Does anyone really belong in Trump’s America?
Wall that president is planning to build to keep Mexicans out is larger than the one we imagine it to be
Last week’s Kansas shooting that killed an aviation engineer, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and wounded his Indian friend, Alok Madasani, raises massive questions.
On Saturday, Srinivas’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, held a press conference. She looked visibly traumatised, but in control of herself. In her speech she asked the Trump government to explain the tragedy that befell her.
Srinivas was a “lovable man”, she said, fighting back her tears, and he was minding his own business and having a drink with his friend, when Adam Purinton, a former naval officer, picked a one-sided fight with them and shot them at close range.
Ian Grillot, a white American, who tried to intervene on behalf of the two Indians, was also shot at. Sunayana wanted the US administration to answer her the great immigrant question: “Do we belong?”
So far the authorities have refused to give a clear answer. But they said it would be “absurd” to directly connect the “hate crime” to Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.
It’s possible that this is a crime that might have well happened during the Obama days. America is a vast country, and no president can be fairly held responsible for all the actions of her citizens.
But the fact remains that Purinton asked a question and then issued an order before shooting the two Indians. His rhetoric related to race and immigration. The question was “Are you from the Middle East?” The order was: “Get out of my country.”
In the context of the paranoia that the Trump administration is encouraging, it is perhaps not difficult to understand threatened American that Purinton represents.
The millions who voted Trump into power believe outsiders are taking their jobs and draining their wealth. No amount of data and analysis that argue immigrants contribute to the prosperity and the quality of the American dream will help them change their mind. That fear, or alternative reality, is what Trump has predicated his presidency on.
Which is why Sunayana will not get a clear answer to her pointed question. Srinivas and his friend were not new to the US. They graduated in that country, and have been there for close to 12 years. In the new race-conscious America, the time you spent in trying to merge with the American society does not matter. The wall that Trump is planning to build to keep Mexicans out is larger than the one we imagine it to be. It goes through other countries as well. The Middle East, India, Pakistan, and Africa. The wall Trump is building is through people’s minds. Men like Purinton are the bricks in it.
The best one can say about the Kansas shooting is that it is not possibly directed specifically at Indians. But that does not solve the problem. The problem is that the America that is emerging is increasingly Purinton’s. The kind of man who takes a gun and shoots the first guy who looks different because he is the Other, responsible for all the larger ills.
Sunayana’s question — “Do we belong?” — then is the great summing up of the immigrant experience. Indeed, given the vast demographic movements that have redefined cultures across continents and continue to do so, it is a sweeping question on civilisation. Can an Indian belong to another culture? Can an Arab?
Trump’s great service to human knowledge is to remind us all that despite the homogenising influence of technology and relative globalisation of capital and labour, physical borders of nations stand for clear lines of demarcation between man and man, between race and race. In short, he is saying: keep off. Sunayana, on the other hand, is appealing to the generosity of the human spirit and the catholicity of the American experiment, and asking, aren’t we all humans?
As things stand, at least for the foreseeable future, Sunayana is likely to find herself facing the wall. And behind her stand Indians, Arabs, Mexicans, Somalians. A widow has become their unacknowledged legislator. Sunayana then defines a moment in Trump’s America. It’s going to be a long, pregnant moment.
As things stand, at least for the foreseeable future, Sunayana is likely to find herself facing the wall. And behind her stand Indians, Arabs, Mexicans, Somalians