The Kurds are one of the very few groups of brown-skinned people that have, on the balance, largely benefitted from US Imperialism. Until the US abandoned Kurdistan almost entirely to its own fate at the end of the Second Gulf War instead of backing their dream of an independent state, directly leading to ISIS murdering enormous numbers of Kurdistan soon thereafter, of course..

Your experience is largely unique- and would not have occurred if you were a brown person from nearly any other part of the world.

At the same time the US was investing in Kurdish farmers like your grandfather and sending your parents to college, it was doing things like backing a literal genocidal regime in Indonesia, behaving in an initially friendly manner to Apartheid South Africa (until public pressure caused the US to finally start enforcing sanctions), and overthrowing the legitimately-elected Democratic Socialist government of Chile and replacing it with the murderous Pinochet far-right dictatorship that set up concentration camps across the country...

Just because a few lucky family like yours benefitted does NOT mean US influence was a net positive for most people.