May 24, 2021

Blowing Up the Billionaires' Con That's Strangling America by Thom Hartmann

 Why would people adhere to arrogance and greed? - Quora

 Source: Thom Hartmann

 

As we're struggling to recover from Trump's half-million unnecessary Covid deaths here in America, fighting to get a clear picture of how extensive the sedition was among Republicans in Congress around January 6th, and trying to pass legislation to ensure clean and safe elections and put the country back into shape, dark money, foreign oligarchs and rightwing media groups are hard at work tearing this nation apart.

And they're having considerable success.

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to "do what is right" when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower 1950s administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson's 1960s presidency.

In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent of Americans trusted their government. It's so bad that throughout 2020 armed protesters showed up nationwide to protest the "tyranny" of having to wear masks during a pandemic, and then stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, all cheered on by the then-President of the United States and multiple rightwing media outlets.

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This is no accident; it's the result of a five-decades-long campaign by some of America's richest people to tear apart the governing fabric of our nation, formally kicked off by their man, Ronald Reagan, proudly proclaiming at his January 20, 1981, inauguration that, "[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

Put yourself in the place of the heirs to a multimillion-dollar fossil fuel empire, a situation akin to the "heroic" brother and sister who inherited a railroad from their dad in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged:

  • If you don't have to pay to dispose of cancer-causing byproducts from your refineries but can simply vent them into the air, and you make more money.
  • If you can cut wages and threaten employees because they don't have a union, you make more money.
  • If you can run a pipeline across sacred Native American land atop a major national aquifer with minimal safety oversight, you make more money.
  • If you can hide your money from the IRS because the agency has had its budget slashed so badly that it can no longer do expensive audits of morbidly rich people, you can keep more of the money you've made.
  • If you can get the government to cut social programs and public education, thus lowering your taxes, you can keep more of the money you've made.
So how do you pull this off, when every one of these things hurts average Americans?

Easy. Just embark on a 50-year-long campaign, through think tanks, right-wing media, and massive PR efforts to convince average Americans that government is the cause of, not the solution to, their problems. Convince working-class Americans that gutting government is a good thing that will ultimately help them in some mystical, magical way through the incredible "invisible hand" of the marketplace.

Lewis Powell, a lawyer for Big Tobacco, launched the movement to do just this with his infamous memo in 1971, and billionaires have funded and promoted politicians who jump on board the "government is evil" bandwagon ever since.

And it's largely worked, if the "trust in government" statistics compiled by the Pew Research Center since 1958 are accurate.

Years ago I was up late one night watching, as I recall, Bloomberg News on a hotel TV. The American host was interviewing a very wealthy German businessman at a conference in Singapore.

Amidst questions about the business climate and the conference, the host asked the German businessman what tax rate he was "suffering under" in his home country. As I recall, the businessman said, "A bit over 60 percent, when everything is included."

"How can you handle that?" asked the host, incredulous.

The German shrugged his shoulders and moved the conversation to another topic.

A few minutes later, the American reporter, still all wound up by the tax question, again asked the businessman how he could possibly live in a country with such a high tax rate on very wealthy and successful people. Again, the German deferred and changed the subject.

The reporter went for a third try. "Why don't you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."

There are a few wealthy Americans who understand this. But the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it's perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it makes them a few extra bucks.

They've funded and facilitated movements like the Tea Party and rightwing paramilitaries, media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart, and organizations like the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and ALEC. They throw piles of money at Republican politicians, so long as they never stray far from the "deregulate, cut, denigrate" line about American government. They sponsor climate denial to increase their own profits.

And over and over again, they've been successfully pulling this off for the past 50 years. The most recent example is the disaster we're seeing in Arizona where the majority of Republicans in the Arizona Senate, totally owned by rightwing billionaires, went along with Trump and started a phony "audit" to further erode Americans' faith in our government. Reaganism has become Trumpism, and it's all pointing toward destroying faith in democracy in America just to make a buck.

Similarly, a Morning Consult poll about saving Americans from the Covid crisis a few months ago had this headline: "With Congressional Stimulus Fight Looming, 76% of Voters Back $1.9 Trillion Plan, Including 60% of Republicans." Yet every single billionaire-owned Republican in Congress opposed it, and now they're opposing President Biden's efforts to rebuild our infrastructure, both hard and soft.

As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic that — unnecessarily — killed more than 500,000 of our fellow citizens, and struggles with rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let's remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.

May 19, 2021

The Manufacturing of a Mass Psychosis – Can Sanity Return to an Insane World?

 Mass Psychosis and the Church of Humanitarian Interventionism

Source: Academy of Ideas

“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” — Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

Diseases of the body can spread through a population and reach epidemic proportions, but so too can diseases of the mind. And of these epidemics of the latter variety, the mass psychosis is the most dangerous. During a mass psychosis madness becomes the norm in a society and delusionary beliefs spread like a contagion. But as delusions can take many forms, and as madness can manifest in countless ways, the specific manner in which a mass psychosis unfolds will differ based on the historical and cultural context of the infected society. In the past, mass psychoses have led to witch hunts, genocides and even dancing manias, but in the modern era it is the mass psychosis of totalitarianism that is the greatest threat:

“Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims.” — Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions

In a totalitarian society the population is divided into two groups, the rulers and the ruled, and both groups undergo a pathological transformation. The rulers are elevated to an almost god-like status which is diametrically opposed to our nature as imperfect beings who are easily corrupted by power. The masses, on the other hand, are transformed into the dependent subjects of these pathological rulers and take on a psychologically regressed and childlike status. Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th century’s preeminent scholars of this form of rule, called totalitarianism an attempted transformation of “human nature itself”. But this attempted transformation only turns sound minds into sick minds for as the Dutch medical doctor who studied the mental effects of living under totalitarianism wrote:

“… there is in fact much that is comparable between the strange reactions of the citizens of [totalitarianism] and their culture as a whole on the one hand and the reactions of the…sick schizophrenic on the other.”

The social transformation that unfolds under totalitarianism is built upon, and sustained by, delusions. For only deluded men and women regress to the childlike status of obedient and submissive subjects and hand over complete control of their lives to politicians and bureaucrats. Only a deluded ruling class will believe that they possess the knowledge, wisdom, and acumen to completely control society in a top-down manner. And only when under the spell of delusions would anyone believe that a society composed of power-hungry rulers, on the one hand, and a psychological regressed population, on the other, will lead to anything other than mass suffering and social ruin.

May 17, 2021

How The Politics Of White Liberals And White Conservatives Are Shaped By Whiteness by Hakeem Jefferson and Koji Takahashi

 

The rise of white identity politics in the Donald Trump campaign and the  2016 election — Quartz

Source: FiveThirtyEight

White identity is a potent force in American politics with wide-ranging consequences that are increasingly difficult to ignore. Former President Trump came to power, after all, by using subtle — and not so subtle — language to appeal to millions of white Americans worried that their power and influence in American society are on the decline.

His strategy of white identity politics has continued to work. Not only did Trump campaign on this message in 2016 and win, but after he lost the 2020 election, some of his supporters were so taken by his message that they stormed the U.S. Capitol in defense of white power and white supremacy. While white identity politics have a long, sordid history in the U.S. that predates Trump, we can see how his strategy has taken root in states across the country. Today, Republican lawmakers across the country are working to implement antidemocratic and illiberal policies that threaten to undermine a multiracial democracy all while protecting the power and status of white people.

Understanding the grievances and fear fueling white identity politics on the political right is paramount to our politics. But “whiteness” isn’t something that only animates the politics of white conservatives. Whiteness is central to white liberals’ political identity, too, especially as white Americans must navigate a social and political world in which whiteness is often and explicitly tied to racial injustice — an uncomfortable association for both white conservatives and white liberals.

For years, we have sought to understand how whiteness and perceived threats to it (in social science lingo, “social identity threats”) affect white Americans’ perceptions of their standing in society. Specifically, we have been interested in capturing white Americans’ sense of how their racial identity is viewed by others, especially in light of increased discussions where white Americans are seen as both the perpetrators of racial inequality and the beneficiaries of white privilege.

To do this, we asked white Americans in our research to list the characteristics, traits or behaviors that they think other people associate with white people. Participants came up with a variety of responses, including positive stereotypes like “hard working” and negative ones like “arrogant.”1 They then rated those characteristics, describing most of them as either extremely positive or extremely negative. But whether white Americans believed others thought of whiteness positively or negatively varied a lot by ideology — white liberals were more likely than white conservatives to list negative stereotypes.

There were also important themes in the kinds of stereotypes listed. The most consistent included stereotypes that linked whiteness to racism and bigotry like “biased” and “the KKK,” and stereotypes that linked whiteness to privilege, like “wealthy” and “entitled. Not all of the traits respondents listed mapped neatly as “racist” or “privileged,”  but almost two-thirds of participants listed at least one trait that could be categorized as such. In sum, white people, both liberals and conservatives, think of their racial identity as having both positive and negative connotations. The difference then is in how they think other people perceive whiteness, and how they, in turn, handle situations in which their racial identity is called into question, especially when it is uncomfortable, e.g. suggesting whiteness may confer privilege or harbor racism.  

A wealth of research on this topic has shown that the discomfort of being associated with either racism or privilege can lead white people to adopt a variety of defensive beliefs and attitudes. In fact, studies found that concerns about being seen as racist lead many white people to avoid situations where they may say or do anything that could be construed as racist, including having conversations with Black people. Psychologists Samuel Gaertner and John Dovidio call this “aversive racism,” or a form of racial discrimination rooted in avoidance. They find this practice more common among white liberals, who tend to be more motivated to protect their self-image as egalitarian.

And when white Americans feel that their whiteness is negatively associated with privilege, research demonstrates that how they react is particularly complex. As psychologist Eric Knowles and colleagues write, there are at least three possible ways that white Americans react to associations between whiteness and privilege: 1) They can deny inequality exists; 2) they can distance themselves from their whiteness; or 3) they can work to dismantle the systems that sustain white privilege in the first place (although this strategy, the authors note, is likely the least preferred strategy for most white Americans). 

In one of many studies illustrating how people may deny being the beneficiaries of privilege, scholars L. Taylor Phillips and Brian Lowery find that after being reminded of their racial advantages, white Americans are more likely to try and distance themselves from any racial privilege they may have benefitted from and instead describe their life story in terms of personal and economic disadvantage. Phillips and Lowery find that these narratives help white people protect their self-image and avoid discomfort without having to deny inequalities in ways that may betray their values or relinquish privileges they may prefer to obliviously enjoy.

Understanding how white Americans react to perceptions of their whiteness can help us make sense of behavior across the ideological spectrum. For instance, one reason why white people on the political right may be so opposed to The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which emphasizes the role that slavery played in structuring many aspects of American society, is because the project inherently implicates whiteness. This, in turn, reminds white Americans of negative associations that are attached to white identity, namely the relationship between whiteness and racism. And because white conservatives may be more likely to believe that critiques of whiteness are baseless, relative to their white liberal counterparts, they may show greater feelings of anger and backlash to associations they see as unfair.

On the other hand, white liberals often feel motivated to act in racially egalitarian ways to distance themselves from these same negative stereotypes of whiteness. The thinking may go something along the lines of, “Those white people are ‘bad,’ but I want to see myself as a good person.” However, committing to antiracist action is not a straightforward solution, as it is not always effective at staving off the negative emotions that come with acknowledging a legacy of racism. Moreover, this strategy can fall short in actually addressing racial inequality, as it does not alway prioritize the practical needs of people of color over the emotional and psychological needs of white antiracists.

So, what’s the bottom line? White identity is an important part of our politics, particularly in shaping both white conservatives’ and white liberals’ beliefs. And as conversations around white identity center more on the privilege and inequality that whiteness can engender, it’s likely we’ll see more concerns among white Americans that their identity may be threatened and socially devalued. But a key insight from decades of social science research is that people have a variety of strategies they can use to cope with threats to their identity, and some of those strategies serve to maintain the status quo while others challenge them. Which path white Americans take then may not simply boil down to whether they are conservative or liberal, but may depend on how they think others perceive their whiteness in a particular moment.

May 10, 2021

On Being White & Other Lies by James Baldwin (1984)

It's Too Late to Redeem HP Lovecraft, Who Was An Unapologetic Racist and  Anti-Semite - Willamette Week
 

The crisis of leadership in the white community is remarkable—and terrifying—because there is, in fact, no white community.


This may seem an enormous statement—and it is. I'm willing to be challenged. I'm also willing to attempt to spell it out.


My frame of reference is, of course, America, or that portion of the North American continent that calls itself America. And this means I am speaking, essentially, of the European vision of the world—or more precisely; perhaps, the European vision of the uni-verse. It is a vision as remarkable for what it pretends to include as for what it remorselessly diminishes, demolishes or leaves totally out ofaccount.
There is, for example—at least, in principle—an Irish community: here, there, anywhere, or, more precisely, Belfast, Dublin and Boston.


There is a German community: both sides of Berlin, Bavaria and Yo r k v i l l e . There is an Italian community: Rome, Naples, the Bank of the Holy Ghost and Mulberry Street. And there is a Jewish commu-nity, stretching from Jerusalem to California to New York. There are English communities. There are French communities. There are Swiss consortiums. There are Poles: in Warsaw (where they would like us to be friends) and in Chicago (where because they are white we are enemies). There are, for that matter, Indian restaurants and Turkish baths.There is the underworld—the poor (to say nothing of those who intend to become rich) are always with us—but this does not describe a community It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to be-come "white." No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country.


It is probable that it is the Jewish community or more accurately,perhaps, its remnants—that in America has paid the highest and most extraordinary price for becoming white. For the Jews came here from countries where they were not white, and they came here, in part,because they were not white; and incontestably in the eyes of the Black American (and not only in those eyes) American Jews have opted to become white, and this is how they operate. It was ironical to hear, for example, former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin declare some time ago that "the Jewish people bow only to God"while knowing that the state of Israel is sustained by a blank check from Washington. Without further pursuing the implication of this mutual act of faith, one is nevertheless aware that the Black presence,here, can scarcely hope—at least, not yet—to halt the slaughter in South Africa. 


And there is a reason for that.


America became white—the people who, as they claim, "settled"the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway,for example, where they were Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.


This moral erosion has made it quite impossible for those who think of themselves as white in this country to have any moral authority at all—privately, or publicly. The multitudinous bulk of them sit, stunned, before their TV sets, swallowing garbage that they know to be garbage, and—in a profound and unconscious effort to justify this torpor that disguises a profound and bitter panic pay a vast amount of attention to athletics: even though they know that the football player (the Son of the Republic, their sons!) is merely another aspect of the money-making scheme. They are either relieved or embittered by the presence of the Black boy on the team. I do not know if they remember how long and hard they fought to keep him off it. I know that they do not dare have any notion of the price Black people (mothers and fathers) paid and pay. They do not want to know the meaning, or face the shame, of what they compelled—out of what they took as the necessity of being white—Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson or Cassius Clay (aka Muhammad Ali) to pay I know that they, themselves, would not have liked to pay it.


There has never been a labor movement in this country, the proof being the absence of a Black presence in the so-called father-to-son unions. There are, perhaps, some niggers in the window; but Blacks have no power in the labor unions.


Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunninga pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names I will leave that to you. 


But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen: And how did they get that way?


 By deciding that they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a Black child's life meant nothing compared with a white child's life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that Black women, Black men and Black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of Black people, they debased and defamed themselves.


And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white. Because they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history. Because they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers. Because they think they are white, they are looking for, or bombing into existence, stable populations, cheerful natives and cheap labor. Because they think they are white, they believe, as even no child believes, in the dream of safety. Because they think they are white, however vociferous they may beand however multitudinous, they are as speechless as Lot's wife—looking backward, changed into a pillar of salt.


However! - White being, absolutely, a moral choice (for there are no white people), the crisis of leadership for those of us whose identity has been forged, or branded, as Black is nothing new. We—who were not Black before we got here either, who were defined as Black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a very long time, and have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about ourselves, survived, and triumphed over it. If we had not survived and triumphed, there would not be a Black American alive. 


And the fact that we are still here—even in suffering, darkness,danger, endlessly defined by those who do not dare define, or even confront, themselves is the key to the crisis in white leadership. The past informs us of various kinds of people—criminals, adventurers and saints, to say nothing, of course, of popes—but it is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people.It is a terrible paradox, but those who believed that they could control and define Black people divested themselves of the power to control and define themselves.

The Real “Big Lie” Is That Billionaires Are Tolerable by Hamilton Nolan

 

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the rest of the 'Oligarchic Dozen'  just reached a 'disturbing milestone' - MarketWatch

Source: InTheseTimes

American capitalism is premised on many lies. None is more pernicious than the lie that it’s possible to deserve great wealth. This lie is the most necessary one — if people stop believing it, the entire system will crumble. This is ​“The Big Lie,” and it makes a lie about a single presidential election look like a minor gripe in comparison. Yet as important as this lie is to the self-preservation of the billionaire class, they cannot help themselves from continually acting in ways that make it hard for even the gullible American public to keep on believing it.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ new $500 million superyacht will also have a ​“support yacht,” to carry his helicopter. Amazon delivery drivers are forced to piss in bottles in order to make their deliveries on time. Jeff Bezos is the richest businessman in the world. Amazon spent vast sums of money to prevent the workers in one single Alabama warehouse from unionizing so that they could collectively bargain their wages and working conditions. Remember, Jeff Bezos’ new $500 million superyacht will also have a ​“support yacht,” to carry his helicopter. Amazon brags about paying $15 an hour for warehouse jobs that should be paying twice that much. Jeff Bezos made $70 billion last year. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made $132 billion last year. This addition to his already considerable wealth has finally given him the ability to pursue his passions: Making bad tweets, encouraging regular people to make bad investments in pyramid-scheme style cryptocurrencies, and making an insufferable and unfunny Saturday Night Live appearance. Musk’s meandering path to becoming the nation’s most charmless celebrity has been enabled by thousands of employees of Tesla, who Musk has illegally discouraged from unionizing. 

This strenuous commitment to union-busting from the world’s richest people should be understood not as an economic position — after all, a union at these companies would not change the fact that their founders have more money than they can ever spend — but rather as a sort of public reinforcement of The Big Lie. In the minds of the über wealthy, if a union won $2 per hour raises for hundreds of thousands of workers who are, as we speak, developing carpal tunnel syndrome picking items in a warehouse or assembling electric cars, that would amount to an intolerable pickpocketing of the wealth that those founders earned fair and square. Billionaire entrepreneurs deserve theoretically infinite wealth for thinking of good ideas; working people deserve just $15 an hour, and asking for more shows distasteful ingratitude. 

The only way that the current economic arrangement in America can persist is if the rich are able to convince the public that their soaring wealth has nothing to do with the fate of the rest of us. It is the job of capitalist mythology to keep these things scrupulously separated, arguing for an atomized model of the world in which Great Men reap Just Rewards for Great Ideas and if you want to join them, all you need to do is to Work Hard. (And, consequently, if you are struggling, the fault is your own.) Never mind the fact that the idea that we all rise and fall on our individual talents, with no responsibility for the collective good, runs contrary to every major system of ethics created since Jesus’s apostles started peddling their stories. 

In America, the public has to believe that it’s fine for Jeff Bezos to have $200 billion while Jeff Smith, an Amazon warehouse worker, has just dollars to his name and repetitive stress injuries and no health insurance. We must believe that it is normal and correct for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos together to have more money than the gross domestic product of Bangladesh, a nation of 170 million people. It is vital to the continued smooth operation of everything here that we all view this arrangement as Just Fine. Any change in this perception, and the flashing lights start going off deep inside the billionaire bunker. 

The most meaningful shift that could happen in American public opinion is not the yearly fluctuation in affinities for Democrats or Republicans. It is not the broadening public acceptance of gay marriage or legal marijuana. It is not the shifting attitudes towards smoking or climate change or police brutality. The most meaningful shift that could happen would be for Americans to develop an intolerance towards the hoarding of wealth. The day that average citizens stop seeing billionaires as people to be envied and admired and start seeing them as antisocial hoarders monopolizing resources that could be directed towards life-or-death needs elsewhere will be the day that the inequality crisis that has been building since the Reagan era begins to end. 

All that it would take for that change to come about would be for people to recognize the simple fact that billionaires do not exist in a vacuum. We all live in this world together. The people with the greatest resources have a responsibility to help the people with the least. That should not be a controversial viewpoint, in a nation full of ostensible Christians, and yet accepting it leads inevitably to a curdled disgust with the possession of absurd levels of wealth. 

The philosopher Peter Singer famously noted that everyone agrees that if you come upon a child drowning in a shallow pond, you should jump in and save her, even if it means ruining the clothes you’re wearing — and the very same principle applies to people starving and suffering overseas, whether we can see them in front of us or not. We are morally obligated to help when we can, because the awful suffering in the world far outweighs the small sacrifice it would require of us. This simple moral guideline is so clearly valid that the arguments against it always reek of desperate attempts to stave off personal guilt, cobbled together for the sole purpose of justifying the excesses that we’ve long enjoyed.

For billionaires, this is very simple. In order to be good people, they need to give away their money. Fast. Now. They are sitting on what amounts to thousands of human lives. As soon as that sickens rather than inspires the general public, we will tax the billionaires away, as we should. For $500 million, ten million people could receive surgery that saves them from blindness. Instead, Jeff Bezos bought a superyacht, and a support yacht to carry his helicopter. But what do you expect him to do — land the helicopter directly on the main yacht? It would ruin the feng shui. 

We all have problems, I guess.

Musings

 

May 7, 2021

The War on Critical Race Theory by David Theo Goldberg

 Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory? - In These Times

 Source: Boston Review

According to the right, a specter is haunting the United States: the specter of critical race theory (CRT).

On the eve of losing the presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order in September banning “diversity and race sensitivity training” in government agencies, including all government “spending related to any training on critical race theory.” He was prompted, apparently, by hearing an interview with conservative activist Christopher Rufo on Fox News characterizing “critical race theory programs in government” as “the cult of indoctrination.” (President Biden ended the ban as soon as he took office.) In March Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, introduced a bill seeking to ban the teaching of CRT in the military because—he charges without argument or evidence—it is “racist.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis banned CRT from being covered in Florida’s public schools for “teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.” Republican majority lawmakers in the state of Idaho prohibited the use of state funding for student “social justice” activities of any kind at public universities and threatened to withhold funding earmarked for “social justice programming and critical race theory.” Lawmakers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are following suit.

Similar attacks are afoot abroad. In Britain a government minister declared in October that the government was “unequivocally against” the concept, even though records show that the phrase “critical race theory” had never once been uttered in the House of Commons before that time. And a British government “Race Report,” commissioned by Boris Johnson in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests, was just released amidst considerable controversy for its reductive definition of racial discrimination as nothing but the explicit invocation of skin color. For the French, criticism of a “decolonial” turn in the academy is being invoked to do the sort of political silencing that CRT has been advanced to do by conservatives in the United States and Britain. (Never mind that decolonialization—as a term, a politics, and a field of study—was around well before CRT.) President Emmanuel Macron and his ministers have castigated the importation of “certain social science theories” from “American universities” for leading to “the ethnicization of the social question,” and prominent intellectuals have denounced discussions of race. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, whose earlier work tracked the history of anti-Semitism, indicts contemporary anti-racist critics of the French state as guilty of “anti-white racism.” An assistant attorney general in Australia insisted an anti-racism program should not be funded because “taxpayer funds” were being used “to promote critical race theory.”

The attacks have also made their way to my office doorstep, probably due to my small contribution to the body of scholarship to which “critical race theory” actually refers—scholarship that first emerged several decades ago, not in the last few years, as a critical response to what was then known as “critical legal studies.” When I picked up my mail a few weeks ago, I found a thick hand-addressed envelope with no return address; the contents included an eight-page-long screed denouncing CRT as “hateful fraud.” The documents are copies of resources prepared by the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York (CACAGNY), which filed an amicus brief in the failed Supreme Court case challenging what the group characterized as discrimination by Harvard University against Asian American applicants. The materials echo essays sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, which calls CRT “the new intolerance” and “the rejection of the underpinnings of Western civilization.” The materials suggest a more coordinated campaign than many seem to have realized; I am surely not the only one who received this package.

What do all these attacks add up to? The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about. Instead, CRT functions for the right today primarily as an empty signifier for any talk of race and racism at all, a catch-all specter lumping together “multiculturalism,” “wokeism,” “anti-racism,” and “identity politics”—or indeed any suggestion that racial inequities in the United States are anything but fair outcomes, the result of choices made by equally positioned individuals in a free society. They are simply against any talk, discussion, mention, analysis, or intimation of race—except to say we shouldn’t talk about it.

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Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument—all notably absent from the current attacks.

Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today. Very little holds all of these accounts together beyond taking race and racism as objects of analysis. Two radically divergent books, for example—Isabel Wilkerson’s latest bestseller, Caste, and Oliver Cromwell Cox’s classic, Caste, Class, and Race (1948)—share little in common, though both would be recognized as works in critical race studies.

In conservative accounts, the two authors most commonly cited as CRT’s principal exemplars are Ibram X. Kendi, who trained not in law but in African American Studies (he is CRT’s “New Age guru,” according to the Heritage Foundation), and Robin DiAngelo, a professor of education. Neither is a critical race theorist in the traditional legal sense, and Kendi’s popularizing of some work on race shares little with DiAngelo’s reductive account of what she calls “white fragility.” Other screeds also dismiss philosophers Angela Davis and Achille Mbembe as “scholar-activists” (as if there is something damning about the title). Of course, there is no evidence anywhere of either ever claiming anything resembling that “everyone and everything White is complicit” in racial oppression, or that “all unequal outcomes by race . . . is the result of racial oppression,” as the CACAGNY documents put it.

According to the CACAGNY screed, CRT claims that “you are only your race” and that “by your race alone you will be judged.” The theory of intersectionality—first elaborated by Crenshaw—belies the point, of course, arguing that race operates along with other key determinants of social positioning such as class, gender, disability, and so on. Nor do I know of any serious CRT scholar who would endorse the CACAGNY qualification that, in intersection “with other victimization categories” like gender, “race is always primary.” The point of intersectional analysis is that conditions and context dictate what the primary and exacerbating determinants of inequality and victimization are in specific circumstances. Indeed, one of Crenshaw’s seminal contributions to CRT scholarship specifically criticized the limitations of a “single-axis framework,” including those that focus on race to the exclusion of a supplementary “analysis of sexism.”

Another measure of the ideological dishonesty can be found in the cheapness of these screeds’ intellectual genealogies. According to CACAGNY, CRT simply substitutes “race struggle” for “class struggle” in the work of “such hate promoters as Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Schmitt, Marcuse, Foucault, and Freire.” Apparently critics cannot be bothered to imagine sources other than white men. For them there was no Frederick Douglass, no W. E. B. Du Bois, no Zora Neale Hurston, Fannie Lou Hamer, or Frantz Fanon, no Aimé Césaire, Alain Locke, or Charles Hamilton Houston, no Stokely Carmichael, Charles Hamilton, or Audre Lorde—and on and on. Their list of progenitors is instead plainly meant to conjure “neo-Marxist” bogeymen, the association with Marxism or socialism the surefire means to parodic conservative dismissal. Needless to say, I have not seen any mention, let alone analysis, of the substantive body of literature on racial capitalism and racial neoliberalism.

A small circle of conservative outlets appears to be responsible for the bulk of the messaging. One of them is City Journal, a voice of the Manhattan Institute long committed to defending and defining the conservative and anti-anti-racist values of the day. The Heritage Foundation, decades-long coordinator of attacks on progressive critical thought, provides the cement, insisting that CRT “seeks to undermine the foundations of American society”—implicitly admitting the racism at the country’s basis. The groups Campus Reform and Turning Point USA weaponize these criticisms to spy on faculty and students across the country they take to be too liberal for the national good. Freedom of expression is cancelled for all but those shouting their agreement with them. National Review gets in on the act by publishing a dismissive review of what they take to be the founding texts of whiteness studies—three decades after those texts were published. These are contemporary extensions of the practices conducted by David Horowitz’s Freedom Center over the last couple of decades; all that is new are the terms of indictment. The critics, NGOs and politicians alike, are mobilizing the very tactics for which they excoriate CRT.

City Journal has published a growing number of articles attacking CRT, many by Rufo—a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former director of the Center on Wealth and Poverty at the Discovery Institute, best known for its unstinting advocacy of intelligent design. Rufo pits a self-styled disenfranchised right against a supposedly out-of-control government set to impose dogma on the unsuspecting:

critical race theory . . . is an almost entirely government-created and government-sponsored ideology, developed in public and publicly-subsidized universities, formulated into policy by public bureaucracies, and transmitted to children in the public school system. The critical race theorists and their enablers at the New York Times and elsewhere want the right to enshrine their personal ideology as official state dogma. They prioritize the “freedom of the state” over the “freedom of the individual”—the prelude, whether deliberate or accidental, to any totalitarian system.

The ideological dishonesty is almost too obvious. Bell, Crenshaw, and others would be surprised to hear it was the government that created CRT. And the irony of the accusation of individual freedoms being sacrificed to the state will not be lost on those noting the current undertaking by these vigorous conservative efforts to impose its ideology on the state. The truth is that the only high-level coordinated campaign attempting to “enshrine” a view of CRT “as state dogma” is a dismissive one. It is the French president who has echoed Heritage Foundation publications and webinars. It is the British prime minister who has authorized a Race Report committed to downplaying racism in society along with the history and legacy of slavery. And it is conservative state governors and politicians in the United States who are acting to legislate bans.

The attacks on CRT and CRS often center examples of egregious “anti-racist” practices, attributed usually to K–12 school classrooms or student groups on university campuses. As with Rufo, decontextualized quotes and positions are often lifted from academic publications; Dinesh D’Souza honed such practices to an art in the 1990s. While many, if not all, of the targeted claims are peripheral to much of CRS and all but missing from CRT, critics attribute their occurrence to the impact, influence, or implication of CRS commitments.

It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But “diversity training,” “racial equity,” “systemic” and “institutional” racism, and indeed “anti-racism” itself are not the inventions of CRT; all but diversity training predate it. Like “diversity” over the past decade and “multiculturalism” before that, critical race theory is being made the bag now carrying the load long critical of racism. The foolishness sometimes said and done in its name—including some genuinely wince-worthy—is being used as a sledgehammer to bash any effort to discuss and remedy racial injustice. Attempts to turn these into a manual, largely by those looking to advance personal, professional, or pecuniary standing, are doomed to ridicule, which in turn unleashes the conservative caricatures.

Critics such as Thomas Sowell, taking CRT reductively to claim that racism alone disadvantages Black people, counter that education is a major enabling factor in Black advancement. On the face of it nothing objectionable there. But in blaming Black people for lesser educational attainment, they pay no attention to deep, structurally produced inequities in public school funding. They ignore historical lack of access translating into cross-generational disadvantage. They sideline racially disproportionate class differences enabling a greater proportion of wealthier white students to receive after school tutoring and not have to work to put themselves through college. The conceptual narrowing of “racism” in the British Race Report—limiting it to the beliefs of individuals—engages in the same sleight of hand.

An honest critique of CRT would take issue with its actual assumptions, logic, and conclusions, not blame it for policies, programs, and practices—or for that matter, attributed premises and principles—it had no hand in formulating or implementing. “CRT,” a Heritage webinar asserts, collapsing the good and the bad of CRS with CRT, is “leading to cancel culture.” Not only politicians but political fundraising campaigns are using these explicit terms to advance their cause. Controlling the narrative, rather than honest critical debate about the sources and remedies of racial injustice, is defining the agenda.


What conclusions can we draw from these developments?

 

First, the coordinated conservative attack on CRT is largely meant to distract from the right’s own paucity of ideas. The strategy is to create a straw house to set aflame in order to draw attention away from not just its incapacity but its outright refusal to address issues of cumulative, especially racial, injustice. In a perverse misuse of Martin Luther King, Jr., colorblindness remains the touchstone of clearly uninformed conservative talking points on race. As critics such as Eduardo Bonilla-SilvaPatricia Williams, and myself, among many others, have long pointed out, colorblindness—the individualizing response to structural and systemic racial injustice par excellence—hides the underlying structural differences historical inequalities reproduce.

Second, the conservative attack on CRT tries to rewrite history in its effort to neoliberalize racism: to reduce it to a matter of personal beliefs and interpersonal prejudice. (Even in this case, you will search in vain at The FederalistNational Review, Fox News, the Daily Caller, and Breitbart News for coverage of a recent story in which a group of white high school students “auctioned” their Black peers on Snapchat.) On this view, the structures of society bear no responsibility, only individuals. Racial inequities today are at worst the unfortunate side effect of a robust commitment to individual freedom, not the living legacy of centuries of racialized systems. The British Race Report shares with the 1776 Project this project of historical erasure. The problem is not the actual histories of slavery, racial subjugation, segregation, and inequity but, as historian David Olusoga observes, how those histories are represented, taught, and mobilized for contemporary ideological purposes. Hence the attack on work spelling out the historically produced social conditions establishing ongoing racist systems—especially the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is explicitly dismissed as the product of CRT thinking.

Third, race has always been an attractive issue for conservatives to mobilize around. They know all too well how to use it to stoke white resentment while distracting from the depredations of conservative policies for all but the wealthy. Conservatives see their worldview under threat of being eroded; Tucker Carlson now openly alludes to the white nationalist “replacement” conspiracy theory, the fear of white people being diminished and displaced by Blacks, Latinos, and immigrants. “Whiteness,” James Baldwin wrote, is “a metaphor for power.” At a time when the power, privileges, and indeed numbers of the GOP base are under pressure, the conservative assault on CRT is only the latest effort to maintain white domination—economically, politically, and legally.

There is no simple toolkit for the critical analysis of racism. Pointers and rules of thumb may help, but they are not and never will be a substitute for mass popular organizing to create a more just world.

CRT and more nuanced work in CRS offer an invaluable resource for this work. They take seriously what the conservative attack too readily looks away from. They try to account for what it is in our culture, in the social infrastructure and institutional shaping and the order to which they give rise, that reproduces the undeniable inequality, the lived violence and trauma, that people of color experience in the United States and Europe, however variously.

Conservative critics of CRT not only have no serious response to these tragic injustices; instead they belittle the very suggestion that they ought to have one. Willed away are the lives of those they would rather not admit are fellow citizens. Heritage calls instead for a narrative of upliftment and hope. Wiping the slate of history clean, they insist that formal equality under the law—never mind how recently or imperfectly realized—vitiates any claim of enduring injustice. Whatever the unfairness of the past, this thinking goes, individuals are now free to make of their lives what they will.

If we are to learn one thing from this highly orchestrated assault on CRT, it is that this alternative narrative is not a sincere expression of hope: it is a cynical ploy to keep power and privilege in the hands of those who have always held it. Meanwhile, the outcome remains what Marvin Gaye sang about a half century ago: “Brother, brother, brother, there are far too many of you dying.”

May 1, 2021

America Never Wanted the Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses by Caitlin Dickerson

 

Source: The Atlantic

When David Dorado Romo was a boy growing up in El Paso, Texas, his great-aunt Adela told him about the day the U.S. Border Patrol melted her favorite shoes. Romo’s aunt was Mexican and had a visa that allowed her to commute into South Texas for her job as a maid. Every week she had to report to a Border Patrol station, in accordance with a program that ran from 1917 into the 1930s requiring most Mexican immigrants to bathe in government offices before entering the United States. She would dress up in her nicest clothing, because those who looked dirty or were thought to have lice were bathed in a mixture of kerosene and vinegar. Years later, when Romo visited the National Archives outside Washington, D.C., he found photos and records of gas chambers where the belongings of the Mexican workers had been disinfected with the chemical Zyklon B, as well as a large steam dryer of the sort that had melted his aunt’s shoes. He discovered that a German scientist had taken note of the procedures being carried out at the American border and advocated for them to be implemented in Nazi concentration camps. Eventually, the Nazis increased the potency of Zyklon B in their gas chambers, and began using it on human beings.

Romo also learned that just as the bathing and gas-dousing program was winding down, the American government began using a different dangerous chemical to delouse Mexican immigrants: From the 1930s through the 1960s, border agents sprayed DDT onto the faces of more than 3 million guest workers as they crossed the southern border.

Romo was shocked that he hadn’t learned this earlier. He became a historian dedicated to exposing truths that have been buried along the borders. “We have deep amnesia in this country,” he told me when I spoke with him recently. “There’s a psychological process involved in forgetting that is shame from both sides—from both the perpetrator and the victim.”

This forgetting has allowed the racism woven into America’s immigration policies to stay submerged beneath the more idealistic vision of the country as “a nation of immigrants.” That vision has a basis in truth: We are a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had. Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them. “It’s in our DNA,” Romo says. “It’s ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”

The first American immigration laws were written in order to keep the country white, a goal that was explicit in their text for more than 150 years. (Over time, the understanding of “whiteness” changed and expanded. Well into the 20th century, only those of Northern and Western European descent were considered white; Italians and Jews, for instance, were not.) Even after the laws were finally changed, allowing large numbers of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa into the country starting in the 1960s, the eugenic ideas that supported earlier versions of them remained embedded in our society, and still provide the basis of many modern restrictions.

President Joe Biden’s immigration plan would make citizenship available to millions of unauthorized immigrants. Democratic members of Congress rallying behind it have said it would establish a more inherently American system, arguing implicitly that the Trump administration’s often overtly stated preference for white immigrants, or no immigrants at all, was an aberration from the past. “To fix our broken immigration system, we must pass reforms that reflect America’s values,” Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the proposed legislation, said in a statement introducing the bill. “For too long, our immigration system has failed to live up to the ideals and principles our nation was founded on,” said Senator Alex Padilla of California, another co-sponsor. But Donald Trump’s immigration agenda was executed without a single change to laws already passed by Congress, and his rhetoric and policies were consistent with most of American history. “The Trump era magnified the problem, but the template was there,” Rose Cuison-Villazor, a scholar of immigration law at Rutgers University, told me.

As the country moves forward from the past four years of harsh immigration policies, it must reckon with a history that stretches back much further, and that conflicts with one of the most frequently repeated American myths.

“This idea that somehow immigration was based on the principles stated on the Statue of Liberty? That never happened,” Romo said. “There has never been a color-blind immigration system. It’s always been about exclusion.”

Most American children are taught in school that the United States’ immigration policies help make the country special and, yes, great. A haven for outcasts who faced persecution in their home countries, the nation was founded, the story goes, on the principle of welcoming others who were treated similarly in their own homelands, with the idea that granting them individual rights and freedoms would allow distinct cultures and traditions to thrive together. This tale resonated in my own Central California school district, where I sat alongside classmates whose parents had come from Mexico, India, Laos, Vietnam.

But the cracks in that story began to show as soon as we hit the schoolyard, where kids of different backgrounds played together, but also hurled insults that stung because they had the weight of centuries of American law and rhetoric behind them.

When the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to settle in the New World, they brought with them ideas that would evolve into “manifest destiny,” which held that the United States was a land that had been bestowed by God on Anglo-Saxon white people. In 1790, the first American Congress made citizenship available only to any “free white person” who had been in the country for at least two years. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked Chinese immigrants—and in 1917, it was expanded to block most Asians living between Afghanistan and the Pacific. These laws were upheld numerous times by federal courts, including in a seminal Supreme Court case from 1922, in which the government prevailed by arguing that citizenship should be granted as the Founders intended: “only to those whom they knew and regarded as worthy to share it with them, men of their own type, white men.”

In the early 20th century, the term progressive became synonymous with preserving or improving the racial “stock” of the country—and that meant keeping it white. Harry Laughlin, whose work would provide a model for Nazi Germany’s sterilization laws, served as the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization’s “expert eugenics agent.” In 1922, he presented evidence of the “hereditary feeble-mindedness” of nonwhite immigrants. Laughlin categorized the subjects of his research into overlapping subgroups that included “the criminalistic,” “the diseased,” and “the dependent.” Two years later, Congress passed the “progressive” Johnson-Reed Act, which established immigration quotas based on national origin. Adolf Hitler hailed the law as a model to emulate. “Compared to old Europe, which had lost an infinite amount of its best blood through war and emigration, the American nation appears as a young, racially select people,” he wrote.

Beginning during World War II, geopolitical and economic interests became important factors in the development of new immigration laws, but protecting the nation’s whiteness remained a priority.

The historic Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did away with the quotas based on national origin and instead allowed citizens of the United States to petition for family members to join them. But the overtly race-blind language in the new system belied its intent. For his book Dividing Lines, Daniel Tichenor, a scholar at the University of Oregon, scrutinized the Congressional Record and found that legislators designed the system the way they did because they believed that people of European origin, who made up the majority of the population at the time, would also make up the majority of those petitioning to bring in new immigrants. In the 1980s, the so-called diversity-visa program was created to help the thousands of Irish immigrants who were coming into the country illegally each year enter instead as legal residents.

However, since 1965 the flow of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa has, as ever, outpaced expectations—to the point where America is on track to become a majority-minority nation sometime in the next few decades. Various attempts have been made to acknowledge the enduring presence of immigrants of color by granting them legal status: In 1986, President Ronald Reagan ushered in an amnesty policy that allowed nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexican, to become citizens. And in 1990, President George H. W. Bush amplified the demographic effects of the 1965 law by increasing the visa caps it had established. But by the time these efforts were made, racial tropes that had once painted Irish, Italians, and Chinese as unassimilable and prone to crime, poverty, and disease were already embedded in the nation’s culture, as well as in its laws.

Previous iterations of racialized enforcement practices were more explicit, putting the power of government behind stereotypes. At various points, immigrant groups were associated with specific illnesses, resulting in enhanced screenings by American authorities that were degrading and unnecessary. “Even germs were ethnicized,” David Dorado Romo told me. “Middle Easterners were said to have this terribly frightening disease that was trachoma, which made you blind. The Jews were seen as people that carried tuberculosis; the Chinese had cholera.”

Well into the mid-20th century, while Mexicans were being bathed in kerosene, sprayed with DDT, and subjected to Jim Crow laws in the American South, Northern and Western European immigrants were being given periodic opportunities to legalize their immigration status. One such program, called pre-examination, allowed tens of thousands of Europeans to gain residency. Their descendants could then claim that their families had entered the United States the “right way,” as a means to argue for the exclusion of others who could not make the same case.

Mexicans were ultimately not eligible for these programs. Instead, their communities were policed with increasing ferocity. Mae Ngai, a historian at Columbia University, notes that in the 1920s, the earliest Border Patrol agents were instructed to act with civility toward white immigrants only. Within a decade or so of the agency’s establishment, its officers were apprehending nearly five times more people along the Mexican border than along the Canadian border. By the 1980s, when Mexicans made up just over half of the undocumented population, they accounted for nine out of 10 immigration arrests.

This overpolicing of Latinos and other nonwhite immigrants by federal authorities continues to the present day as a result of policies implemented by prior administrations—both Republican and Democratic. Collaboration between police and immigration authorities, which began under Bill Clinton and was expanded under Barack Obama, compounded the racial biases of each. Sheriffs began to campaign on platforms arguing that keeping communities safe meant ridding them of immigrants. The supposed relationship between immigrant and crime has become implanted in the national psyche, even though evidence consistently shows that U.S. residents born outside the country commit fewer crimes than the native-born.

Several of Jim Rielly’s colleagues told me that Latinos were more likely to be questioned and arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, such as during a workplace raid or street enforcement operation, whereas European immigrants were typically picked up only if they came onto the agency’s radar because of a serious criminal conviction. One former officer, Lorenzo Rivera, who was born in Mexico and worked in immigration for 30 years starting in 1986, told me he would often be asked to join in ICE’s workplace raids to help identify who was undocumented and who was not; he could distinguish among different groups of Latinos in ways that his white colleagues could not. He chafed, sometimes publicly, at what he called the “unwritten rule” that Mexicans should be singled out while European immigrants were effectively ignored. “I used to tell my supervisor, ‘You know, you’re basically profiling here.’ And he goes, ‘These are orders from Washington.’ ” Rivera suspected that the disparities he witnessed at work were due to more than just a difference in policy: “Most of the special agents were of European descent, and of course to them, going after one of their own—it was unheard of.”

The use of the phrase a nation of immigrants to describe America first appeared in the late 1890s, in the Congressional Record, according to Donna Gabaccia, a scholar at the University of Toronto. It was used only sparingly until the 1950s, when it was popularized during the movement to broaden the label of white to include a more diverse group of Europeans. Mae Ngai notes that in 1958 John F. Kennedy, himself the descendant of Irish immigrants, published a book called A Nation of Immigrants that included only two paragraphs on Asian and Latino immigration.

To call America a nation of immigrants is not wrong, either as a factual statement or an evocation of American myth. But that fact coexists with this one: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in. Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people, most of them Latino, according to Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago. No other country has carried out this many deportations. This “challenges that simplistic notion of a long tradition where the United States has welcomed immigrants,” Goodman told me.

Moreover, though the United States accepts more immigrants each year than any other country, the percentage of its population that is foreign-born is lower than in countries like Norway, Gabon, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates—none of which considers itself “a nation of immigrants.”

There are legitimate debates to be had about how to balance economic, geopolitical, and humanitarian concerns in formulating immigration policy. But too often, such concerns have been invoked as euphemisms to disguise arguments that are really about race.

One of the most insidious consequences of stereotypes about immigrants is that they have been used to justify punishments that outweigh their transgressions. Undesirable immigrants were a “double debit” against society, Harry Laughlin, the eugenicist, told Congress in 1922. “Not only do the inadequates not pull their own weight in the boat but they require, for their care, the services of normal and socially valuable persons who could well be employed in more constructive work.” In the 1920s the label LPC—“liable to become a public charge”—was “shaken on deportation cases as though with a large pepper shaker,” a political scientist wrote at the time, in order to rationalize deporting people who had committed only minor criminal offenses or perceived moral transgressions, such as having a baby out of wedlock. For years before President Trump came along, tens of thousands of people without criminal records were being deported every year—many of them leaving behind children who were U.S. citizens—after they were caught living in the country without legal status, which is a civil infraction. During Trump’s term, more than 5,000 children were taken from their parents, many of whom had committed only the misdemeanor offense of crossing the border without documentation a single time.

In describing its own immigration plan as a racial-equity initiative, the Biden administration is nodding at a more complex view of our history. But opposition to the proposal, predictably, has echoed the past. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas called it “a disaster” that “does nothing to secure our borders, yet grants mass amnesty, welfare benefits … to over 11 million people.” On Fox News, Laura Ingraham said that Democrats pushing for the plan were “enticing illegals to bust through our borders, exploit our resources, and commit crimes.”

Once you begin to notice examples of how the past is still present, they become difficult to ignore. Trump enacted the most stringent border closure of his administration by citing the threat of disease, even though COVID‑19 outbreaks were far worse inside the United States than just outside its borders (in fact, Americans were actively deporting the virus abroad). His persistent blaming of the Chinese for outbreaks in the U.S. helped incite violence against Asian Americans that continues today, mirroring similar attacks from centuries past.

In moving toward the more inclusive system that some elected officials now say they want, the country would be not returning to traditional American values, but establishing new ones.


Musings

 It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction. - John Boyd Orr

The New Corporation

  The New Corporation ​is a 2020 documentary directed by Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, law professor at the University of British Columb...