The outcry on ‘American Dirt’

A few days ago, a book called “American Dirt” appeared on bookshelves and promised to become the next new “must-read,” that volume you almost wear as an accessory, pulling it up on your Kindle so the lady sitting next to you on the bus can see what great taste you have, or conspicuously packed at the top of your tote bag. It was chosen by Oprah for her literary equivalent of knighthood, destined to be January’s Book Club title and, because of that, a money-making juggernaut. It was going to be “a thing.”

Then the vultures of multiculturalism, the woke folk, mobilized against the author Janine Cummins, for reasons I will get into in a minute, and the fairy tale became very Grimm. If you Google the poor woman’s name, you will find some of the most disgusting invective in English and Spanish, and I have the dubious benefit of being fluent in both languages so it’s been an absolutely lovely few days on Twitter, seeing Mujer’s inhumanity towards Mujer.

Most of the criticism is centered around the fact that Cummins is not Latina enough. It all started when Latino/a authors, readers and reviewers realized that this book, which tells the tale of a Mexican mother and her son who are forced to make the dangerous trek to the border because of threats on their own lives, was written by a white woman. Cummins is 25% Puerto Rican through her maternal grandmother, and 75% (or almost ¾) Irish. That means she is not “brown” enough, apparently, for the indigenous folk who believe that you can only write about a culture if your 23 & Me results come back sufficiently pure.

When I happened to mention how stupid it was for members of the Latino community to be outraged at a novel that was written to highlight the difficult plight of Latino immigrants, I myself was attacked with comments like “what do you, a white woman, know about the immigrant experience.”

This is how I responded to one young woman:

“25 years helping legalize them under immigration laws. Being godmother to client’s kids. Holding their hands at detention centers. Traveling to consulates to plead for them. Waking at 2 a.m. when their fathers are about to be deported. Fluent in Spanish. But yeah, not brown enough.”

I think the reason that I am particularly outraged by this ridiculous attempt to punish people for coloring outside of the lines (pun intended) is that as an immigration lawyer for the past quarter century, I have learned to empathize deeply with people who do not look like me, who don’t speak like I do and who, God has not forbidden, identify as a different gender. Twenty five years putting myself in the place of immigrants who are at the most vulnerable moments in their lives, standing at the entrance to this great country and asking to be let in, has given me a sixth sense for what it means to be Mexican, Albanian, West African, Lebanese, Salvadoran, Chinese, Pakistani or Algerian. That doesn’t mean I am an expert in all of these cultures. But it does mean that I understand what it feels like to be different, and want to embrace something bigger than yourself.

That is ultimately what “American Dirt” is about, a story that tries to give a fair and loving portrait of an illegal immigrant and her child. It is very important to that portrait in this day and age, where we often see immigrants and immigration used as a political bargaining chip. I just the other day got an email from a reader who attacked me because

I don’t hate Donald Trump enough for his taste, and he argued that this completely delegitimized my work as an immigration attorney.

That angers me, and conjures up words that I cannot safely use in a column.

And that’s exactly the same emotions that are raised by the PC attacks on a book that, regardless of literary merit (some have said that it uses some shallow stereotyping) deserves to be judged by what is written on the page, and not based upon the DNA, melanin or ethnic last name of the author.

That I have to keep writing columns like this just shows me how far we have to go in our journey, much farther than an immigrant mother and her son running toward the border.