You Want to Know Who America Is, Pay Attention to Who She Was

We’ve been here before

“The Anti-Chinese wall” by F. Graetz — A print shows Uncle Sam using “Congressional Mortar” and building blocks carried by ethnic workers to construct a wall with the stones are labeled “Law against Race, Prejudice, Jealousy, Competition, Fear, Anti Low Wages, Non-Reciprocity, [and] Congressional Blunders”. Source: Library of Congress (Public domain, 1882)

In 1996, Jacques Derrida gave two important seminars on foreigners and the role of hospitality, later collected in a book called Of Hospitality. In the first lecture, “The Foreigner Question,” he says,

Isn’t the question of the foreigner a foreigner’s question? Coming from the foreigner, from abroad…the question of the foreigner is a question of the foreigner, addressed to the foreigner. As though the foreigner were first of all the one who puts the first question or the one to whom you address the first question. As though the foreigner were being-in-question, the very question of being-in-question…But also the one who, putting the first question, puts me in question.

Let’s unpack this. What Derrida is saying here is that the foreigner brings with her questions. The foreigner, by virtue of being different and othered at the outset, generates a series of questions, and the questions go as follows: “Who are you?,” “What is your name?,” “What do you want?,” and most importantly, “Who am I in relation to you?” The foreigner, because she exists, puts the host into question.

When we question the foreigner, we are already trying to decide if their humanity, their “being,” is enough like our own that we can find them acceptable. In…