So the moment you are threatened, you decide to denounce the citizenship hard-won by your mother? You’re American, but special and different from other Americans, so you should not be beaten (though other types of Americans should be, perhaps)? Many types of people lived in, and escaped, American ghettos. Most ghetto pathology, today and for many decades now, is self-created — in America or the Netherlands. And anyone whose large family was, by your description, fed and sheltered — utterly subsidized — by the hard work of other Americans should feel some quite unambiguous gratitude for that generosity. You say you do, but then it’s back to differentiating yourself by identity and negatively contrasting our welfare system to the Dutch welfare system’s “generosity.” You can’t have it both ways — your family was treated generously by strangers forced to subsidize them, was it not, including the uniquely American part about inculcating an ethic of self-reliance and the desire to leave dependence behind?
Women can not trot so freely around Europe’s streets — or streets anywhere — but I’ve never heard of a woman in your situation resorting to denouncing their Western identity in the face of street thugs. Perhaps, because they cannot. Perhaps in the moment you were understandably seeking safety, but you don’t seem to view it this way in retrospect or comprehend the irony of the experience as a whole. Think harder about these things. If you were standing next to an American friend who was not Puerto Rican and not from New York, would you turn him over to the thugs to save yourself? That is, frankly, the logical path you have taken here.
When I read something like this, I worry that our educational system is so far gone that even someone clearly trying to think for himself is handicapped by politically correct identity-privileging and reflexive anti-Americanism.
