Looking “American” by Timothy Trainer
July 15, 2025 — Has anyone ever said to you: You don’t look “American”? For some foreigners, making such a statement isn’t so strange. Foreigners who are ardent fans of basketball or football can be forgiven if they are confused about what Americans look like given the fact that in both the NBA and NFL black/African Americans make up over half the players. NBA receives an A for racial and gender hiring practices – ESPN, 20+ National Football League Demographic And Financial Statistics [2023]: NFL Revenue + History – Zippia.
The world of sports doesn’t reflect everyday life or, in some cases, reality. These days when there are raids to round up people, detaining them and deporting them to an undisclosed location or unnamed country, it’s worth exploring this strange and weird notion of looking “American”. There’s a funny thing about this looking “American” concept and idea. Looking like you are a descendant of someone from Europe, i.e., like Trump and a lot of his anti-immigrant minions, you should be the first suspects rounded up and put into a detention facility.
When someone like the border czar Tom Homan says things like ICE agents being able to confront individuals without probable cause and detain them because of their “physical appearance”, that seems to mean that agents who might have true links to being native Americans should be able to go up to people who look like Homan, Trump and Hegseth and detain them. Homan claims ICE officers ‘don’t need probable cause’ to ‘briefly detain’ people.
Apparently, there is great confusion about what “Americans” look like. For those who have taken U.S. History in high school or college (apparently a course that did not make an impact on many elected/appointed federal government officials), you might recall that there were people living on the North American continent when those European explorers arrived in what has become the United States. Strange as it seems, many of the people being rounded up and deported or simply caged in detention centers look more American than the masked people who are doing the rounding up.
First and foremost, the United States is located on the North American continent. That would tend to imply that everyone in Canada, United States and Mexico are “Americans”. Beyond this, the western hemisphere is made up of two continents: North America and South America. That might be a hint that everyone living in these two continents can legitimately claim to be Americans. There is some support for the idea that native Americans are those people who are the aboriginal peoples of the whole western hemisphere. Native American | History, Art, Culture, Reservations, Tribes, & Facts | Britannica.
Another thing to consider when wondering about this whole looking “American” concept is that those who have studied past migration patterns find support for people coming to the North American continent from Asia. The Origin of Amerindians and the Peopling of the Americas According to HLA Genes: Admixture with Asian and Pacific People – PMC. This migration predates the Europeans by thousands of years. Stretching the point and raising the question, do Asians (Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, etc.) look more American than those whose ancestry is European?
Now that we have an Administration that would like to take the United States back in time when those descended from Europeans controlled everything, e.g., corporate board rooms, educational institutions, military, maybe it’s time to be honest about what’s going on here. Given that masked men wearing guns and badges are carrying out instructions from those who look like Trump, Homan and Bondi, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to think that the current onslaught that rounds up U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who look a certain way is nothing more than a bigoted effort to falsely make U.S. citizens of European descent feel “safe” from their own fears of “others.”
About the Timothy Trainer: Writing books is a passion for attorney Timothy Trainer, who for more than three decades focused on intellectual property issues in his day job. He has worked in government agencies and in the private sector and his assignments have taken him to 60 countries around the world.
Tim found time to pen a few non-fiction tomes, including his first book, Customs Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights; the 15th edition was published in 2022. Thomson Reuters’ Aspatore Books published Tim’s next title in 2015, Potato Chips to Computer Chips: The War on Fake Stuff.
Fiction was a genre he always wanted to try. In 2019, Pendulum Over the Pacific, was released by Joshua Tree Publishing. “This political intrigue story is set in Tokyo and Washington, D.C., and centers on trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan in the late 1980s,” Tim explains.
In 2023, his first series hit bookstores: The China Connection.
In 2025, he published the sequel, The China Factor, which ranked #63 on the Amazon Asian Literature list in May.
Learn more about this book and Tim’s writing process when he’s interviewed by author Jeffrey James Higgins’ for his new Inkandescent podcast and video show: Elaine’s Literary Salon.
Learn about Tim’s work and books: timothytrainer.com
