Racists have always hated Black and Brown immigrants

The Monday Musings

While a well worn cliche, there is truth to the idiom that "history repeats itself;" for those watching current events while realizing that you have seen, read, or heard about mass hysteria regarding illegal immigrants before, trust me when I tell you that you’re not alone!

As a long time student and teacher of history, I know full well that the "ideals" of America have ALWAYS clashed with the "realities" of America!

You see, there was Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence that touted "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" while at the same time, “Massa” Jefferson and his fellow slave owners were denying life, liberty, and happiness for enslaved Blacks toiling right outside of his Monticello office and across the South.

Lest we forget the Statue of Liberty, christened with a bronze plaque featuring Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" sonnet that aimed to beckon immigrants who were "tired, hungry, and yearning to be free”—all the while Congress was passing the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act and Immigration Reform Act of 1924, both of which severely restricted immigration according to race—and forbade immigration from Sub-Sahara Africa (read-”Black" Africans) until 1965!

This past week, there has been much social media chatter about Ken Burns's latest historical documentary, the "U.S. and the Holocaust," one that takes a deep dive into America's role in preventing Jews wishing to escape Nazi persecution in Europe from immigrating to the United States. For those who don't have the time to read long tomes or treatises about this era, Burns does a masterful job in highlighting what most of us who majored in American history already knew—which is that our nation could have done so much more to help offset what would become the Holocaust by allowing mass access to Jewish refugees (and, during the war, by bombing railroads that led to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the scores of German concentration camps where over six million Jews and four million Roma were murdered from 1941-1945). 

Nazi prison guards overseeing new Jewish deportees to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp circa 1943.

Such pedantic and accurate history is rarely taught in elementary school social studies, or middle and high school history for one reason—history classes, by design, have often been tools for propaganda that inspires jingoism, which is defined as an almost cult like fealty and zeal towards one's home nation. So, if you happened to have parents who told the unedited truth, or if you attended a school with teachers who kept it real about historical racism, kudos to you for being "woke" long before that phrase was appropriated by simple cynics who try to use it as a diss. 

But if you are learning these facts for the first time via Ken Burns, Google, or even the Hobbservation Point and my Facebook posts, it is better late than never when it comes to seeing and understanding systemic racism in the form of anti-immigration hysteria!

More crucially, I must add that the political party or ideological bent of the racist doesn't really matter when considering that, from Federalists to Whigs, from "Know Nothings" to Democrats and Republicans, that racists within the white race have despised non-whites equally in formal legal and political policy! You see, their racism was through “Manifest Destiny” and the Trail of Tears among Native Americans and Mexicans back then, while today it's chants of "Build that Wall"—and pushes to siphon off the lucrative casino money that some Tribes use to offset their losses of land and wealth to the U.S.

When we listen to politicians like Republican former President Donald Trump whip up hysteria about "murderous Mexican criminals and drug dealers," all the while ignoring his own Department of Justice's stats that, per capita, there are more white murderers, drug dealers, and drug users across America than any other race, a curious person should wonder "why?"

Trump visiting his still incomplete wall in 2020…

When we see Border Patrol Agents under the Executive Branch authority of Democratic President Joe Biden whipping and using lassos to corral Haitian immigrants crossing the Rio Grande in 2021, all the while nearly 50,000 Ukrainian (read-white) immigrants were gaining access to the U.S. earlier this year, a curious person should wonder, "why?"

Border Agents brutalizing Haitian immigrants in 2021…

When we see Republican Governors Ron Desantis (Florida), Greg Abbott (Texas), and Doug Ducey (Arizona) sending thousands of Central American immigrants by bus and airplane to Washington, D.C. and Massachussets, a curious person should wonder, "why?"

To this writer, the "why" boils down to the following:

1. Many whites, including some whites who consider themselves allies of Black and Brown people, do not see Black and Brown people as equals worthy of respect, compassion, and dignity. 

2. Most white racists fear the inevitable darkening of America, which is why immigration hysteria moves their masses—as does abolishing abortion because to those of this ilk, whites need to have another baby boom to offset their population losses to “The Mexicans” and to “The Blacks” from “Sh*thole countries,” as former President Trump infamously declared to the delight of the racists among his base. 

3. Racism has always moved the masses, whether it was white fears that the Chinese would take over the West Coast in the 1800's; whether it was white fears that the Japanese would take over the West Coast in the 1940's; whether it was white protestant fears that Jews and dark skinned (Catholic/Greek Orthodox) Southern Europeans would take over the East Coast in the 1930's and 40's, and today, when it is white fear that "the Mexicans, Venezeulans, Guatemalans, and Haitians" will take over the South in the 2020's, all of these deplorable thoughts stemmed (and stem) from a systemic racism bent.

Japanese-American citizens after being seized by gunpoint from their homes and loaded into trains for detention during World War II

Such a mindset is twisted, demented, evil, and totally opposite of what America claims to be on paper—and in boasts by politicians who preach “E Pluribus Unum,” translated as “From Many, one," while they really mean “Sicut Unum,” or, “Just One”—with the “one” being whites (or white boot licking, “Yessa Massa” people of color).