Twenty years in America, powered by its enduring spirit

Iwas perched at a window seat in the back third of a Lufthansa jetliner from Frankfurt, when we started descending from the skies above Chicago. As the plane slashed through the misty clouds of a late-morning sky, I saw rolling fields, highways, clusters of suburban houses and the skyscrapers of metropolitan Chicago below me. America.

I was born in Kenya and grew up in Uganda. As a teenager, my impression of America was mostly derived from the Hollywood blockbusters that made it to our living room or in the local theaters of Kyambogo, a suburb of Kampala. America, the most prosperous, most free and most developed nation in the world, represented all the aspirations, symbols and ideals of modern life. But this caricature was informed as much by what I learned in school as what I saw in popular media.

Everything I had learned or internalized about American life was about appreciating its greatness, particularly in contrast to the circumstances of where I lived in Uganda. When I was a teenager, Uganda was just emerging from a period of war and civil strife. It wasn’t unusual for the government’s political opponents to be thrown into prison on bogus charges. We struggled with decrepit roads and schools. Reliable household running water and electricity were considered luxuries in most of the country.

America was the complete opposite. It was a democracy, rich and free, all at the same time. I’d heard it described on occasion as the land of milk and honey, and I had no reason to believe otherwise.

This is what I was thinking about when I leaned into the window of that Lufthansa jetliner. I was filled with excitement at the prospect of landing in America, to become part of yet another truism of American life — the immigrant experience. My excitement was tempered only by the uncertainty of starting over anew.

The day was Monday, May 26, 1997. It was Memorial Day — the day I came to America.

• On Memorial Day we celebrate and honor those who died while serving in this country’s military. This country’s egalitarian democratic principles of openness, rule of law, due process and free speech are built on the sacrifices of those who died in various battles. Abraham Lincoln called it “the last full measure of devotion.” For me, Memorial Day holds additional significance because it was both a literal and symbolic introduction to the history and traditions that help define the essence of what it means to be American.

On this Memorial Day, I find myself reflecting on the experiences that have shaped my understanding of America over the years.

Erford Road, a street that meanders in and out of an enclave of cul-de-sacs of houses with white picket fences, neatly trimmed lawns and the sprawling campuses of Fortune 500 corporations in suburban Camp Hill, lies just off the Harvey Taylor Bridge, which spans the Susquehanna-River in Harrisburg. It was everything I had pictured-America looking like in my teenage impressions. It was here that my two brothers, my mother and I joined my father in the two-bedroom apartment that would be our home and our introduction-to American life.

But if the relatively plush Erford Road represented the quintessential America I had in mind, it was also where I began to understand the halting ways in which American life unfolds for different people, notwithstanding the promise of great possibilities it can hold for those who pursue it.

Out walking the streets of the neighborhood on sunny summer days, my brothers and I noticed that people would cross the street and pass by us on the opposite side of the road. Fresh-off-theboat, my brothers and I didn’t necessarily dwell on this strange behavior, but it would be the first of many awkward interactions we would encounter — like police stops just blocks away from home as we returned from late-night or early morning working shifts — in the four years we lived on Erford Road. Until then, I had never had occasion to consider society’s perception of me as a black man or to account for that in my navigation of circumstances and relationships.

• I remember a sociology class in college in which we studied the theory of the looking-glass self, and it helped me wrap my head around that reality. Proposed by the American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, the theory posits that one’s identity or self-image is often formed through interactions within the context of the society one lives in — that you see yourself best if you understand the lens through which the wider society around you sees you.

I found the idea insulting and limiting, and yet I couldn’t escape the gnawing sense that American life is organized around historical and structural inequities that can be barriers for many left out or left behind on the socioeconomic ladder that is the American Dream. Many years later, I would see a similar sense of anxiety threaded through the themes of the mass political movements organized around the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.

Perhaps what I have learned most about the American experience over the past 20 years is that it is constantly evolving. At its core, America is a country of immigrants and the shared experiences that bind us together. On this Memorial Day, I celebrate both an anniversary and that enduring American spirit that allows me to call myself an American.