies segregate cells and proteins into self and
non-self on a molecular level in order to defend itself; this is the foundation
of immunity and the reason why we don’t succumb to overwhelming infections.
Unfortunately, human beings are too crude to understand that, while this
molecular war against outsiders is adaptive and necessary, the macroscopic insistence
on enmity among individuals is both counterproductive and intellectually lazy.
I wonder if Trump knows that race is merely a social construct (I’m guessing
that he doesn’t), or that his assertion that some Mexicans are maybe “good
people” is dependent on an arbitrary definition of good and evil. One might
imagine how such nuances could have escaped Trump.
Long have I struggled with things like race, patriotism, and organized
religion—any classification system that is based on nonspecific features other
than character, ideas, and choices. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in
an environment in which I scarcely thought about my ethnicity and the fact that
it rendered me a part of a “minority” group; certainly, if I had been raised in
a community fraught with racial tension, I might have felt differently. It
wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina that I remembered that I have brown skin
(on the inside, I feel exactly like Queen Elizabeth the First), as I found
myself fielding frequent and mostly benign “what are you?” questions. I
have no problem with my ethnicity, I simply don’t think much about it. I never
felt marginalized by the mostly white Barbie dolls I played with as a child
because they didn’t look anything like me, nor did I ever daydream about
marrying a dashing brown prince. My self-actualization was cultivated on a
foundation of my passions, my talents, and the people and things that I’ve
loved--not on the color of my skin, the country I was born in, or the God my
parents taught me to worship.
It is odd to me that we all cherish our individuality so closely, yet
have this natural propensity to fall in line with regard to race and religion,
which seem to be the enemy of individualism. How is it that people feel so
comfortable with defining their entire identity by something as insignificant
as the rate of melanin degradation in their skin cells? I understand that
people don’t necessarily conceptualize race strictly in terms of skin color,
that culture, history, and traditions factor in as well. This makes sense to
me. Culture is sturdy, durable, and substantial; I can comprehend how culture
dictates identity very well. But culture and race are two very different
things. Culture and religion are two very different things, in fact. I
have tried to understand why this distinction is so often ignored, and have yet
to come across a satisfactory answer.
Being a surgeon only emphasizes the irrelevance of these arbitrary
distinctions that we designate amongst ourselves. On the inside, everyone looks
more or less the same. I can’t tell the different between a white person’s
pancreas and a black person’s pancreas. Your left gastric artery is located in
more or less the same place, whether you’re a Muslim or a Christian. The blood
flow to your heart depends less on your skin color than it does on your dietary
and lifestyle choices. The inside of the human body is unfazed by thing like
citizenship, tax brackets, and church attendance. I’ve seen necrotizing
fasciitis (what’s colloquially known as the flesh-eating bacteria) kill African
Americans, Chinese Americans, and Caucasians in less than twelve hours—rich or
poor, religious or atheist, legal or illegal, death came for them all.
We as a civilization have made race more important than it is,
and we have chosen to wage war in the name of religion and territory. What
would we be without those things? How would we make sense of one another? I too
am guilty of my own non-hateful prejudice; assumptions are pervasive in
medicine and very few are able to look at the young, Black, heavily tattooed
male smelling strongly of weed in the trauma bay with a gunshot wound to the
chest and not think “gang member”. Are
we all hateful for making these assumptions, or have we been so heavily
influenced by the importance that society has placed on race as an indicator of
character that we are powerless to resist even the most subtle of prejudices?
My point is, there are forces greater and more powerful than you, I, or
Donald Trump could possibly understand that are directing the course of
humanity. And there should be zero tolerance for blind hatred and xenophobia.
Life is hard enough, what with mass shootings, climate change, nuclear weapons,
and flesh-eating bacteria. Is it possible that maybe—just maybe—we are
actually all from the same tribe, whether we believe in Jesus, Moses, Allah,
Buddha, or the tooth fairy? (I personally believe in unicorns, but that may be
beside the point.) On a fundamental, anatomical and structural level, we are no
different. And Mr. Trump, for all his billions of dollars and his skyscrapers
and his perpetually younger trophy wives, is no better than the Mexican immigrant
trying to cross the border to seek a better life for his family. Sooner or
later, both will turn to dust, and Trump’s dust won’t sparkle any brighter.
