In these enlightened times, we have finally moved beyond the crude, outdated notion that birthplace confers belonging. Or rather, we have refined it. If you are born in America and arrive via the correct vectors of marginalization—preferably with papers stamped in the language of the Global Majority—you are, of course, an American. Full stop. Thee Supreme Court just made this clear. Your presence enriches the tapestry. You are the vibrant thread that makes the whole garment worth preserving.
But if you are born in America and your lineage traces, however distantly, to those who committed the original sin of settlement, then you are something else entirely. You are a colonizer. You are a guest who has overstayed by several centuries. You occupy stolen land, breathe stolen air, and—most unforgivably—vote on stolen ballots. The distinction is not arbitrary. It is moral physics.
Consider the elegant symmetry. A child born yesterday in a Cleveland hospital to parents who arrived last year from wherever the State Department still processes arrivals is an American by the ancient jus soli magic. This is uncontroversial. Yet the descendant of someone whose great-great-grandparents cleared a field in Pennsylvania in 1785 is a settler-colonial artifact, ethically equivalent to a squatter in a National Park. The former embodies the American Dream. The latter embodies the American Nightmare, and should probably mail their property deed to the nearest federally recognized tribe before someone does it for them.
This is not contradiction. It is nuance.
The colonizer thesis requires us to hold two truths simultaneously: national borders are imaginary lines drawn by violence, except when they protect the hyphenated identities of recent arrivals, in which case they are sacred and any questioning of them is xenophobic. Similarly, indigeneity is a sacred state of original belonging—unless the indigenous in question built empires, practiced slavery, or engaged in intertribal warfare, in which case we apply the gentle academic filter known as “context.” History, after all, is not a ledger of universal human failing. It is a morality play with only one cast of villains.
One hears the sputtering objection from the usual quarters: “But every nation on Earth was founded by conquest!” This is both true and irrelevant. Other nations lack the unique burden of having produced the Enlightenment, constitutional liberalism, and the iPhone. Their sins are therefore picturesque. Ours are structural. When the Mongol hordes swept across Asia, they were merely expressing robust migratory traditions. When English settlers arrived in Massachusetts with terrible timing and worse agricultural skills, they launched five hundred years of microaggressions against people who had been minding their own business in sustainable harmony with the land (never mind the archaeological evidence of earlier waves of conquest; those were pre-colonial, and therefore pre-problematic).
The solution is as straightforward as it is uncomfortable for some. Americans—real Americans, the ones whose Americanness is not tainted by ancestral productivity—should continue to celebrate their unproblematic presence. The rest of us must engage in perpetual atonement: land acknowledgments at the start of every Zoom meeting, voluntary wealth redistribution calibrated to melanin and generational distance from Ellis Island, and a quiet acceptance that our very existence constitutes ongoing harm.
Some will call this logic self-loathing. They misunderstand. It is not self-loathing. It is other-loving, applied retroactively and asymmetrically. To love the newcomer is to interrogate the native. To affirm the hyphen is to dissolve the root. This is progress.
In the final analysis, birthplace does matter. It matters until it doesn’t. The rule is simple: If you’re born in America, you’re an American—unless you’re the wrong kind of American, in which case you’re a colonizer living on stolen land, and your highest civic duty is to make yourself as small and reparative as possible while applauding those who replace you.
Anything less would be ahistorical.
Mx Chou is Associate Professor of Decolonial Epistemological Law and Director of the Center for Narrative Reparations, University of Coastal Guilt
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About Author
Mx. Sandra Chou, PhD. PhD.
(she/they/grrrl) Mx. Chou is the most intersectionally progressive person in the world—a transwoman trapped inside the body of a transman. Grrrl only eats fruit that has fallen off the vine and identifies as a paraplegic polar bear.
