A print of this photograph by Dorothea Lange hangs on my office wall.  It means a lot to me, but not because it’s some kind of memento of, or statement about, my becoming a U.S. citizen last year – something visitors to my office sometimes assume.

The picture was taken in Oakland, CA in March 1942, but the banner you see on the storefront was  placed there on December 8th, 1941 – the day after the strike on Pearl Harbor.  Look carefully at the business owner’s name painted on the window.  Mr. Wanto, a graduate of the University of California, was forcibly evacuated and his business shuttered, and he was interred with thousands of Americans for the duration of the war for no other reason than that he was of Japanese descent.  His banner – unbearably poignant – is at once a protest, a defense, an explanation, and a plea to the conscience of his neighbors.  The words don’t contain even a trace of the pride we usually associate with them.

In 2016, a year when one of our Presidential candidates demonized Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers and routinely abused Muslim citizens, can we expect to see banners like these appearing in other parts of the country, as Americans born outside the country or to parents born outside the country are forced to defend their status and allegiance to their neighbors?  Public discourse in this election season has been unusually poisonous, but none of us should tolerate our politicians deciding if some citizens are “more American” than others.  “I am an American” is a phrase that ought to speak to the values that unite us.  Used any other way, it betrays everything the country represents.