Will "Crossing the Line" be in Your Hand, or Banned, Two Months from Today?

No matter. Walls can be torn down, tunneled under, or tip-toed around.

“When we reject the single story,” states truthteller and author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her celebrated July 2009 TED Talk, “we regain a kind of paradise.”

While I don’t claim to have reclaimed paradise with Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, I did aim to reject the “single story” by lifting real people out of the stereotype of “migrant” to share their humanity, with their permission and collaboration. Because the real “crisis” we face today is not just the hardening of borders all over the globe. It’s the hardening of the human heart.

It’s this world without empathy, that I bemoan.

Ms Adichie bemoans the “end of curiosity, the end of creativity, the end of learning, even,” made manifest in the epidemic of book banning, especially of literature that confronts the truth of our worst historical blunders and blindered cultural miscalculations. The solution, Ms Adichie states, is not to cover up the less savory aspects of our past, but to expose them and to learn from them so as not to commit them again.

Yet, in a world awash in disinformation, this is becoming increasingly hard to do. The reason is that any tale, no matter how tall, repeated over and over and over again until it is parroted by the many without question, has transformed into a false “truth”—no matter how far the actual truth was stretched in its metamorphosis.

The current framing of the global story of forced displacement and human migration is a prime example.

US residents have been so flooded with lies proffered 24/7 by the right-wing propaganda machine for so long that even the so-called bastions of liberalism have come to talk the same talk. Today, as Crossing the Line sheds its computer-file chrysalis to become a physical, e-, and audiobook, CNN is the new Fox on the issue. And many Biden border policies mirror his predecessors in all but name.

And then there’s Texas. Whole books could, and should, be filled with the story of Lone Star State derangement and duplicity. They would read like dystopian fiction, featuring governors, attorneys general, high-court judges, and Border Patrol chiefs, squandering billions to stop an “invasion.” 

Except there is no invasion.

There is no war.

There are just people doing what people have done since time immemorial: move away from danger and toward safety as well as opportunity. 

Except at this historical moment, they crash into a reality so alternate, a mentality so destructive it finds justification in the unjustifiable: victimizing the victims, criminalizing the caregivers, and celebrating the true barbarians—elected officials and their gatekeepers—as the “good guys” keeping us “secure.” 

In Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, I refer to this twisted, upside-down place as The Matrix, a metaphor I borrowed from Guerline Josef. In his recently launched eponymously titled book, scholar-activist Kehinde Andrews speaks of it as an affliction. He calls this affliction the “psychosis of Whiteness.” 

As I previously posted, I was in Del Rio, Texas in September 2021, when an estimated fifteen hundred men, women, and children seeking safety “suddenly” appeared under the International Bridge. I bore witness through a sleepless night as Governor Greg Abbott militarized the Texas borderlands against these individuals, most of them from Haiti, all unarmed and in need of food, shelter, water, life. 

Dignity and respect should have been theirs by right, not to mention international and US law. But when the sun rose over the Rio Grande, nearly one thousand federal and state vehicles stood side-by-side at the water’s edge—a “wall” of weaponized metal reminiscent of Silvestre Reyes’ 1993 Operation Blockade, aka Hold the Line, which became Operation Gatekeeper a year later. Based on the theory that human migration can be thwarted through deterrence, Gatekeeper remains the bedrock of White House policymaking; and cruelty for cruelty’s sake remains the strategy at its core.

In September 2021, nearly thirty years on again, I saw the practice of deterrence through cruelty in action as Abbott positioned Texas State Troopers as well as officers of the Department of Transportation, National Guard, and US Border Patrol to stop folks who’d traversed tens of thousands of miles on foot, carrying children in their arms and all they owned on their backs, from entering the promised land they sought. 

It was a made-for-Fox-and-Breitbart spectacle: they were the only media outlets allowed on the ground. It was a set-piece enactment, recalling scenes from the Tanton network bible, The Camp of the Saints, written by a celebrated Frenchman, Jean Raspail, who posited that racism and ostracism are necessary for white survival. 

“Paranoia is the recurrent symptom of Whiteness,” writes Mr Andrews, “there is a fear of the threat of immigrants, a fear of losing their traditions and a fear of Black people in general.” 

More recently, in a charade worthy of cartoon villains, Abbott’s lawmakers, who purport to be Christians, have targeted the leadership and volunteers of El Paso’s Annunciation House, which has provided for tens of thousands of newcomers since Director Ruben Garcia opened its doors in 1973. Now, these Good Samaritans are threatened with ten to fifteen years in prison if they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give the thirsty to drink, or ferry non-citizens in medical distress to the hospital. 

This is one “America” I found while crossing the line: a modern manifestation of the mentality that drove Manifest Destiny and the Munroe Doctrine. It is represented today by whip-snapping Border Patrol cowboys, Border Protection cops that kidnap kids, and elected officials so cynical they booby-trap river buoys with razor wire and circular saw blades to deliberately maim mothers and children; who erect made-for-TV “walls” of shipping containers and eight-mile concertina wire barriers; who traffic human beings with public funds and orchestrate military maneuvers against unarmed “foes.”

This “America” is not so much a place, but a state of mind: one altered by the “psychosis of Whiteness.”

Fortunately, I also found while crossing the line an “America" many of us dream about and still aspire to, where everyone’s humanity is recognized and valued: the “Beacon of Hope for those striving to live free.”

Crossing the Line is a call to action to safeguard that promise.

So let them ban my book. If they do, I will be in good company with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and other personal literary heroes, like the late, great Toni Morrison, who warned us in 1995:

“Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Besides, no matter what walls some humans build, other humans more creative and resilient will find their way around.

So let them try to build a wall between me and my readers. We’ll jump over it, dig under it, poke holes in it, blast through it. Humans always do.

If only we’d finally come to recognize the futility of erecting walls in the first place.