We are a forgetful nation

By Ali Behdad

Each November, families and friends gather on Thanksgiving to celebrate a value that lies at the heart of our self-understanding as a nation: hospitality. By sharing an elaborate meal, we commemorate the first feast that our Pilgrim ancestors shared with their Native American friends whose generosity helped the first generation of new settlers to survive.

The spirit of Thanksgiving — of strangers welcoming newcomers and lending a helping hand to those most in need — has helped to define the American character, and to make us justly proud as a generous nation of immigrants founded on the idea of openness, opportunity and hope to all in need. This hospitable regard for newcomers is suitably captured in poet Emma Lazarus’ quintessential expression of American generosity: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

And yet, as we celebrate our hospitality and embrace our identity as an immigrant nation, we turn a blind eye to the fact that we have gradually become an intolerant nation, neither hospitable toward newcomers nor generous toward those who do not share our values.

At the root of this transformation lies historical amnesia. As Lee Iacocca put it in his argument for turning New York’s Ellis Island station, once the nation’s top federal immigration center, into a museum: “We’re ignorant about how we started.”

Increasingly, through our policies, we have turned our backs on the huddled masses who have come our way, even as we engage in unpopular wars to impose our values upon others. We seem to have forgotten Franklin D. Roosevelt’s admonition to “remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”

Our national poet Walt Whitman celebrated the United States as “a nation of many nations.” Yet when President John F. Kennedy wrote his acclaimed book, “Nation of Immigrants,” strict quota laws served as the backbone of the nation’s exclusionary attitude toward immigrants.

More recently, an era of new nativism was marked by the passage of Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot initiative aimed at denying undocumented immigrants social services, health care and public education in California. And lately, we have seen militarism at our border with Mexico, and xenophobia toward Muslim and Middle Eastern immigrants.

As we feast on Thanksgiving Day, let us practice the art of remembrance. It requires more than embracing a selective and mythical view of the past — one which overlooks the bleaker moments of our history, such as the genocide of Native Americans, the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans, the colonialist annexation of Mexican territories, and the harsh discipline long meted out to Jewish, Italian and other immigrants at Ellis Island.

The art of remembrance is about working through our history in a way that helps us untangle our claims of hospitality from our exclusionary practices, and our democratic possibilities from our elitist tendencies. Only through a proper sense of history can we strive to honor the spirit of compassion and tolerance that defines Thanksgiving.

Behdad is chair of the comparative literature department.