Can I Finally Feel Proud?

For the longest time, America has made Black people feel like we don’t belong in this country. It didn’t matter if we were Black Americans or Black immigrants; to be Black was to be other. We were all to know our place, to be grateful for the simple privilege of being allowed to exist in a nation built on our ancestors’ backs, and to graciously accept whatever scraps of opportunity were tossed our way. This was the unspoken contract of American Blackness: accept your station, and perhaps you will be tolerated.

Now, it seems the national gaze of suspicion has shifted. The rhetoric of “otherness,” once so laser-focused on us, is now squarely aimed at immigrants. I would say illegal immigrants, but I’m sure even those here legally, those who have followed every rule, feel the chill of unwantedness simply because they weren’t born on this soil. The nightly news is a testament to this shift. The faces of fear are no longer just Black and Brown boys being frisked on a street corner; they are the faces of families being torn apart at the border, of workers rounded up in factory raids.

As a Black man born in America, this transition stirs a complicated, almost shameful, cocktail of emotions within me. For my entire life, I have carried the weight of proving my Americanness. I have felt the implicit demand to be a model citizen—law-abiding, impeccably polite, twice as good to get half as far—all to justify the luck of my birthright. It was a constant, low-grade anxiety, a feeling that my belonging was conditional and could be revoked at any moment.

I see a haunting parallel in today’s headlines. The way men and women are being swept up off the streets, their lives upended in an instant during this war on “illegals,” is a grim echo of the past. It reminds me of the 1970s and 80s, when the “war on drugs” was a thinly veiled war on Black communities. Our fathers, brothers, and uncles were the ones being snatched from street corners, thrown into paddy wagons, and disappeared into the maw of the justice system, often for minor offenses. We were the “superpredators,” the national threat that needed to be contained. The fear was palpable; it was the air we breathed.

And now, that fear has a new address.

It is a strange and deeply unsettling thing to find a sliver of peace in someone else’s pain. It’s a shame that only when the focus of oppression shifts to another group of people do I finally think that maybe, just maybe, I can feel proud to be an American citizen. Is this what it feels like to be truly American? To have your belonging defined not by your own merit, but by the exclusion of others?

This newfound sense of security feels fragile, almost fraudulent. It’s a pride born not of genuine inclusion, but of being momentarily overlooked. The spotlight of xenophobia has moved, and for a brief moment, I am left in the shadows, able to exhale. But it is a shallow breath. The relief is tainted by the knowledge that the machinery of oppression hasn’t been dismantled; it has simply been recalibrated to target a new scapegoat.

Can I truly feel proud? Perhaps. But it is a pride laced with guilt and the bitter awareness that in America, for many of us, the feeling of belonging is not a right, but a privilege granted only when a more convenient target is found. The question that lingers is, how long until the spotlight swings back?