Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

By beginning the collection with “Allegiance,” Lalami establishes an immediate distinction between citizenship and being American. The essay opens with the location where Lalami became a citizen, but it ends with a reflection on the violation of Japanese Americans’ rights in the same location during World War II. These two instances frame the essay, contrasting the privilege and excitement of becoming a citizen with the power that the government has to revoke or modify the conditions of that citizenship. The essay’s title, “Allegiance,” presents one of the reasons that the government might use to justify infringing on a citizen’s rights: The US was at war with Japan during WWII, just as it went to war with various countries in the Middle East over the last half of the 20th century and into the 21st century. Lalami notes that this context serves as a pretext for questioning the citizenship of Americans of Arab or Middle Eastern descent.

Lalami’s examples of discrimination, such as hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs and the strange looks she gets after 9/11, reflect different tiers of rights in US society. Though Arab and Muslim Americans were not placed in concentration camps as Japanese Americans were, they are denied basic rights of human interaction in social settings and often experience discrimination. Displaying one’s allegiance to the US, Lalami notes, is the only way to overcome this discrimination, even if it runs counter to one’s personal beliefs. Specifically, President Bush established a dichotomy that required Muslim Americans to explicitly support US military intervention in the Middle East. Although white Americans could outright oppose these military actions without raising suspicion, Arab and Muslim Americans who shared their view risked being labeled terrorists.

Lalami demonstrates that the issue of allegiance is used as a political weapon to alienate a specific person or group or to garner favor with racist American voters. She cites the “birther” theory raised during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign administration and President Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration to the US from certain predominantly Muslim countries. Lalami notes that President Obama was often compared to other Black leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, denying him a sense of individuality as a presidential candidate. Despite his provision in 2008 of his birth certificate and newspaper birth announcements from 1961 documenting his birth in a US state, accusations championed by Trump that Obama was not a natural-born US citizen divided the country during the Obama administrations along issues of what it means to be a “real” American. In 2017, President Trump moved beyond focusing only on Arab and Muslim Americans, issuing executive orders that put in place an effective ban on immigration for people from several Arab- or Muslim-majority countries. This decision was justified on the same grounds of presumed disloyalty to the US that force Arab and Muslim Americans to constantly voice their allegiance to their country.

Though the question of allegiance can be overcome through vocal patriotism, Lalami also illustrates that, regardless of citizenship, issues of ethnicity and sex still jeopardize citizens’ social rights. Her example of border guards making the same racist and sexist joke to her husband 10 years apart helps demonstrate the enduring nature of these attitudes. In another encounter, a coworker asks Lalami if she is going to shoot him during a disagreement: “Isn’t that how you people solve things?” (13). These experiences demonstrate that, regardless of one’s broader social standing, underlying assumptions about people of color and women shape interpersonal relationships. Lalami ties many of the problems that non-white, non-Christian Americans face to statements from American politicians, policies and laws, and international conflicts, but she also demonstrates that daily personal experiences reflect regular people’s acceptance of these ideas. Americans who might otherwise feel no negativity toward Arab or Muslim Americans are encouraged to behave aggressively and feel distrusting toward these groups to maintain their “real” American status.

Throughout the essay, Lalami regularly references her mother-in-law’s struggles with Alzheimer’s and dementia, as well as her and her husband’s struggles to care for her. The purpose of this, as Lalami hints, is to combine her mother-in-law’s own immigrant story with the forgetfulness of American culture. Her mother-in-law fled Cuba in a time of revolution, seeking refuge in America. Now that she is older, she clings to the American life she built for herself and her family. Meanwhile, she forgets pieces of her past and present life. This process of inculcating fierce loyalty and involuntary forgetting is tied to America’s aggressive devotion to a past it can hardly remember. Lalami reminds the reader, as she reminds her mother-in-law, of the real details of the past, such as Muslims’ involvement in the conception of America, the contributions of people of color to American development since the country’s founding, and the struggles of non-white and female Americans to gain basic citizenship status. Thus, she highlights the undeserved and immoral mistreatment of these groups by sharing an intimate view of her family’s history.