America
is at a crossroads. It must choose whether to strive to become a
truly multiracial democracy, or to plunge down the current trajectory
towards a white supremacist and fascist state governed by slave
master Christianity. None of the human rights violations our
government is committing, and none of the atrocities taking place in
our name will subside until Donald J. Trump is removed from office.
The
migrant families of color caged like animals — the human zoo
specimens a cold-hearted and stone-faced Vice President Mike Pence
recently served up to please his base for the 2020 campaign —
are the deliberate, intentional faces of racialized suffering under
the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the “Squad,” the
four black and brown freshman congresswomen — Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayana Pressley and Rashida Tlaib —
represent the high-profile representatives of the anti-Trump
resistance. That Trump told the four progressive lawmakers of color
to “go back” home to their own “broken,
crime-infested countries” is a reminder that he built his
career on Birtherism, and evidence that his campaign to scapegoat
undocumented immigrants serves to “otherize” all
immigrants, naturalized citizens and native-born citizens who are
nonwhite and not regarded as true Americans.
This
White House is a white supremacist crime syndicate, a terror
organization that trafficks children and locks families in cages and
concentration camps in violation of human rights law, both for
profit
and for political gain. Trumpian policies reflect xenophobic, white
nationalist hate groups such as FAIR
that support and staff this White House, and the eugenicist
and racist
spirit of 1920s immigration laws designed to cap immigration, with
extreme limits on “morally defective” Italians
and Eastern European Jews,
and a complete ban for Asians.
The
endgame of white supremacy is genocide. Of the ten
stages of genocide,
the U.S. has arguably reached the seventh (preparation), eighth
(persecution) and tenth (denial) stages through the Trump policy
against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Immigration
is not the only example of white supremacist measures in the Trump
GOP, which adheres to white
genocide
theory — the notion that white people are an endangered
species
threatened with replacement through nonwhite immigration, civil
rights, abortion and contraception.
Republicans
sought a change to the census to include a citizenship question
solely to preserve white power. Red states, emboldened in the age of
Trump, engage in voter suppression and racial gerrymandering to
perpetuate white minority rule. Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee signed
a proclamation honoring the domestic terrorist Nathan
Bedford Forrest,
the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, who presided over the Fort
Pillow Massacre,
killing 300 black Union soldiers after they had surrendered to the
Confederate Army.
Emboldened
by the rise of accused sexual assaulter Brett Kavanaugh to the
Supreme Court, red states have enacted harsh abortion bans
criminalizing women’s reproductive freedom rather than the men
who commit rape and incest. “You need to realize that in this
country right now we’ve got a whole lot of white folks are
scared to death because they know that within 30 years, white people
will have lost their numerical majority in the United States of
America,” said anti-racism activist and educator Jane
Elliott.
“You need to know that the attempt to get rid of my right or
any other woman’s right to have an abortion is not about
religion, it is not about morality. It is about keeping white people
in the numerical majority in this country, and you’d better
realize that’s what’s happening.”
Democratic
leadership — who are not caged migrants — lack a sense of
urgency and proceed with the caution and moderation white skin
privilege affords, even in the face of emergent fascism. Unwilling to
impeach Trump and hoping to court his supporters, Democrats are
misguided to place all their faith in voter turnout to overcome a
Russian- and Republican-rigged 2020 election. Claiming they value
voters of color — their energetic base — Dems marginalize
four black and brown women lawmakers who already receive death
threats. Amid calls for bold, audacious change, Democrats would tweak
the edges of an inherently flawed system, stake out a dubious
neoliberal “middle ground” between progressives and
fascists, and return to the good ol’ days when white moderate
lawmakers got along with their segregationist colleagues.
Although
some insist we are better than this, that this is not who we are,
racial violence is very American. America is the home of the
plantation authoritarian state, the separation of enslaved black
families, and the kidnapping of Native American children forced into
boarding schools. The U.S. deported 1
million Mexican-Americans
during the Great Depression, and sent Japanese-Americans to
internment camps during World War Two. Hitler
studied Jim
Crow segregation
and took notes, and 20,000
American Nazis
once filled Madison Square Garden.
However,
we should aspire to be better. People of good will — woke and
steeped in outrage — must ensure this nation changes direction
and ends this racist madness. This is impossible while Trump remains
in office, yet even after his departure, the hard work begins of
draining the swamp of white supremacy, corruption and injustice that
is the U.S. political system.
This
commentary was originally published by Medium.com
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