Even after King’s assassination and Angelou’s poetry and eight years of an idealistic, educated family in the White House, it never went away.
It festered under the rocks, all over America, and then, like some super-microbe, it reasserted itself in 2016 with the affirmation of essentially half a country. Now racism has its spokesman, its hero, speaking things that have been gathering in all corners of this diverse country, things people of color (my friends, my relatives) hear and feel every day: why don’t they go back where they came from? This sentiment generally refers to people of color, people who are “different,” people who speak out. The Other. Now they have their man, looking to weed out all those who don’t fit into the white mold. It’s been there all along. You can see it in the smug nods of the White Citizens Council that gathers behind the Grand Kleagle himself, Mitch McConnell, in the halls of the Senate. Now President Donald J. Trump has blurted it out, perhaps to the consternation of his backers, who prefer to do it by degrees, by gerrymandering, with the assent of the Supreme Court. Goodness gracious, even servile Lindsey Graham, lost without John McCain, has urged Trump to “aim higher” while essentially agreeing with Trump. Trump and his stubby little tweeting fingers let it fly on Sunday, the rant of a bigot who needs a minder, wishing that four women – of course, women, it seems to me that he hates women – of “different” backgrounds, urging them to go back where they came from. Except, of course, three of them were born in the United States, and all of them have succeeded admirably in this country which allegedly rewards strivers. But only if you’re Our Kind. There is no need to insert the quotes here, it’s all out there. The president wants to deport Latino immigrants without the right papers, but he also wants to deport, psychologically at least, people who are different, “troublemakers” (as the Chinese call dissidents), even elected representatives who are challenging their own Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Trump is speaking to his base, which seems to think the economy is going great -- for them, and that is all that matters. He is betting that the Supreme Court and the McConnells and the state legislatures will give his party – his race – an edge in 2020. And he is willing to play the race card, out in the open, knowing he has support, a lot of support. Speaking of deporting – go back where you came from – it is worth remembering that Trump’s grandfather, one Friedrich Trump, left Bavaria and wound up in Seattle, apparently running restaurants and hotels and maybe even brothels. When that earlier Trump went back to Bavaria and sought to resume his citizenship, they deported him because he had avoided military service – a perfect example of rampaging genetics, come to think of it. Friedrich Trump groveled to the prince: “Most Serene, Most Powerful Prince Regent! Most Gracious Regent and Lord!” And he concluded his plea: “Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.” In Bavaria, they told Friedrich Trump: go back where you came from, so he wound up in Queens, New York, and his son, Fred Trump, was soon keeping black people out of his apartment buildings, on his way to shielding his revenue from taxes, to pass on to his children (one of them a judge; only in America.) Now the grandson tells four duly elected members of Congress to go back where they came from, his rant based on racism. He has touched off a storm, but Trump has an audience. It never went away. * * * (The reaction to Trump’s racist bleat on Sunday) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/14/us/politics/trump-twitter-squad-congress.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage (The deportation of Friedrich Trump) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-grandfather-germany-letter-deportation-us-bavaria-dreamers-a7903071.html https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-07-15/the-latest-trump-renews-attacks-on-4-congresswomen (Even Lindsey Graham urges Trump to aim higher) https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2019-07-15/the-latest-trump-renews-attacks-on-4-congresswomen
Seth Friedman
7/15/2019 10:34:53 am
Well done, as usual. Always great to read your writing. All the best.
Angela M.
7/15/2019 11:30:06 am
The relentless daily verbal assault on the national psyche is terribly disheartening.
Robert lefland
7/15/2019 11:25:32 am
Has the man no shame? It could be any of us. Most of us need look back very far to find the immigrant roots. First they came for the....people who looked the other way when donald trump threatened their fellow citizens.
John McDermott
7/15/2019 12:05:46 pm
The Orangutan in the White House(I should probably apologize right away here to all the decent Orangutans out there) has merely opened the door of a very dark closet(or a fungeon perhaps) and made it ok for his followers to openly express racist attitudes that they had been keeping more or less under wraps. It’s a kind of “leadership”, I suppose, in the backward, retrograde sense. Instead of Back to the Future, Trump wants to take us Forward to the Past, a past where Blacks, Jews, the Irish, Italians and Poles knew their place, what kinds of jobs they should be doing and, most importantly, where they could live and go to school. And Mexicans? Aside from those relative few who crossed the border to do seasonal farm work, mostly in California and Texas, there weren’t any. As Tom Friedman said today, now it’s four progressive women of color in Congress. But it is really anyone who is in some way “the other”. His obnoxious “go back where you came from” tweet, by his reasoning, could just as easily have been sent to Ivanka, urging her to go “back to the Czech Republic” where her mother came from. What Trump really wants is an America that looks, and thinks like him. To quote Tom Friedman again, we have a President who wouldn’t pass the basic test given to those who want to become US citizens because he clearly has no idea what America is or what it stands for.
bruce
7/15/2019 01:00:58 pm
george, 7/15/2019 03:54:37 pm
Today’s partisan gridlock and personal snipping is nothing new. It started back in the 1970’s and is well documented in Ira Shapiro’s “The Last Great Senate: Courage and Statesmanship in Times of Crisis”.
Charles Vincent
7/16/2019 01:16:46 pm
The Republicans in Congress offer no reason for a updated version of John F. Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage"
George Vecsey
7/16/2019 06:23:18 pm
Regards to the Magnificent First Seven, thank you.
bruce
7/16/2019 07:05:53 pm
george,
Edwin Martin
7/16/2019 10:26:26 pm
Beautiful, if painful, portrait of our divided nation. Comments are closed.
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