GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Donald Trump’s Racist Ideas

There are a lot of things I could say about the Trump administration’s latest anti-immigration efforts. I could say that splitting up families who enter the nation illegally is cruel and that the cruelty is purposeful, designed to punish those fleeing violence in South and Central America, and to demonstrate his anti-immigrant animosity to his supporters.

I could question the temporary “warehousing”of children on military bases (which President Obama did, as well, though he was responding to the entry into the US of unaccompanied minors), which only magnifies the cruelty.

I could point out that the administration’s threat of jail time for illegal border crossers is both in humane and counterproductive, flooding an over-burdened system and turning these immigrants into criminals when, for most, their only crime was to seek a better life.

But nothing about this callousness is nothing new. It is part of a belief system that has governed Trump’s every move, one based on racism, on a view of the world that divides people into racial, ethnic, and religious classes, attributes to them broad characteristics, and then ranks them.

This approach meets the definition of racism and racist thinking, which is not necessarily about hate — though it often sinks into hatred — but about group thinking, about seeing racial, ethnic, and other classifications as definitional, as creating behavior, as dictating future outcomes. (I’m using race and racism broadly, including racial, ethnic, and religious identification under the umbrella.)

Complimenting Jews as great negotiators, which Trump did on the campaign trail, is racist even if not intended as hateful. The reason? The comment, and the thinking that underlies it, indicates a world view that sees Jews as a unity, as a single entity that shares a set of attributes, that has the same strengths and interests — and, by inference, the same weaknesses, the same failings.

Trump has spent his political life stratifying the populous into groups, with whites at the top, followed by Jews, Asians, and African Americans, with South and Central American Latinos, and Middle Eastern Muslims at the bottom. In this, he is an exemplar of his party, which has spent the last four-plus decades demonizing the various others of American society.

Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of conservative Republicans, cut his political teeth by using racist rhetoric and imposing race-based policies that made life more difficult for many African Americans. Starting with his votes against the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, Reagan’s career was defined by his antipathy toward black Americans: attacks on the Fair Housing Act when he ran for governor, a race-based agenda in California, support for states’ rights, his depiction of welfare queens and welfare fraud, his ramping up of a war on drugs that mostly targeted majority-black communities.

Reagan’s influence only broadened during the 1990s, when Bill Clinton and the Democrats attempted to out-Reagan the Republicans. There were rhetorical assaults on prominent African Americans, an expansion of the police state, and an explosion of prison construction, and new death penalty offenses. He oversaw the dismantling of welfare, tied public housing to criminal records, and so on.

A small shift occurred under President Barack Obama, though even the nation’s first black president felt it necessary to lecture African American communities on issues of morality and respectability.

This is the context within which Trump must be viewed, the context within which not only his language but his actions must be understood. Trump is not an anomaly. He rises from this history of American racism and from an intellectual effort to couch this racism in benign language.

Ibram X. Kendi, a scholar at American University, explains that racist ideas come in essentially two forms: The first is the segregationist attitude, which sees the races as distinct biologically and blame the targets of their racism for racial and ethnic differences. The second is assimilationist, which blames discrimination for creating different classes but still views these classes as absolute and determinative.

A racist idea, Kendi writes, “is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.” These ideas elide individuality, assuming that group identity determines all.

This brings me back to Trump’s immigration agenda. I’m a supporter of relatively open borders — if money and goods should be free to move across borders, so should people — and I would redefine refugee to include a much broader class of migrant. This puts me in a minority, and I acknowledge that one can be for restricted immigration without being racist.

Trump, however, has made this about race (as I said before, I define this broadly), and we cannot fight back unless we make this clear. We don’t have to demonize his supporters, but we do need to make the connections more explicit between his policies and the racial animus that drives them.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @kaletjournalism; tumblr, hankkalet.tumblr.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Medium.com/@newspoet41; Patreon.com/Newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2018

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