Sekuru David
Sekuru David

So, a total bozo on white TV (Fox News), Jesse Watters, defended Trump's brazenly racist immigration policies by claiming that the president only wants "the best and the brightest" immigrants to come to the US and not "some guy's uncle from Zimbabwe." Zimbabwe. Uncle. Some guy. That sounded just like me, who, at the time of reading the insult, was on the Route 60 bus, heading home after teaching a class on the representations of money in literature for Hugo House. I was some guy with an uncle from Zimbabwe.

The uncle was Sekuru David (my mother's younger brother), who was Zimbabwean, and a mining engineer, and educated at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. He was not alone. In the 1970s, I had another Zimbabwean uncle who obtained a PhD at the University of Washington in education. But why consider uncles? How about my father (a theologian and an economist) or my mother (a university lecturer). Why end there? Let's turn to my cousins. Almost all of them have college degrees and live around the world. One, who lives in the UK, even has a patent on a device I do not understand. Another cousin, who now lives in South Africa, is an engineer who worked on Seattle's bus tunnel. Where the fuck was this Watters asshole coming from? Some uncle from Zimababwe? So, I tweeted this:


But I want to make something very clear. Not all immigrants have the resources and the educational background of my family. Most are here to just get the worst jobs done. Which is why this idea of the "brightest and the smartest" has no meaning outside out of the obvious circle of racism. Furthermore, you will not find anything like the "brightest and the smartest" on the very network that keeps talking about the "brightest and the smartest." They are as dumb as two stones stuffed in your nostrils. Lastly, if we look at history, American history, which is largely a history of robbery (land and labor), what we find and again and again and again are people who arrived here by boat or by legs or by plane with jack shit.

We are now deporting people who clean sewers to support families back home and also to get their kids into and through college. An immigrant of my kind (arrived by plane and with papers) does not see someone picking fruit in Walla Walla as beneath them, but as living those blunt facts of life. Presently, I live near a church of immigrants who pray, work hard, and make all kinds of ends meet. These are my people. They are as close as I get to a national feeling.