Proclaimed as the land of opportunity and success, the idea of America seemed so great to my nine year old self in Nigeria.
In America, they were “technologically advanced and everybody was rich” but the reality of the country only registered to me after spending time in it.
Now, after seven years of living in this country I can say that the idea of coming to America is overrated.
This pedestal that America is put on is only recognized by those who don’t inhabit it. The ‘privilege’ Americans have seems so lost on them. I used to wonder why this was but I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t recognize their advantages because either they don’t have any or all the countries around them have the exact amount of ‘privilege’.
Despite this, America is proclaimed as “the land of opportunity”, yet no one ever seems to mention that those opportunities are only for privileged rich white men. No one mentions the endless discrimination people face just because they don’t fit America’s image of perfection. America is supposed to embody the pinnacle of success and have a level of greatness that all other countries should strive to reach.
In America, racism is embedded into the culture and education. The society has poverty entrenched in its system. People come to America for opportunity and education but the opportunities most immigrants get either extend to being a construction worker for wages subpar to minimum wage or being janitors in the halls of universities watching the education they came to this country for being taken for granted. Yet the education many so desperately seek in this country is riddled with overbearing and seemingly impossible costs.
The many who come to America are primarily the ones who face the most discrimination, so imagine my surprise when I arrived for my first day of fourth grade in a new country with my carefully practiced American accent and someone asked me why, if I came from Africa, a ‘country’ of hungry children, I wasn’t visibly malnourished.
Families like mine are torn apart, stretched between continents just so relatives can have opportunities in a country where they’d be discriminated against for their accent, skin color and ambitions. People would spend their life savings just so that their nephew or granddaughter could go to a school where their skin color was the butt of jokes.
While I’m not undermining the chance that only a select few get and the sacrifice my parents made to bring me to this country, nor am I saying that Nigeria is a perfect county, I’m just stressing that America is just a regular place.
America is not a dream land or the greatest country to ever exist.
America is just another country.
