The senior couple and their two grandsons had been waiting in the driveway as my family pulled up to our new red-brick home in what was then a mostly white Jewish north suburb.
“Hau,” the younger boy, David, greeted me, right palm up as the fictional cowboys do when they cross paths with Native American men in old, hokey Westerns.
I was only 4. But I could sense that my new friend was trying to make me feel welcome after his grandparents likely mentioned that we were Indian, which in the mid-1970s automatically meant Indigenous people — not South Asians — to most Americans.
A few years later, another peer called out my Indian background in a less embracing manner. “Brownie,” the boy muttered as I passed him in a hallway at our elementary school. I immediately understood he wasn’t referring to me as a baked dessert or type of Girl Scout.
The harmless gaffes along with the blatantly xenophobic comments have never stopped.
Some insults lobbed in my direction are now passé. “Gandhi,” for example — co-opted as a slur by Gen X racists following the release of the critically acclaimed 1982 biopic — is no longer in vogue with modern-day bigots.
But other derogatory epithets, like “terrorist” and variations of the phrase “go back to your own country,” remain classics.
“No one wants you here, you can leave anytime, and most people would like you if you went somewhere,” a reader emailed me last month in response to a column I wrote on the adulation of Charlie Kirk, the slain far-right provocateur who unabashedly peddled white supremacy.
I am among the lucky ones.
Although I’m repeatedly told I don’t belong in this country, federal agents haven’t yet manifested these ugly words into reality for me as they have for so many others these last few weeks.
I’ve been chased by armed masked men in camouflage only in my dreams. I get to wake up from the nightmares.
Reading about the horrific U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids proliferating in my hometown, my heart grows heaviest for the scared, mostly Latino children who are detained or forced to watch helplessly as their parents are dragged away, fulfilling the cruel fantasy of many Americans who have told an immigrant or someone they think looks like one to “go back to where they came from.”
I can’t help but think about the origins of my own family’s immigration story as the Trump administration attempts to “Make America Great Again” by making it less Brown.
Recruited by Illinois Masonic Hospital in 1969 to help ease the country’s doctor shortage, my father spent whatever little leisure time he had that year walking the same path along Lake Michigan to ensure he didn’t get lost.
He’d often cry, second-guessing his decision to settle down thousands of miles away from his impoverished village where his aerograms would show up weeks after he had mailed them.
My teenage mother landed in Chicago a year later with my then-infant older sister in tow and no disposable diapers, because she didn’t know the absorbent garments existed.
When she gagged on her first bite of bland American food, my mother also started wondering what she had gotten herself into.
Soon after I was born, she did find some solace watching “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour,” mesmerized by the dark-haired Cher — the closest anyone came to resembling an Indian woman on TV back then.
My arrival may have also marked my parents’ first attempt at assimilation as they nourished their first “Amreekan”-born child — me — with baby formula instead of breast milk, believing the false marketing campaigns that pushed processed products as the more nutritional and healthier option.
At least I got Pampers.
My parents came to America the “right way,” as the legal pathway is often described by those who keep saying they only have a problem with undocumented immigrants, who are a significant part of the U.S. labor force.
The truth is the presence of immigrants of color, no matter how they ended up here, irritates many Americans, including those of Indian descent and others who have forgotten they, too, once lived overseas or had ancestors who did.
Another head scratcher for me is the disproportionately high number of ICE and Border Patrol agents who are Latino.
Economic necessity — “not a lack of identification with the immigrant experience, a dissociation with ethnic identity, and generally restrictionist immigration attitude” — is the primary motivator for this group to sign up for these jobs, according to a 2020 study by David Cortez, an assistant political science professor at the University of Notre Dame.
I try not to judge anyone who is doing his or her best to make a living.
But as Cortez implored these particular agents several years ago, it’s time to “stand up for what is morally right over what is personally convenient.”
Bullies have always enlisted others — even people they don’t necessarily like — to get their prey.
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and leads the opinion coverage at the Sun-Times.