The Radical Clarity of Khizr Khan: The American Military and Immigrant Sacrifice
Memorial Day, like many federal holidays, lacks a prescribed program of observance. As the spouse of a former Marine Corps infantryman, and the cousin of a former Army combat engineer, I am grateful I have no flowers to lay at anyone’s grave on this day, as some of my loved ones do. Instead, I’m left to think about service and sacrifice, and about what it means to love this country in the darkest of times.
With the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee still up in the air amid the global pandemic, and an apocalyptic presidential election looming, I decided to revisit Khizr Khan’s speech from the 2016 Convention, which has had a profound effect on me since the first time I heard it.
Khizr Khan and Ghazala Khan are the Gold Star parents of Captain Humayun Khan, a 27-year-old army captain who was killed in Iraq while saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. For his sacrifice, Captain Khan was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. It's worth watching Mr. Khan's 6-minute speech in full (starting at around 2:40 following Hillary Clinton’s introduction).
After putting his arm around his wife Ghazala to comfort her, and as if to acknowledge her place beside him, Mr. Khan begins:
“Tonight we are honored to stand here as parents of Captain Humayun Khan and as patriotic American Muslims - with undivided loyalty to our country. Like many immigrants, we came to this country empty-handed. We believed in American democracy; that with hard work and goodness of this country, we could share in and contribute to its blessings.
We are blessed to raise our three sons in a nation where they were free to be themselves and follow their dreams. Our son, Humayun, had dreams too, of being a military lawyer, but he put those dreams aside the day he sacrificed his life to save the lives of his fellow soldiers.
Hillary Clinton was right when she called my son 'the best of America'. If it was up to Donald Trump, he never would have been in America. Donald Trump consistently smears the character of Muslims. He disrespects other minorities; women; judges; even his own party leadership. He vows to build walls, and ban us from this country.”
It didn’t matter that few had ever heard of Humayun or his parents before: he had the country’s attention at that moment. Unlike many other political speeches, Mr. Khan’s address was organic and fearless, lacking platitudes or manufactured folksiness. For my part, I saw my own father in Mr. Khan: his obvious sagacity and intellect, and the deliberate manner in which he delivered his words, neither overwrought nor labored. Having grown up in a diverse Asian enclave in the Bay Area, Mr. Khan’s accent and demeanor was as familiar to me as that of an uncle or neighbor. The pride he and his wife professed as “patriotic American Muslims” with “undivided loyalty to our country” was as obvious and visible as a badge on a military uniform. And the halting in his voice was what any attentive child would recognize as the strained cadence of a father holding back tears.
Halfway through Mr. Khan’s speech, in a startling shift, he breaks the fourth wall and addresses Trump directly from the convention stage:
“Donald Trump, you're asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you: have you even read the United States constitution?”
He reaches into his suit jacket and pulls out a booklet.
“I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words 'liberty' and 'equal protection of law'.
Have you ever been to Arlington Cemetery? Go look at the graves of brave patriots who died defending the United States of America. You will see all faiths, genders, and ethnicities.
You have sacrificed nothing and no one!
...I ask every patriot American, all Muslim immigrants, and all immigrants to not take this election lightly. This is a historic election, and I request to honor the sacrifice of my son - and on election day, take the time to get out and vote.”
It was a moment of radical clarity on the state of our country, its potential as well as its betrayals (Trump would later deride Mr. and Mrs. Khan for this rebuke and implement the first of several travel bans against Muslim-majority countries within days of assuming office). I thought of 9/11, the grief that our country went through, and the endless Forever War, the shadows of which have followed American Muslims and military service members ever since. I remember my cousin starting his first year at West Point, then shipping off to Iraq, then Afghanistan, against the desperate protests of my aunt.
For service members and their families, sacrifice often means leaving home and country for months or years on deployment; not seeing spouses, parents, or children for extended periods of time; postponing life events like college or weddings; missing a baby’s first steps. Too many service members don’t come home, or are forever changed - many come back stronger than their families could have ever imagined, yet somehow more fragile too.
Just as the lives of veterans and military families are often touched by loss, so too are the lives of immigrants. Immigrating to another country is itself a radical act. It too involves the loss of homeland, language, community, livelihood, and often, the attenuation of family ties. Many first generation immigrants like Mr. and Mrs. Khan, my aunt, or my father, took such a leap because of the opportunities that awaited in the United States to bring safety and prosperity to the families they left behind, and for the families they would one day create in this country.
As the child of immigrants, I marvel at the courage my parents must have had to start anew in this strange land, at an age that I have now long surpassed. Did they ever feel lonely? Did they miss home? How did their parents, my Ah-Gong and Ah-Ma back home in Taiwan, sleep in an empty nest as wide as an ocean? And how did my parents deal with living in an America still haunted by violence against people of color?
David Eng, Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian American Studies at UPenn; and Shinhee Han, clinical psychologist and Columbia University professor, call the grief that many first-generation Asian immigrants feel, “racial dissociation”. It is the act of mourning these losses of culture and community, an experience often accompanied by depression, loneliness, and a confusion about one’s place in society. Indeed, the pressure of relocating and assimilating to a white supremacist society can be a trauma unto itself.
Immigrants, like military service members and families, are called upon to perform and prove their citizenship and loyalty in ways both big and small, giving up comfort and safety to uphold the “American way”. Being an immigrant and having a child serve in the military, one would think, would be the surest guarantee against any doubts about one’s patriotism.
Yet that has not been the case historically. Over 18,000 Chinese Americans served in WWII, the first years of which were a time people of Chinese descent did not have the right to naturalize. And most famously, 33,000 Japanese Americans served in WWII as well, at the same time 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps. In a recent op-ed, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang cited this chapter in American history as an example of how Asian Americans could help stave off doubts about our “American-ness” in the face of COVID-related hate crimes, and was harshly criticized by many Asian Americans for reinforcing the shallow premise (and false promise) of this proposition.
The irony is that in many cases, American military interference overseas has directly or indirectly forced waves of migrants to come to our shores: the unsung Hmong allies who fought aside American troops in Vietnam, only a portion of whom were resettled in the United States; the tens of thousands of Filipino soldiers who were themselves colonial subjects and members of the American commonwealth when they fought alongside the U.S. in the Battle of Bataan. And in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where a legacy of U.S. intervention on behalf of the rich and powerful has helped incite decades of violence against indigenous communities, driving desperate migrants northward to the U.S.-Mexico border as we speak.
There’s a cognitive dissonance that underlies the American ideals for which Humayun Khan and so many others have given their lives. Yet the responsibility for ending such violence lies not just with those in uniform, but everyday civilians like us, who have the power every single day to divest meaning and power from words, institutions, and movements that enable jingoistic, imperialistic, and nativist impulses. I doubt that Khizr and Ghazala Khan would want us to take at face value the prestige conferred upon U.S. military service members. They don’t need our thanks, nor our condolences, for what they have suffered. Rather, they, their son, and many others who didn’t survive to see our country in its current state of affairs, would probably ask of us one simple thing: to fight like hell and make it all worth it.
May we remember and honor the fallen today, and hold in our hearts those who have buried a uniformed loved one in this strange place they so rightfully call home.
