The day my parents took their oath of citizenship, I skipped school, put on a hideous lavender chiffon dress that I believed was the height of sophistication for a 12-year-old and got into the family Corolla to ride to the ceremony.

It was nothing like TV or the movies, where teary-eyed people pledge allegiance to their new country in gleaming courtrooms with soaring music and waving flags. My parents’ oath was administered in a drab conference room under fluorescent lighting with brutal efficiency. None of us thought to take a photo.

I didn’t feel moved until later that afternoon, when my (white) sixth-grade classmate showed up on our doorstep with her grandmother, bearing a bouquet of red, white and blue lollipops. My mom held onto the glass vase for years, a memento of that time and how kind our fellow citizens could be.

My family immigrated to the United States in 1993 from Bangladesh when I was 5, after waiting a decade for a visa. A few years later, we moved to Plano, Tex., a sprawling Dallas suburb. My parents, like most of our neighbors, came for the reasonable property values and high-performing public schools. I thought Plano was unbearably dull, but I was happy there. You could forgive me for being lulled into the false sense that we — my new countrymen and I — had collectively decided that immigrants were good, and even brown ones were O.K.