Ken Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Former U.S. diplomat and Fort Worth native Maryum Saifee submitted the following op-ed.
A couple of weeks ago, Bo French — the Republican nominee for Texas Railroad Commissioner — posted a photo of a stadium full of overjoyed Longhorns fans at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin, and called it “a problem far worse than he could have ever imagined.”
The problem, in Bo’s Texas, was that the kids bursting with joy looked foreign to him.
At UT, football is religion — almost to the point of tribalism. It doesn’t matter what shade you are on the outside. If you’re a Longhorn, you bleed burnt orange.
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That’s why Bo’s post was always going to backfire. The backlash came from Republicans as well as Democrats. Senator John Cornyn condemned what he called French’s “intolerance and racism,” and Karl Rove called the post “raw, uncut bigotry.”
Notably, one Republican stayed silent: Attorney General Ken Paxton, the man who claims to be running to represent all Texans.
I spent 17 years as a U.S. diplomat, the face of America in countries where I watched democracy unravel in real time. My story as a Texan — and Texas itself, in all its contradictions — was often what resonated most when I was overseas.
Last summer, the Trump administration carried out a mass purge at the State Department that pitted us against each other.
This year, Ken Paxton and Bo French fed into racist anti-Asian tropes in Texas.
And I know what it is like to watch politics turn people into categories — loyal or disloyal, American or foreign, one of us or one of them.
That instinct is bigger than any one politician or party. And ordinary Texans are often the ones who live with the consequences.
I have family near Dallas who have watched Ken Paxton try to stop a Muslim community before it is even built, simply because of the faith of the people who want to live there.
Outsiders who don’t know Texas tend to paint us as a caricature — gun-toting cowboys, insufferable racists, a place where everyone thinks the same way.
When I tell people I grew up here, especially among coastal elites, I’m often met with pity. How did you survive?
I tell them how grateful I am to have been born in Texas — Fort Worth, to be precise — because it is a place where multiple truths can coexist.
My mom’s best friend is a white evangelical Republican doctor who prayed for me after I was pushed out of the State Department last year.
We do not agree on much politically, but our friendship has never required either of us to pretend otherwise.
That kind of contradiction is harder to capture from a distance.
Texas can be deeply conservative and deeply welcoming. It can produce ugly politics and extraordinary generosity. It can be fiercely proud of its traditions while changing underneath them.
It can make room for the person who thinks differently from you — and then serve that person barbecue.
That is the Texas I know.
Maryum Saifee with Dolly Llama
Provided by Maryum Saifee
My favorite proof of what I mean is a photo I keep coming back to: me, on our family’s farm, wearing a Longhorn shirt, trying to feed a very stubborn llama.
Her name was Dolly — the Dolly Llama, pun very much intended.
She was probably from somewhere in the Andes: a non-native Texan with buckteeth, attitude, and a feisty, independent Texan spirit.
She was as Texan as the rest of us.
That’s the beauty of Texas.