A white man’s country
NB: If they wanted a white man's country they should never have imported all those slaves. DS
Just as Trump and his backers make historic racism newly visible, the American anti-racist past needs to come more fully alive. Racism may be momentarily more visible and better funded, but the 20th-century campaign for democracy is as much a part of American history.
The idea that some US inhabitants deserve the land, deserve to stay and to occupy it, and that others must go - to be exterminated (Native Americans), to be exiled (black people), to be driven out (Chinese and Japanese people), to be barred from immigrating (Italians, Jews and other southern and eastern Europeans), to be removed (Mexicans) and, briefly, challenged as citizens (Irish Catholics) - has changed shape over time in terms of the permitted stayers and the non-permitted exiles.
But the conviction
that only some people – that is, white people (however defined) – deserved US
citizenship based on race held on for a very long time. After all, the initial
US Congress began its work in 1790 by limiting eligibility for naturalisation
to the free and the white. In the 1970s, I
thought changes in US laws and customs had put cries of “get out” and “go home”
to rest. I thought the legislation of the 1960s on immigration, civil rights
and access to the vote had put all that behind us, in law, at least, if not
totally in practice. I thought the United States had turned a corner, had moved
away from “this is a white man’s country” and relegated “go back to where you
came from” to schoolyard taunts.
I also thought back
then that naked voter suppression had largely ended. And yet it still exists
today. But it’s not just disfranchisement that’s current. It didn’t occur to me
in the 1970s that outright bigotry like Donald Trump’s would be uttered in
public. It didn’t cross my mind back then that a president would indulge in
textbook-level racism out loud. Today, along with
millions worldwide, I’m shocked and angered by Trump’s taunts against four congressional women of colour, the
latest and most acute in his record of verbal bigotry. To make matters
worse, Trump’s followers in North Carolina revelled in his meanness
by chanting his views, to his clear delight.
In the 1970s, I could not imagine
such presidential behaviour as the American future, although I would certainly
recognise it in the American past. Trump has made us
admit that the “white man’s country” past – the past of publicly uttered white
supremacy that Trump channels, the unabashed bigotry and xenophobia, the long,
long past of race hate in the American south, but also in the west and the
north - flourishes among us... read more:
