The opening of the Obama Presidential Center during America’s 250th anniversary offers an opportunity to reexamine immigration, belonging and the Constitution’s unfinished promise of “We the People.”
The opening of the Obama Presidential Center. Juneteenth. America’s 250th Independence Day. Three moments—one conversation.
Together, they invite us to reflect not only on the American story but on the distance between America’s ideals and each generation’s willingness to pursue them. What I hadn’t anticipated was being invited into this convergence as my own story became part of the story America tells about itself.
A few weeks ago, I stood in the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. Visitors moved through the museum’s immigration exhibit, reading about a movement that helped change the United States. The museum included my story as essential to helping shape that chapter of history in the United States.
It was surreal. For years, that chapter of my life had felt uncertain, unfinished and almost impossible to explain. Yet there it was, preserved inside a museum dedicated to the United States’ first Black president. As visitors paused to read the exhibit, they saw my outcome—I saw the distance.
I saw the years between who I was and who I became. The people who carried me when I could not carry myself. The prayers, risks, disappointments and acts of faith that stitched together a life that often seemed determined to come apart. Most of all, I saw a question that has followed me across continents, identities and decades.
What does it mean to belong?
That question lingered as I walked through the museum and stopped beneath the sign hanging above an exhibit that includes my story: “Welcoming New Americans.”
At first glance, the phrase appears to be about immigration. The exhibit certainly was, at least in part. But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized it was really about membership—about who gets included in the we. After all, what does it mean to welcome someone? Not simply to admit them. Not simply to document them. Not simply to recognize them in law but to make room for them in a shared story. To make room for them in a shared future.
Suddenly, the sign above the exhibit and the opening words of the Constitution felt connected: “Welcoming New Americans” and “We the People.” Words separated by centuries, yet engaged in the same conversation.
Who is we?
For much of my life, I thought belonging was something you found: a place, a community, a passport, a home. Now I believe belonging may be something we build together. That realization took me 30 years—and not because I lacked an identity. I arrived in the United States carrying one.
This country knew what to do with my struggle. It never quite knew what to do with my pride—or the fact that I arrived carrying an inheritance older than the nation itself.
My story has never been about escaping the circumstances of my birth. Long before I arrived in the United States, I knew who I was. I carried the stories of Ile-Ife, an ancient city in southwestern Nigeria and the ancestral home of the Yoruba people. I carried generations of memory, responsibility and pride. I carried an understanding of myself shaped by family, culture and history. I arrived carrying a history older than the nation that would spend the next 30 years struggling to make room for all of who I am.
The challenge was never that I did not know who I was—it was whether all of who I was could belong, all at the same time, in the same place: the daughter of a proud Nigerian father, an immigrant, an engineer, an advocate, a woman comfortable in rooms of power and a woman excluded from systems governing her own life.
For years, I participated in my own reduction. I learned which parts of my story people found inspiring and which parts made them uncomfortable.
The undocumented immigrant made sense. The chemical engineer complicated things.
The advocate fit neatly into the narrative. The proud Yoruba woman carrying generations of history did not. This country knew what to do with my struggle. It never quite knew what to do with my pride—or the fact that I arrived carrying an inheritance older than the nation itself.
So, like many people navigating different worlds, I became fluent in translation. I learned how to present the version of myself that required the least explanation. I told the parts of my story that made people comfortable and quietly carried the rest.
But there is a cost to constantly translating yourself. A cost of shrinking your story into something easier for others to understand. A cost to believing that belonging requires simplification.
My family’s story began long before the United States of America—yet here I am, invested in its future.
In a year commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States, the Obama Presidential Center opened to the public on Juneteenth. Juneteenth commemorates the moment freedom reached people who had already been declared free. It is a reminder that recognition and reality do not always arrive together. Perhaps that is true of nations as well as people: that legal status and lived experience are not always the same thing. There can be a painful distance between inclusion on paper and belonging in practice.
Black American history and immigrant history are not the same. Nor should they be collapsed into one another. Yet both illuminate a question that has shaped this country from the beginning:
Who is included in the “we”?
As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, that question feels especially urgent. Not because our history is settled—but because our future is not. The U.S. has never been held together by a single origin story. The story of this land did not begin 250 years ago, nor has it ever belonged to a single people.
What makes this experiment extraordinary is that people carrying profoundly different histories continue choosing to invest in a common future.
That is not weakness—it is the source of our strength.
For years, I believed citizenship was the destination. I understand now that it merely changed the question. The U.S. is not the place where I learned who I am. It is the place I learned what I am responsible for.
Citizenship did not erase where I came from—I am still my father’s daughter, carrying the pride, expectations and inheritance that shaped me long before I arrived in the United States of America. What it did do was expand my sense of responsibility for where we are going. That realization changed the way I think about belonging.
Belonging is not acceptance. Acceptance is too small a word.
Belonging is not assimilation. Assimilation asks us to trade pieces of ourselves for entry.
Belonging asks something far more ambitious: It asks whether a society can be confident enough to make room for complexity. Whether people can participate fully without erasure. Whether we can bring the fullness of who we are into a shared future.
There is power in that kind of belonging. People protect what they feel part of, and they invest in what they help build. People fight for what they believe belongs to them, and democracy is sustained by that commitment.
Perhaps that is why the phrase “Welcoming New Americans” continues to linger in my mind—because “welcome” is not merely a matter of policy. It is a question of whether people can join a shared story without surrendering their own. Whether we can build a society where belonging does not require us to become less ourselves.
My family’s story began long before the United States of America—yet here I am, invested in its future. Not because America asked me to forget where I came from. Not because citizenship erased the identities I carried before I arrived. But because belonging, at its best, does not ask us to choose between our histories and our hopes. It asks us to place them in conversation with one another.
Who is “we”? For nearly 250 years, the U.S. has been trying to write that answer.
The question now is whether we are brave enough to build a version of “we” large enough for people to bring all of who they are into the future we share.
You may also like:
FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, Ms. magazine’s sweeping series marking America’s 250th anniversary through a feminist lens, including Founding Feminists, which reexamines the nation’s history through the women who shaped it; Feminist Lessons, which explores the defining victories, setbacks and organizing strategies of each decade since the 1970s; and the ongoing Democracy’s Feminist Future section, which looks ahead to the challenges and possibilities facing the next generation.
