My mother immigrated to this country shortly before I was born. She has told me many times that she feels an immediate connection with immigrants. That there is a common bond.
I think that my mother being an immigrant has greatly affected the way I interact with others and view the world.
I love learning about languages, cultures, and foreign events. I like meeting immigrants and asking them how to correctly pronounce their names, what languages they speak, knowing about their religious practices.
When people ask how Barack Obama will do with foreign policy, I wonder why it is even a question. I believe in his foreign policy abilities the same way I believed in Bill Richardson’s. Obama, Richardson and I have something in common. We all have one parent who was a white American and one who was not. All of us have lived outside of the United States and all of us have a non-white, non-USian parent. We learned to fit into different cultures, to grow up within them and make them ours. We come to the table with a perspective that is unique in that we know we have to listen and be open in order to understand the ethos of a foreign language, culture, and perspective.
The world wants to connect with us, the United States. They want to admire us and it is hard to admire us if we come in with an arrogance and without a desire to understand.
I told my friend recently who has been grappeling with the idea of himself as a foreigner or Gringo “…you’ll never fit in and yet you’ll belong to all…colonization does that to us.”
Barack Obama grew-up as all POC in the US do, never quite fitting in and yet he belongs and makes room for himself in all groups. He is a product of colonization as many of us are and because of that he can connect with foreign policy in a way no past US president could have.