When I was in college, I had the privilege of studying abroad in the beautiful, Brazilian coastal city of Fortaleza. One afternoon, when some of my classmates and I arrived at a local suqueria for our daily smoothie, a woman working there turned to her coworker and stage-whispered, “Olha amor, aqui estão nossas gringas.” One of my classmates overheard, and she was furious. “Gringas? Gringas?” she repeated. She couldn’t believe that someone would dare use that term to describe her. She was an individual, with her own unique interests, beliefs, and juice preferences — not just some generically obnoxious foreigner. (And if her Portuguese had been better, she certainly would have let them know it.)
In that moment, I felt a surge of cognitive dissonance. It seemed so quintessentially American, to me, to take offense at being minorly typecast at a juice shop, when our country has so expertly learned to demonize anyone we consider outsiders, with far more serious consequences.
Protesters in Tehran chant slogans and one holds a poster with a vampire-like illustration of President Trump to protest the U.S. strikes on nuclear sites in Iran. (Getty Images/Getty Images Europe)
And, if so, it won’t be the first time. During the first Trump administration,Code Switch talked to the journalist Jason Rezaian about the stigma that Iranians living in the U.S. have faced at different moments in recent history. He told us that during the 1979 hostage crisis, his father, who lived in California and sold rugs, was deeply affected:
“He was a U.S. citizen. He was a, you know, pillar of the community. And a lot of people stopped communicating with him. … And I think, for him, it was sort of a wakeup call that — I hate to say this out loud, but, you know, there are different levels of Americans, right?
And I think a lot of us who have roots in other cultures, who've experienced moments when our own roots or the countries of our roots have been at odds with the U.S., that sort of ugly fact comes forward that, you know, everybody is created equal, but some are created more equal than others.”
We’ve talked about it before: Trans people are major targets of the second Trump administration. But trans people have been fighting for their rights, dignity, and liberation for generations. So this week on the pod: Code Switch producer Jess Kung interviews author Caro De Robertis about their new book, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Gender Queer, and Two-Spirit People of Color.
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Before we go, a huge thanks to the many, many people who wrote in about their experiences of joy and resistance this past week. You all had some powerful stories that threatened to melt some of the ice in my heart. I'm excited to share some of them more broadly soon.
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