There’s something deeply sad and utterly lonely in the quest for purity that characterizes contemporary supremacist gestures.
Lurking behind the state-sponsored language that formalizes the pathologizing of the “illegal”, beneath the suspicion that the stranger always hides a dagger between the creases of his appearing, and alongside the proclamation of superiority that assures one of his vaunted place in the scheme of things, is a loss of faith in the astonishment of being.
The lyrics to this sad song declare: “If we get rid of those that don’t resemble us, those that unsettle us, those that confuse us with their customs and tongues, their hues and blues, maybe the world would be safer. And maybe that safety would mean something worthwhile.”
But even if it were possible to disinfect oneself and discard the offending impurities, to build a wall so high that nothing foreign could scale it, to purge the body politic of every unsettling presence, to achieve at last the gleaming sterility of the Same, what would remain?
A world without encounter. A self without edge. A mirror that reflects only itself, endlessly, until the reflection forgets it was ever a reflection at all. Until the reflection wonders if it too harbours impurities.
The tragedy of purity is not merely its violence – though that violence is real, and bloody, and ongoing. The tragedy is its poverty. The pure world is an impoverished world. It has traded the fecundity of the crossroads for the barrenness of the gated compound. It has exchanged the dangerous gift of the stranger – who arrives bearing questions we did not know we needed – for the stale air of the echo chamber.
What the supremacist gesture does not understand, cannot understand from within the fortress of its certainty, is that the very thing the self seeks to expel is the condition of its own aliveness. The stranger is not the threat to the self. The stranger is the invitation through which the self discovers it was never singular to begin with. We are composed of what we did not choose, touched by what we cannot control, and constituted by arrivals we did not sanction.
To be pure is to be alone. I do not speak of the fertile solitude of the mystic; I speak of the sterile isolation of the one who has refused the call of the world.
The border wall is not a protection. It is a tomb. A tomb called safety.
Báyò Akomolafe
www.bayoakomolafe.net
2026 W.E.B Du Bois Fellow
Schumacher Center for New Economics
Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies
Macalester College, Minnesota