The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America

by Nikesh Shukla

After hearing the election results, I called my brothers and asked them to please not go out that night—a line I never thought I’d speak, having rolled my eyes for years when hearing it from my grandmother. “I can’t go to school tomorrow,” Mahdi told me. “I just can’t do it.” I told him I’d pretend to be Mumma and would call in sick for him, and he could go to the movies instead. We would not tell Mumma or Baba. Each of us was in shock. That night, the vertigo hit so strongly, it would be months before my mind settled to the shift, and I knew: what was possible or impossible to expect in one’s lifetime was so delicate, and so easily undone. Each time I closed my eyes, my mind crowded with headlines and chants from the campaign I had not even realized I’d absorbed. For years we had been told it was just one man, not tied to anything greater. Yet just one man takes a stage and addresses a nation, and the next day my brother is shoved in the hallway of his high school. And just one man tweets a photo likening refugees to a bowl of poisonous Skittles, and that very week Skittles are delivered to my mother.