‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

It begins in civility. Eye contact. A smile.

Do you think Trump will be removed?

I hear the wall-size television screen behind me: Trump. Impeachment. Senate hearings.

No.

The Central Park Five, the Birther fantasies, the tossing of paper towels in the aftermath of an earthquake in Puerto Rico, the sexual assault charges, the big tax breaks to the wealthy class, the mocking of disabled people—why commence with an understanding of what justice means now?

No!

But she’s not interested in Trump, the impeachment, or the Senate hearing. She’s an older white woman, liberal on the edge, I suspect. If she’s anything like her fellow residents in this small Wisconsin town, she’s tolerant of those who must be tolerated, unless there’s an opportunity for her to ride rough-shod over my audacity to stand my ground.

And, standing, I wait. She’s watching me as I look back at her. A no-no!

They just lie, and her voice has raised some, her face, animated. “They” seemingly points to Republicans defending Trump, but not always, necessarily…

Jobs!

I hear the word and know I have arrived in her America where she quickly follows up with something about people who don’t work. In her world, the anger of black woman unifies white Americans in the notion of their own oppression.

Two or three other white women are seating themselves at the table and, while busily shuffling the slick colorful ads in the local paper among themselves, each catches a glance at me.

There are no good jobs out there.

But she’s still not listening, instead, she’s talking, not necessarily at me. The other women at the table are her audience. She has an audience. Witnesses to whatever happens. To whatever is imagined to have happened…

My son… Works several jobs…

Her son?

I’ve worked three jobs too when I was teaching college in Chicago. Three city colleges. Two classes at each.

She doesn’t have to listen.

You will agree that charity isn’t the answer?

Charity?

I look at the other three at the table. One or two look up but quickly return to shuffling the ads among the group.

We don’t talk politics here.

She’s up from her seat, passing me, headed toward the coffee machine behind me.

I look at one woman, I just came in! And shrugging her shoulders, she’s busy again with the ads. Not one here is free to break free!

Everything is politics. I respond, but I know I’m speaking to a group for whom anything I say will not matter one bit. For them, I’ve become the bull in the ring, readied for the kill.

She’s returned, pulls the coffee cup down, and takes her seat, but it’s the voice of another woman with her back to me. Embolden.

We have our opinions, and they are all right!

But she never turns to look at me. She’s talking to the women, at the table.

My time was up! Run along now, back in my place!

Two minutes. Three, tops. That’s everyday. Any day. And what difference does it matter where? It’s everywhere and anywhere, for any person of color in America. White American liberals have the luxury of embracing those hardened in their beliefs about race and contrary to economic justice.

The old colossus, an American symbol of ownership, supremacy, require no physical pedestal in a park or in a harbor…

*

I’ve been to New York City twice in my life, and I’ve seen the Lady standing in the harbor. A picture in a travelogue doesn’t relay the allure of such a figure, what she represents to those fleeing oppression.

How many Jews fled fascist and totalitarian regimes in the 20^th Century and set eyes on the Statue of Liberty—only to be turned away. Under the Roosevelt administration. Increasingly grime narratives of Germany atrocities inflicted against Jews, and in lesser numbers, Africans, Gypsies, Jehovah Witnesses, gays, and lesbians ended civil handshakes among Western heads of state, including the US, and the fascist regime. When politically expedient for the US government to remove Hitler, too transparent in his pogroms to exterminate a whole population of humanity, there’s finally a flow of Jewish refugees, sailing into the harbor and setting eyes on Lady Liberty.

From Poland, Romania, Russia, Austria, Hungary, and other countries in Europe, refugees came to the shores of America, some speaking English while others, German or Russian or Yiddish. Some had family in the US while others represented the sole surviving member of their family. Some had resources while others had empty coin purses, empty pockets.

I see these immigrants looking up at the Lady in the harbor, grateful for being alive and free from tyranny.

To be white in America is, among other things, to take on the tasks of white America. And the tasks of white America is that of controlling and maintaining a tight grip on power and wealth—all the resources, institutions necessary to sustain the lives of white America. Controlling the mobility of Indigenous, black, brown people, no matter how long these people have lived and worked and struggled on American soil, is so much the norm, it’s unconscious to most white Americans who consider their hard work, careers, just about caring for their families. Just being American!

I see, too, the Italians and the Irish overcoming the disadvantages of being the newest on the block, the outsider, the foreigner. Some Irish, accumulating enough capital, bought plantations from Anglo-American planters.

In Hollywood, The Birth of the Nation premiered in 1915. Lynchings were a common event in America, barely noticeable by the vast majority of whites—unless one of those infamous postcards of a Sunday afternoon picnic happened to arrive by mail to a family member in some other part of the country. Eyes look back at the viewer. They are smiling. But the figure in the middle of the frame, hanging from a tree branch, isn’t able to speak of the atrocities he or she has experienced. On American soil.

Europe’s immigrants were here, too. Proud and civil.

*

Appearing on a plaque at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty is a sonnet written in 1883 by poet and activist Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849-November 19, 1887). The words suggests a paradise lies ahead—and not the one featured in “The Garden of the Covenant” or “The Garden of the Chattel.” In contrast to errant narratives, ahead is a democratic paradise!

The doors of the United States is open, no matter race, class, gender…

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand.

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she
With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’

Tired. Poor. Wretched. You are all the more so, welcome to America! Emma Lazarus herself was German on her great-grandfather’s side. Other ancestors include Portuguese Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, arriving as some did, to New Amsterdam (New York).

In South America, Jews fled to escape fascism while the Nazis fled to escape accountability for implementing social, cultural, political, economic pogroms to effectively stifle to lives of European Jews. Before extermination. Today, in South America, the US-driven War on Drugs has long rendered the everyday a no-win situation for women and children in particular. At the US-southern border, the wealthy and powerful are building a “beautiful” wall is intended to serve as the final deterrent for the tired, poor, and wretched, for those seeking an escape from violence and poverty that in part is thanks to US economic interests.

According to Executive Order 13780, March 26, 2017, the tired, poor, and wretched from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, and Venezuela are subject to a new narrative, less poetic, in which the idea is to protect the US from foreign and terrorists attempting to enter the US.

Under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, (yes), this order is, according to authors of a Truthout article in December 2019, “a distorted definition of anti-Semitism that deems any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic.” The Jews, first and foremost, became a “protected” class, and, as you can imagine, they aren’t having it.

What does this policy mean, writers Talia Kamran and Eva Kalikoff, for pro-Palestinian protesters—many of whom are Jewish?

But the policy ultimately protects the right of the wealthy and the powerful to stack the deck (policies and laws) in such a way as to maintain control over the vast majority of humanity and material resources. Indigenous populations and African Americans can’t take from us! People of color can’t take our country! Our right to privilege ourselves! Our identity! Our interests!

Recognize the kinship between these racist executive orders and the alternative version of Emma Lazarus’ poem, the one the poet never wrote. You may have felt the roar—the Lady in the harbor is no longer civil:

“Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,” uttered by none other than a descendant of Italians and Irish, the Principle Deputy Director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Ken Cuccinelli.

Hear the Chief US Citizenship and Immigration Czar: No charity!

A seize at the harbor is attempting to usurp Lady Liberty. What appears new is but a very, very, old menace. See the powerful and the wealthy hoisting a canvas backdrop, concealing the Lady with an image of a male on horseback, forever waving Confederate flag.

This would seem to be the last image at the end of the story, except it’s not. The backlash becoming the norm is not the end, and historically, it rarely is.

*

Somehow I have still a few of those black and white images I captured back in the 1970s with a manual 35mm, given academia’s disdain for the “foreign” and the necessity, as a result of appearing threatening to white identity, to travel lightly. After completing my BA at Columbia College Chicago, I took a photography class (including darkroom sessions). All these decades later, the photos have survived to remind me of another time.

Looking on at these mounted and framed images, mostly of locations in downtown Chicago, I wonder if I would feel free to carry a similar camera, snapping shots here and there, without being made to feel as if I were an intruder? Would someone call the police?

Citizen or foreign, people of color can be mistaken for an “alien.”

She was charged with trespassing; nonetheless, we still have the images. A kind of discourse of photos surrounding the one in which a black woman, a Congo-born, naturalized US citizen, Teresa Patricia Okoumou is climbing the Statue of Liberty. She’s seen photos of children of migrants from South America attempting to cross the US-Mexican border, children detained in cages. In cages! Crying three-year old children. Preteens and teens, some siblings of the babies, forbidden from touching the little ones. The Americans, uniformed guards, look on.

In another photo is Okoumou standing in front of the courthouse wearing a green dress, with white letters, in the front and back: “I really care. Why won’t U?”

“We stand on the right side of the history,” she said. “I am not discouraged.”

Holding ground at the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, the black woman points back to The New Colossus.