Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

While Lalami discusses a wide range of historical events, from 15th-century conceptions of race to Donald Trump’s presidency (2017-21), the overarching historical significance of the text centers on the practice of colonization, also called imperialism. Colonization is the process of occupying and establishing ownership of territories outside a nation’s borders, and it always involves one of two processes: internal hierarchy or displacement. Internal hierarchies occur when the colonizing force, such as the Spanish conquistadors, takes over a territory but does not remove the region’s Indigenous people. Instead, a hierarchy is created within the colony that holds the colonizers above the colonized groups but maintains the presence of autochthonous peoples within the bounds of the colony. Displacement, on the other hand, mandates the removal of all Indigenous peoples from the boundaries of the colony, with few exceptions, labeling them as foreign and excluded from the colony.

Lalami presents a series of former colonies as examples and evidence. Each of these, despite being independent from its colonizers, developed according to the method of colonization employed at its inception. In the case of Morocco, where Lalami grew up, the French established an internal hierarchy that placed native Moroccans, who are largely Arab Muslims, below the French in terms of legal rights, social mobility, and interpersonal perception. Lalami recounts that many of her teachers in school were French and French-speaking; even after independence, France held a degree of power over Morocco and Moroccan affairs. Internal hierarchy maintains a large population of non-colonizers within the colonized territories. Thus, when Morocco, for example, became independent, most of its population was still Moroccan, not French. This allowed the development and enrichment of a postcolonial—or after colonization—identity.

The main topic of Lalami’s work, though, is the US, which is itself a postcolonial nation, having been established by the English in the 17th century. The US, however, was founded on the displacement method of colonization, in which Indigenous people were excluded from colonial affairs. They were often killed or restricted to areas outside colonial boundaries. As such, when the US attained independence, it was established as a copy of European ethnicities and values in many ways. Prior to independence, the American colonists were considered second-class citizens by the English people who ruled over them. The oppression of Indigenous peoples and of people of other races who were brought to the colonies by force established a broad hierarchy in which white American colonists derived power only from their oppression of non-white groups. After independence, postcolonial America became an imperial force. Instead of developing its own postcolonial identity, the US mirrored the English and European cultures and values from which it developed.

Across Lalami’s essays, it is important to note that issues of racism, sexism, and xenophobia line up with the displacement method of colonization; she notes regularly that there is an implied American-ness to being white, being of European descent, speaking English, and adhering to “Western” values of Christianity, social norms, and patriotism. These norms are rooted in the broad hierarchy of America’s legacy of colonization and independence. The colonists, who were held below their European masters while maintaining dominance over the non-European peoples of the region, reached the top of the hierarchy. Thus, the dominant power structure within the US is akin to the internal hierarchies of other colonies, such as Morocco, in which those of European descent co-exist with those of non-European descent, but within a framework of legal, social, and political bias in which Europeans or their descendants still exert majority control.