KarinKohlmeierArt

The day after the election I heard a story (the first of many, unfortunately) from a woman who was told “This is America! Speak English!” when she spoke in her native language on her cell phone in the supermarket that day. I was particularly struck by how she described the guy who said it as sort of quiet and tentative about it, as if testing the waters to see what he could get by with under this new regime. That story really stuck with me, and I thought of it again later that day when I was walking home through Harlem, NYC and heard a man speaking in (I believe) an African language on his cell phone. I thought: This is one of the things that makes American great right now! I love that there are places in this country where you can hear 14 different languages being spoken in the same day. Even the fact that I didn’t know exactly what language this man was speaking—the fact that we have THAT much diversity in our country is amazing! That’s really, really, extremely cool and something to be celebrated, not feared, not denigrated, not silenced. THIS is America! This is my America and the America that I will fight for in every way I can for the next four years and beyond! As I was walking along thinking about that, the image of this shirt popped into my head and wouldn’t let go. So I made it and here it is. I’ll be donating 50% of all proceeds to the ACLU…because they need us now more than ever.