The following excerpt is from Sen. Marco Rubio’s book Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity. It can be purchased here.
In October 2015, a student at Claremont McKenna College wrote an essay in her school newspaper. The student, whose parents were working-class immigrants from Mexico, wrote that she felt “out of place” on her college campus. According to her essay, this is because the college—and the country, for that matter—makes people from immigrant families such as hers feel “abnormal” and “unwelcome.”
In the first paragraph, the student tells a story about being made to feel shame that her father, a first-generation immigrant, made his living as a waiter.
“When my fifth-grade teacher asked the class to write about our career of choice,” she writes, “I, of course, wrote ‘waiter.’ He politely asked if I could choose something else.”
As the son of a bartender, I found it hard not to feel a certain amount of empathy.
But it dissipated quickly as I kept reading.
“One of the many things I’ve learned from queer activists,” the student writes, “is that assimilation does not equal liberation. Achieving the ‘American Dream’ for myself does not mean that people like my parents, relatives, or hometown community will stop being de humanized or that they will be given the respect they deserve … These feelings [of inadequacy] caught me by surprise as I had never known what it felt like to be the ‘minority’ in my predominantly immigrant, low-income Latinx hometown.”
In these few sentences, you can find almost everything that has gone wrong in the debate over immigration and inclusion in this country. When I was a young man, I often felt the same lack of belonging that this student writes about. But back then, the answer for young immigrants was not splitting off into racial affinity groups, tearing at our imagined wounds, and penning dramatic op-eds in student newspapers about our irreparable sense of unbelonging. We did not siphon ourselves off from American society and create new, nonsensical terms like Latinx to distinguish ourselves.
Instead, we got to work and absorbed the culture around us—and we contributed to it. We assimilated because it was the norm—it seemed natural. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the political left was focused on labor unions and helping members of the working class. When they did embrace identity politics, they did it for the cause of inclusion rather than exclusion, arguing that everyone should be granted the same rights no matter their ethnic heritage. In doing so, they followed the example of great civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., who once called our founding documents “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” In other words, our mission was to bring people together under one shared national identity.
But slowly, beginning around the 1990s, elite institutions began adopting identity politics as a tool for exclusion and division. Activists spoke of interlocking oppressions and the impossibility of understanding anyone else’s life story. In the years that followed, we were introduced to completely new terms: safe spaces, toxic whiteness, and “microaggressions,” the latter of which has been defined by a professor from Columbia University as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.”
In 2014, just a year before this student at Claremont McKenna published her essay, the University of California published a list of supposed microaggressions. One of the terms was “melting pot.” Apparently, when a “person of color”—another coinage of woke activists—heard the phrase “melting pot,” all they heard was a white supremacist telling them that they didn’t belong in the country. Obviously, this was nonsense, and it should have been treated as such by intelligent people everywhere, especially on college campuses.
But it wasn’t. For a while, anyone who dared speak out against this deranged ideology was quickly silenced for fear of being “canceled.” People were fired. Others were threatened with the loss of their livelihoods. Most of the time, this happened to people who had no ill intent. It happened to people who had simply chosen the wrong words, used a phrase they shouldn’t have, or forgotten to include some piece of language that the mob demanded of them.
Copyright © 2023 by Marco Rubio. Reprinted by permission of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers