February 28, 2018
Subtext has become text. For the last fifty years, racism was hinted at in coded metaphors, dog whistles like “law and order,” and “welfare queens.” After the brief halcyon days of the Civil Rights movement, a backlash ensued in which policies were enacted in the name of “neutrality” or “fairness” that deliberately overlooked literal centuries of injustice and had the effect of arresting or erasing any progress that the nation had made towards equality.
The Reagan presidency ushered in an era of selfishness that encouraged us to define our self-interest as narrowly as possible. School funding was slashed such that many kids’ sports and music instruction became the sole province of the affluent. Unions were weakened and profit as a value was elevated to the point where companies eliminated pensions and moved jobs overseas, leaving large swathes of the industrial heartland hollowed out, consigning their denizens to despair. The result was that millions of Americans, Black, white or Latino, were left with no path to prosperity. The conservative solution was to demonize and imprison as many Blacks and Latinos as possible through the War on Drugs and to mine the rich vein of racism and unthinking Christian fundamentalism to keep white Americans from turning on the wealthy.All of these developments set the stage for where we find ourselves now — governed by demagogues who are all too eager to foment genocidal rage and a sense of hopelessness in the American public at large. Over the weekend, Trump gave a speech at CPAC which twisted the lyrics of the brilliant Black musician and activist, Oscar Brown, Jr., to compare Latino immigrants to venomous snakes who would turn on their beneficent hosts and kill them. This blatantly racist scapegoating has antecedents in Nazi Germany and Rwanda. The sight of Trump being enthusiastically applauded by an audience of Hitler Youth wannabes was truly chilling.
The backdrop for Trump’s incitement is the continuing saga of ICE run amok, freed by John Kelly from any rules that would constrain the gleeful sadism of its agents. Just Monday, we learned of an ACLU lawsuit to reunite an asylum seeking Congolese mother who was separated from her seven year old daughter by ICE agents in San Diego. The two have been held in separate detention facilities 2000 miles apart for four months (Source: “A mother and child fled Congo fearing death. ICE has held them separately for months, lawsuit says,” by Derek Hawkins, The Washington Post, 2/27/17).Lest we think that the contagion is limited to the Executive Branch, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Jennings v. Rodriguez that the government had the right to detain immigrants indefinitely without bond hearings while they awaited final adjudication of deportation proceedings (Source: “Supreme Court throws out ruling that said detained immigrants deserve bond hearings,” by Robert Barnes,The Washington Post, 2/27/18).
Trump and his enablers are doing their level best to dehumanize immigrants so that we are are inured to their indefinite detention and unbothered by their victimization at the hands of violent racist civilians. We cannot avert our eyes. This is our government, doing this in our names. If we don’t do everything possible to topple these people from power, blood will be on our hands too.
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