Wednesday, February 15, 2012

“The Land of the Free”


          

            I never thought of myself as an immigrant, not until recently. I thought I was an academic / writer / public intellectual crossing borders, writing, doing research, going back and from Romania to the US and back and, most of the time, living in a country that was so diverse and used to its diversity that accent and skin color didn’t matter as long as you worked hard and got along with everyone else.
            Somehow, at the end of my bios that I had to submit for conferences or publications, the phrase “originally from Romania” made its way. And once I heard myself say, in a faculty meeting, “as an immigrant woman,” which kind of scared me. I didn’t think I was an immigrant. I thought I was a hip academic who happened to have an accent and a Romanian passport.
            Yet after ten years of teaching and writing, after living in New York, Texas, Michigan, and New Jersey, teaching more than a thousand students in the process, struggling very hard to get an academic job, and even getting some two-year positions, it gradually dawned upon me that I’m not a tourist, I’m not visiting, that I actually live here, work here and work hard for that matter, and that the locals, from my students to the USCIS, do think that I’m an immigrant, a newcomer in a long series of arrivals, someone who has given up being in the country of their birth in order to be here, the land of the free.
            Ok, fine, but what do they have to say about it? At the beginning of every course I teach, one of my students usually informs me that they can’t stand it when immigrants come to the United States and then criticize their country. They also say that the US is the land of the free and that in the US people have freedoms they don’t have in other countries. Usually it’s students who have never traveled abroad who say that.
            Now I agree that counting who has how many freedoms where is a tough question to answer. But my student are right in a way: in the United States, we talk about freedom a lot. The United States does pride itself in its national identity, like every nation should, and it defines its national identity as “the land of the free”. In contrast, Romania never thought of itself as “the land of the free.” If anything, they would call it “the land where Romanians can be free,” given that Romanians had been dominated by Turks, Russians, and Hungarians from the Middle Ages on.
            So it’s all fine so far, we can call the United States “the land of the free”, but that sets it up high and at some point or another the US has to respond to such lofty expectations. And it does at times and it tried to do so, in an honest way, many times in its history. Like for example during Radical Reconstruction, when the South experienced one of the most progressive “interracial democracies”, or during the 1960s, when women gained new freedoms, or more recently, by attempting, again honestly, to expand the definition of marriage.  
            But that begs the question, how should we define freedom? Is it “freedom from” you name it—government interference in private matters, government regulations, taxes, ideological control, etc.? According to John Dewey, American philosopher, that would be freedom defined as a negative concept, freedom defined as the absence of something.  
            Or should it rather be freedom, defined as a positive concept this time, to do what makes us happy (provided it doesn’t hurt someone else), freedom to thrive, freedom to be healthy and generous and creative and freedom to make sure that everyone has opportunities to do the same?
            I’d love to live in a country like that.           

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