The other side of the Trump Campaign's racist Puerto Rico comment

There has been a lot of very righteous criticism of the Trump comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's racist crack that:

"there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

While this obviously racist attack on Puerto Rico has been called out by everyone that's not a shameless Trump supporter, this comment has two edges, and it cuts both ways. Whereas the insult to Puerto Rico and the Puerto Rican people has received a lot of attention, the insult to the Earth has received none that I've seen. 

That's why I'm writing this blog post. In all this discussion about the racist nature of the Trump comedian's comment, somebody needs to point out that there really is a floating island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is already twice the size of Texas—and that's no joke!

This other side of this racist attack, treating this massive attack on the Earth's oceans as a joke, is also a component part of white supremacy, as I noted in a blog post more than six years ago:

Why white supremacy is a danger to the Earth

While the skin color differences between the European colonizers, and the people of the southern hemisphere may have provided the original impetus for the white and black categorization, the adoption of the symbolism of white by Europeans at the beginning of the imperialist period has been used not only as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the thereby newly created "non-white" people, it has been used as a sign of their righteousness in dominating and raping the entire planet. Therefore, we can conclude that the problems inherent in a group of people being called white is not merely a race problem. It would be a problem even if there were no other people. This attitude of whiteness has been invoked not just against the "black people of the Earth" but against the Earth itself.

The array of political forces around the climate change debate is but one example of how white supremacy isn't just an attack on the better part of humanity, but on nature itself. At first glance, the global warming question has nothing to do with race, and one would think that even the most extreme racist, that envisions an earthly future free of people of color, would still be fighting to see that the Earth did have a future, if only for white people, and yet there they all are, firmly on the denial side of climate change.

White chauvinism therefore is the practice of white supremacy, not just towards the excluded peoples, but towards the entire excluded natural world. It underlines and legitimizes the operations of capitalism not just in exploiting "people of color," but in ruthlessly exploiting the resources of the Earth as well.

Anyway, the Trump comedian's so-call joke so clearly illustrates this dual nature of white supremacy that I just thought someone should point this out is all.

Clay Claiborne

Halloween, 2024

Occupy LA, October 2011