"Great is the Miracle of Human Speech"
Why I choose to go public with my story
My main interests were always science and engineering. I never thought one day I would be a public writer and speaker. What the bookish 18 year-old me fell in love with was the orgy of industry, science, and production going on in free countries. The more I got to read about the processes of polymer production, jet fuel refinement, and chip manufacturing, the more I wanted to escape Iran and become a part of the industrial revolution.
When I escaped, I was legally not allowed to pursue work or education. Not because I wasn’t qualified, but because of where I was born.
I still remember the day I came to that realization. The free countries were not as free as I thought. They oppress immigrants the same way Iran oppresses religious minorities. They took everyone I loved away from me. They’re not letting me get my dearest little brother out of Iran. I lost most of my friends, some to suicide, because there was no visa for them either. The two friends I have not lost, my best friend and his boyfriend, are about to be deported back to Iran any day.
I have to start my life from scratch today because under the current immigration laws, I had to spend the first seven years of my adult life not being allowed to work. Instead of building my resume, I had to become a sex slave to get sponsored for a visa and to have enough to eat.
Yet I see that the free countries are blind to what those laws are doing to people like me. When I told some of my American friends about my story, they became deeply surprised and encouraged me to educate the world about my experiences.
But to be honest with you, writing about my story makes me feel desperate quite often. It is emotionally taxing. I’m making myself vulnerable. I’m arguing people out of crushing me and my people under their boots, while their boots are still on the people I love.
I was worried that going public about such a tragic story will eat away at my optimism and can-do attitude. I don’t know of anyone who has experienced similar injustices, and still was able to retain his optimism.
And more importantly, I want my life to matter. I want to leave the world better than I found it. How will speaking out against injustice help me leave a dent in the universe? At the end of the day, will my story matter? Or should I abandon it and become an engineer?
Frederick Douglass
Since I started reading Frederick Douglass, my perspective has changed completely.
When Frederick Douglass escaped to the North, he expected to be treated with equal dignity. But instead, he found harrowing levels of racism, hate, mobocracy, and sympathy with the South.
He wrote:
In the Southern part of the United States, I was a slave, thought of and spoken of as property. In the Northern States, a fugitive slave, liable to be hunted at any moment like a felon, and to be hurled into the terrible jaws of slavery—doomed by an inveterate prejudice against color to insult and outrage on every hand,–Massachusetts out of the question—denied the privileges and courtesies common to others in the use of the most humble means of conveyance—shut out from the cabins on steamboats—refused admission to respectable hotels—caricatured, scorned, scoffed, mocked and maltreated with impunity by anyone,–no matter how black his heart, so he has a white skin.
When I read this, I felt like I was reading my own life story. Although his experience was in many ways more painful than mine, I also was a white man’s slave. An actual slave, worked, exploited, berated, and beaten in plain sight for four years. I had to emancipate myself, too. And to this day, the government is forcing people like me into slavery.
I have escaped to America from Iran. I understand how frustrated Douglass must have felt with the North. I lived with the fear of being hunted by the government and sent back to the hell I escaped from, just like he was. And just as the North became progressively like the South during his life, America is becoming progressively like Iran today.
After going public with his story, Douglass had to escape from America–his home– because he was in danger of being sent back to the South at any moment. He arrived in England, where he was safe and respected. He could have forgotten the evils of his past, and settled down there. But he didn’t. He decided to become an advocate of freedom, and came back to reform America after his friends bought his freedom from his master.
In the North, he was severely beaten multiple times by anti-abolitionist mobs and left for dead. In 1843, they broke his right hand which never fully recovered. He could have given up then, cursed America, and retreated into a quiet farm. But he didn’t. He kept pursuing his mission.
In 1851, his abolitionist friends boycotted him when he announced that he thinks the constitution is an anti-slavery document. His readers unsubscribed from his newspaper en masse, plunging him into debt and poverty. It looked like the battle was over. His friends had cut ties and his audience had deserted him. But he did not desert his battle. He sent hundreds of letters asking for donations to keep his newspaper alive, and he wrote a speech so powerful that it doubled his popularity: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
When the infamous Fugitive Slave Act was passed, all seemed hopeless. The United States was united in protecting slavery. Many of Douglass’ friends gave up. One of his wealthy friends (John Scoble), believing that the cause of freedom was lost in America, offered to help black people move to other countries. This is what Douglass said in response:
He sees us, a suffering people, hemmed in on every side by the malignant and bitter prejudice which excludes us from nearly every profitable employment in this country, and which, as he has well said, has had several of the states to legislate for our expulsion. In the extremity of our need, he comes to us in the spirit of benevolence, I believe, and holds out to us the prospect of a better country, the prospect of a home, where none shall molest or make us afraid. And he will think it strange that we do not accept his benevolent proffer, and welcome him in his mission of mercy and good will towards us. And yet we must say that such a welcome cannot be given by the colored people of this country without stabbing their own cause to the vitals, without conceding a point which every black man should feel that he must die for rather than yield, and that is, that the prejudice and the mal-administration toward us in this country are invincible to truth, invincible to combined and virtuous effort for their overthrow. We must make no such concession.
One of Douglass’ core beliefs was that “prejudice and mal-administration” were not “invincible to truth,” that the oppressed people should stay and fight for justice instead of giving up. And that is exactly what he did his entire life.
During the Civil War, Douglass was promised by President Lincoln that black soldiers would be given equal treatment if they enlist in the Union army. With hopeful enthusiasm, he helped recruit hundreds of black people, only to find out that Lincoln had caved in and not honored his promise. Douglass could have cursed Lincoln and started drinking. But he kept pushing him, going to the White House and refusing to leave without a meeting with the President.
My mind changed
At the time of Frederick Douglass, the institution of slavery was a formidable behemoth. It was considered normal. It had money, religion, the state, hundreds of years of precedence, thousands of thugs, and millions of supporters behind it. It was so entrenched in American politics that few dared to question it. Douglass and his abolitionist friends were a tiny minority facing a powerful institution.
Frederick Douglass was a giant of persistence, optimism, and integrity. He fought to reshape America into a truly free country, and succeeded in most part. In doing so, he suffered a lot of disappointment, pain, and even death threats. But what struck me from reading his final autobiography (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass), was how happy his life was. I expected to find a tragic martyr, but instead, I found a swashbuckling fighter, conscientious thinker, passionate father, and loving friend.
That completely changed my perception of what is possible. Douglass proved to me that someone who has been so deeply victimized can still rise up and fight injustice, and live a good life doing that.
Douglass’ life was dramatic and movie-esque. Every day of his work mattered. He fought on the frontlines of freedom versus feudalism. He was friends with, quite literally, the best people of the 19th century. Every town he went to, on every street, there were people who hated him, but also many people who really loved him.
His fight is my fight today. Slavery was a perfect parallel to today’s guilty-until-proven-innocent immigration laws. Those laws have caused immeasurable suffering, torn friendships, enslaved and exploited innocent people, and broken our politics. What was originated in 1924 America and championed by Southern racists has been adopted as the legal status quo of the free world.
Douglass’ story answered all my objections to choosing speaking about my story as my career. It matters. Speaking out matters. Those who speak out for justice make the world better for everyone and make a good life for themselves in the process.
“Great is the miracle of human speech by it nations are enlightened and reformed; by it the cause of justice and liberty is defended, by it evils are exposed, ignorance dispelled, the path of duty made plain, and by it those that live to-day are put into the possession of the wisdom of ages gone by.
“Sir:-Your vocation is to speak the word; there is none higher. We welcome you to this vast vantage ground, your chosen post. You touch the main spring of the moral universe. Truth is the saving power of the world, preach it and you bless yourself, your race and the world.”
-Frederick Douglass