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Foreword

The Dream the Dreamers Dreamed

Allegra M. McLeod

On July 4, 2018, Therese Patricia Okoumou scaled the Statue of Liberty in protest of US immigration enforcement tactics, decrying that in this purported democracy “we are holding children in cages.” Earlier that week, close to one million people took to the streets across the country condemning the brutality of immigrant detention centers, and earlier that same morning, on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, the group Rise and Resist had unfurled a banner reading Abolish ICE. As the afternoon wore on, Okoumou, a forty-four-year-old woman born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, sat upon Lady Liberty’s robes, and while police helicopters circled overhead and park officials began clearing thousands of tourists and visitors from the site, Okoumou insisted that she would not come down “until all the children are released.”

In this brilliant and stirring book, Unsung America, Prerna Lal connects Okoumou’s demonstration and other more recent protests to the long and still unfolding history of immigrant resistance—one that has for more than a century sought to expose the viciousness of immigration enforcement in the United States while calling for its reformation and imagining a different future for America. Just as the poet Langston Hughes decried this country’s “stupid plan [o]f dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak” while exhorting another ethos also present in America, so too do Lal, Okoumou, and the many others whose visionary stories are introduced in Unsung America lay bare the truths of racialized violence in the very foundations of the United States, while giving life to an incipient alternative borne of the struggles of those who resisted slavery, indigenous genocide, and immigrant exclusion.

Unsung America reveals that the shameful and dehumanizing treatment of children at the border are not exceptional but emblematic of the brutality of immigration enforcement and US nation-building since its inception. Through the stories Lal recounts, we learn that the violence manifested in the caging of immigrant children was honed in the separation of millions of other families, with the detention and deportation of mothers, fathers, and siblings over the course of decades. These practices were cultivated earlier still through the incarceration of mostly indigent youth deprived of the second chances afforded to their more affluent peers. And before that, through the internment of the Japanese, the removal of Native American children from their homes and of indigenous peoples from their lands, and in the kidnapping, shackling, and enslavement of Africans to build private wealth in America. Beyond the borders of the United States, too, Lal’s protagonists expose how the imperial quest for exploited labor, land, and political control has wrought immiseration and instability around the world while precipitating new waves of migration to this country. In other words, the most egregious violence, degradation, and hypocrisy involved in contemporary immigration enforcement have long been in practice here—this brutality is not a rare deviation but a defining characteristic of this country’s history and its persistent legacies.

Yet, Unsung America also holds open the possibility that, as Langston Hughes writes, “America will be!”—that the radically diverse assembly of people on this land, including formerly enslaved people, immigrants from across the globe, and indigenous inhabitants, could come together to create a more just and peaceful world. It is this struggle against US nationalist violence and to make a better world possible that animates the poignant life stories that Prerna Lal lifts up in Unsung America.

This struggle for a more just world is manifested most recently in the contemporary movements that understand immigration justice as connected necessarily to the unfinished work of abolition. But Lal makes plain that abolition should be understood not simply as the abolition of the government agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), nor even as the end of immigration enforcement more broadly. Instead, abolition entails working to create a more equitable society, without militarized borders or immigration chokeholds, and with universal access to a dignified, sustainable form of collective life. This is the egalitarian society—open, democratically reconstituted, inclusive—that was the unfulfilled hope of black abolitionists in the nineteenth century and ultimately the unrealized promise of America.

The first stories in Unsung America are those of black abolitionists and others who fought the horrors of slavery, and from their struggles we learn that after the end of the Civil War, the dismantling of the institution of slavery was accomplished, at least in part, with the prohibition of chattel slavery, but the positive goal of abolitionists to constitute a new, more equitable social order remained unfulfilled. Untold numbers of black people were lynched or criminalized for minor or nonexistent offenses, and then forced to return to labor on the plantations where they had worked as slaves—a history recorded by W.E.B. DuBois and others. Lal reveals further that among the earliest known deportation plans were efforts to remove emancipated black people from the United States. For example, more than one hundred emancipated black people perished in the course of their removal to the desolate island of Ile-a-Vache in the Caribbean. Lal recognizes a shared struggle for abolition and a more just social order to have commenced with black people who resisted kidnapping, forced migration, brutal unfreedom, and with Native Americans who fought against their forced removal from their lands.

The object of Lal’s account, however, is not to claim any likeness between immigration and slavery, or indigenous dispossession and slavery. Instead, this history serves to deepen our understanding that exclusionary and restrictionist immigration measures originate in the institutions of slavery and indigenous genocide, and to recognize the work on the part of African Americans and Native Americans to challenge and expand the meaning of citizenship and to resist exclusionary conceptions of America. Importantly, too, this history shows that the struggles of immigrants, Native Americans, and African Americans may be more closely connected than is sometimes acknowledged.

Unsung America locates a common impulse to justice in the civil disobedience of over ninety thousand Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Chinese immigrants associated with the Chinese Six Companies organized in the late 1800s to oppose the forced registration of Chinese immigrants, predominantly called the “Dog Tag Law.” This massive Chinese American civil disobedience effectively crippled the efforts of the government to surveil and remove Chinese peoples from the United States en masse. We learn as well of the stories of immigrants like John Turner, Emma Goldman, Marcus Garvey, Harry Bridges, Carl Hill, and Prerna Lal (the author) who fought their own deportation cases and while doing so sought to advance their respective ideals of greater freedom in this country, ranging from anarchism to socialism to black economic independence to queer liberation.

These struggles for social, racial, and economic justice continue today in the twenty-first century work of certain immigrants who have organized to advance the proposition that there are millions of people who are Americans in all respects but legally. Lal recounts the stories of the courageous youth who have infiltrated detention centers to organize for the release of incarcerated people there and crashed the border to demand an end to inhumane border restrictionism. The abolitionist struggle for a new beginning in America reverberates as well, we learn, in the solidarities between contemporary movements for immigration justice and racial justice—the call for “Not One More Deportation” that accompanies the Movement for Black Lives demand to “End the War on Black People”; and the dreams of Therese Patricia Okoumou and others—that principles of liberty might one day be realized in a “homeland of the free” leading “all the children to be released.”

But how will America become America, how will it move from our vicious and inequitable present to a freer and more just future? Lal offers us the crucial beginnings of an answer by helping us to see and understand more deeply the common bonds that compose already an alternative assembly of peoples. We might think of Unsung America as the prehistory of how a better world may come to be. The collective struggles and individual stories Lal lifts up clarify the scope of what we must oppose together and ultimately what we must build. Unsung America will leave you transformed and inspired to build this world together.