There is no such thing as a good one

Note: Content warning for racial slurs.

Note 2: I feel like I shouldn’t need to say this, but please be respectful in the comments.

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When I was in my last year of college, in a town somewhere in the middle of New England, I got a letter addressed to me but with no return address.

In that letter was a lesson I’m still learning every day I live in the United States.

On a typed-out note in Arial, ~16-pt font, on an unjustified paragraph, was a series of insults and threats targeting me because of my race and my gender. Some words were so new to me that I had to Google them. One of them I still remember:

                                                                          Spic

There was nothing specific about me in this letter other than my name, from which I assume they deduced my race and gender. There was no mention of my country of origin, which I was warned to go back to. I could tell from the writing that this person thought I wasn’t an American citizen; they called me a “wetback”.

This letter was addressed to me only, not to my other roommates, who were also Hispanic women. But the insults would’ve been interchangeable between all of us.

My first feeling was confusion about the logistics of how this letter came to be in the first place. I asked myself the 5 Ws: why, who, when, where, and how. But nothing really came up in my personal inquiry. I couldn’t fathom someone who would hate me so much without citing any specific ways I had wronged them.

I didn’t really tell anyone about the letter that day, trying my best to think of this hate mail as email spam come to life. The only friend I ever told, I shared it as a joke: “Look at this weird thing I got in the mail, isn’t that funny.” I could tell by the look of horror on their face that this was not even remotely funny to them. They looked straight at me and told me I should contact the police as soon as possible.

And so I did. I went to the campus police and showed them the letter. They asked me a series of logistical questions. Like my line of inquiry, nothing pointed in any particular direction: Did I have a scorned ex? Was I active in some sort of political way? Had someone actually come and said these things to my face? No, no, no.

They kept the letter as evidence and told me to reach out if anything in particular happened. They offered to escort me at night if I ever felt unsafe.

I didn’t tell many other folks. I didn’t want to worry them, like I had worried my friend. I didn’t want to scare them, like I had scared myself.

The Nashua River, taken from this website

A couple more letters came in the next few months, with the same types of messages: saying I was not welcome here and should go back to where I came from. I got one the same month I voted in my first American presidential election. There was never any additional evidence that could direct any investigation. I took the letters to the police, but it didn’t matter. It was just generalizable hate mail coming from an anonymous source. An angry void screaming at me for no reason other than my ethnicity and gender.

I spent the rest of my senior year looking behind my shoulder, being away from my room as much as possible, and drinking myself silly so that I didn’t have to listen to the constant worry, wondering if someone would come into my room, which had a big window that opened onto the street, and “take me back where I’m from” by force. But, other than those couple of letters, nothing else happened.

I was applying for graduate school and became increasingly more desperate to leave that New England town. I wanted to go to a city where I could be one of many who are not like the many. Where if someone wants to target an individual based on the intersection of their race and gender, they will have a hell of a hard time picking out which one of us to go after.

But more than 10 years after that incident, the poison of that letter still irritates me. The specificity and generalization of the hate still astound me. But the messaging in it is as timely and timeless as ever.

I know, deeply, there is no such thing as good ones and bad ones. This is a delusion of exceptionalism some diasporans hold from our life back on the other side of the Caribbean and have transported onto this soil. A wound of divide between ourselves that we have to do the work to heal if we ever want to live in harmony, at home or abroad.

This election cycle, this divide of good ones and bad ones was a mirage we got sold. A fantasy that some of us bought into because we think we will be granted indulgences into their kingdom by anointing them as leaders.

I still think of that ~20-year-old holding that letter on that porch, insulted in ways she couldn’t even understand. She had always thought of herself as one of the good ones. That letter taught me that it doesn’t matter that I have degrees and jobs and have volunteered in my communities and have paid thousands upon thousands of dollars in federal taxes. It doesn’t even matter that I am a citizen. Some will always think of me as invading garbage.

They will always tell me to go back to where I’m from.

But I’m not going anywhere.