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Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racism. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 5, 2019

If Ralph Northam has to resign, why is Donald Trump still in office?

In 1989, Donald Trump spent $85,000 to take out ads in four New York City newspapers that called for nothing less than the legal lynching of five innocent boys, four African American and one Hispanic, accused of the raping a white woman who was jogging in Central Park. This is a taste of what he said in the small print:
Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will.
And he always will. Even after Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer and serial rapist in prison, confessed to raping the jogger, DNA evidence confirmed his guilt in 2002, and the convictions of the Central Park Five were vacated, Donald Trump continued to say they were guilty.

The hate he felt for these five colored boys was racial hatred. I'm from Atlantic City. I know his history. But even with that history, I would not convict anyone today exclusively because of attitudes they held thirty years ago. The problem, when it comes to Donald Trump, is that he holds those same racist attitudes today.

In a 1989 interview with Larry King about the CP5, he said, "maybe hate is what we need if we're gonna get something done." These are the same racist methods he is using today. He gives his racial hatred a national stage regularly. He has brought it into the White House. He has taken children of color from their parent because of it. He most recently shutdown the federal government, causing much misery, so that he can keep up the racist agitation that is his WALL project.

So, my first question is: If Ralph Northam has to resign, why is Donald Trump still in office?
North by Northam: The Alt-Right targets "a radical leftist" governor
The Fox News crowd had been after the Virginia governor for weeks now because of his support for a liberal abortion policy. Two days before the story about a particular racist yearbook photo broke, The Washington Post reported:
President Trump, Republican lawmakers in Virginia and conservatives across the country attacked Gov. Ralph Northam and other state Democrats on Wednesday after they defended a failed bill that sought to reduce restrictions on late-term abortions.
...
“I thought it was terrible,” Trump said.
“Do you remember when I said Hillary Clinton was willing to rip the baby out of the womb? That’s what it is. That’s what they’re doing. It’s terrible.”
Northam, whose spokeswoman said his words were being taken out of context by Republicans, called the notion that he would approve of killing infants “disgusting.”

“I have devoted my life to caring for children, and any insinuation otherwise is shameful and disgusting,” he said.

The president’s remarks came after former U.S. senator Jim DeMint called the bill “vile” and said Northam should abandon it or resign.
So the racist right was already demanding Northam's resignation days before they found a way to bring almost everyone else on board.

They may have been focusing their attacks on Gov. Northam because his background as a pediatric neurologist makes his support for medical abortions especially compelling. The next day, Thursday, RNC Spokeswoman Kayleigh Mcenany was on Fox & friends blasting "the so-called moderate governor from Virginia, in essence a radical leftist" for what they consider the crime of "infanticide."

These demands for Northam's resignation were cascading just as the VA General Assembly's money committee was scheduled to meet on 3 February. They are threatening to strip $1 billion dollars from the state budget he submitted two months ago, crippling Northam's greatest accomplishment - expansion of Virginia's Medicaid program. Many House and Senate leaders also oppose the governor's plan to return $216 million in anticipated new revenues to lower income earners, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch. There are a host of reasons for wanting him out.

On Friday, the script changed because the now famous racist photo on Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook half-page was leaked. On Fox News Monday morning, Ed Henry said he'd heard it had been leaked by some of Northam's medical school alumni because they were upset with his stand on abortion. On Monday evening, Henry said many targeted Northam because the VA governor had the gall to call President Trump a racist. That must have made this particular tactic taste sweet to them. The photo was first posted on the Internet by the conservative website Big League Politics.

In the week before they broke this bombshell article, they had published no less than 10 stories about "the pro-infanticide Virginia Governor." Finally they had a story with legs! Mike Cernovich tried to take credit for the story in the inter-right squabbling that took place later, but BLP accused Cernovich of trying "to steal our scoop." They maintained they where responsible for the scheme of "accusing a sitting United States Governor of a blatant racism that will likely cause him to resign"[BLP bold]. They must have enjoyed breaking this story on the first day of Black History Month.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Northam's initial response to the breaking news:
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam apologized Friday after admitting he appeared in a racist photo in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook depicting one person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.
...
Northam said in a statement Friday evening that he was one of the two people in the photo and that he is "deeply sorry." The statement did not say whether Northam was the person wearing blackface or the person wearing a Klan outfit.
Later he release a statement that said:
“Earlier today, a website published a photograph of me from my 1984 medical school yearbook in a costume that is clearly racist and offensive.

“I am deeply sorry for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now.

“This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service.” More ..

Still, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported:
Northam’s statement left it unclear whether he was wearing the blackface or a white robe and hood.
On Saturday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported:
Northam suggested that he had been overzealous in his initial apology, saying he did not have a copy of the yearbook because he never bought one and was unaware of what was on his page. After taking more time to look at the photo, Northam said, he concluded he was not in it.
Northam said, “This was not my picture. I was not in that costume either as blackface or as KKK. And it’s not me,” but it was too late. Pundit and politicians that had made statements based on his early confession didn't have the flexibility to rethink anything.

Others, who knew him at the time, also don't see him in the photo:
Dr. Rob Marsh, who was Northam’s roommate for two years at EVMS, said that when he first saw the photo, he didn’t think it was real. He said he was skeptical about whether Northam is either of the people in the photo.

“I don’t remember that ever happening,” said Marsh, who graduated from the school one year before Northam did and now has a medical practice in Middlebrook.

Marsh, 63, said Northam was “very respectful” to others as a medical student, and he never heard Northam “mock anybody of any other race.”
Dr. Betty Bibbins, an African American woman who graduated from EVMS in 1982 did not personally know Northam, but has long supported him. She remembers EVMS having a very open and inclusive culture, but acknowledged that racism existed in subtle ways during her time as a student. She also has doubts, saying:
“I have a lot of questions about where they got the picture from, how it got in the yearbook.”
A former EVMS yearbook page designer told the Richmond Times-Dispatch how the pictures for the yearbook were collected:
Seniors at Eastern Virginia Medical School were allowed to submit up to three photographs in a sealed envelope to appear alongside a formal school picture on their personal pages in the 1984 yearbook, according to a former student who said he helped design most of those pages.

Designers would open the envelope and draw spots numbered one through three on a page to show where each photo should go, said Dr. William Elwood, who served on the Harbour’s staff the year a photo of a man in blackface standing beside a man in Ku Klux Klan garb appeared on Gov. Ralph Northam’s page.

A corresponding number was written on the back of each photo and then they were returned to the envelope before being sent along with the pages to the printer, said Elwood, who did not know whether Northam submitted the racist photo, or who was in it.
There is probably enough room for error in this system that those who argued that Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be given the benefit of the doubt even when confronted with multiple live witnesses, should stand down before attempting to end a long political career over such a 35 year old finding.

What about the other racist photos?

The now famous photo on Ralph Northam's half-page was very far from the only racist or blackface image in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook. Probably, the reason Northam was hesitant to deny it when first confronted with it is that, at the time, posing in blackface, or even a Klan outfit, would have been considered normal and uncontroversial. Even while denying he was in the photo, he said:
“While I did not appear in this photo, I am not surprised by its appearance in the EVMS yearbook. In the place and time where I grew up, many actions that we rightfully recognize as abhorrent today were commonplace.”
This brings to mind another point: As long as we are asking people to resign their current position for things they may have done 35 years ago, what are we asking of the adults in the room at the time? This happened in 1984. On Saturday, EVMS President Dr. Richard V. Homan apologized and said the school shares “the outrage, alarm and sadness voiced by our alumni, the press and many on social media.” Where is the outrage that they were running a school that would produce such a yearbook three decades after Brown vs. Board of Education?

The Richmond Times-Dispatch described some of these other images:
On the page opposite Northam’s — which includes the image he apologized for appearing in on Friday before saying Saturday he’s not pictured — there’s a photo of three men in blackface.

Another photo in the same yearbook shows one of the men wearing a wig and black paint on his face. At least one other blackface photo appears in the 1984 yearbook, with a caption referencing a song by the Supremes: “‘Baby Love,’ who ever thought Diana Ross would make it to Medical School!”

In another picture, a student gropes an unclothed mannequin: The caption reads, “I try never to divulge my true feelings while examining my patients.”
There were quite a few other racist images in that same yearbook.
Like the three in blackface on the page just opposite Northam's
Some added a misogynistic element to the racism 
Maybe we should start investigating these to determine who we should be demanding resign next. Then we could move forward to the 1985 yearbook, or maybe backwards to 1983. Of course, more than this one school would be reviewed. But perhaps our attention would be better focused on how such images are used by the white youth of today.

Students from Charles Stuart University in Sydney, Austrian posing as Klu Klux Klan members and in blackface in a picture posted to Instagram last year.
This should be of much more concern than anything posted by Northam 35 years ago. This photo was created by three high school students in Rochester, MN just this past November. This is the Trump effect.
Northam's confession

Northam's first "confession" should never have been accepted. He apologized for the photo but then said he didn't know if he was the one in the blackface or the one in the KKK outfit. In a crash meeting with Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax on Friday evening, he repeated this ambivalence. Fairfax said:
“He indicated that these were photos that did appear on his page for his medical school yearbook. He told me that while he didn’t recall the specifics of the event, he apologized, that he had thought that it may have depicted him.” 
What kind of confession is that? Imagine someone walking into the FBI office to confess to a recent high profile robbery. He claims that he was involved but he doesn't remember whether he was the gunman or the wheelman, and he doesn't know who the other person was. Sans supporting evidence, that "confession" would go nowhere.

This is exactly the type of "confession" that the NYPD coerced out of the Central Park Five. None of the five owned to being the rapist. Each claimed only to have helped hold her down, touched her breast, etc. They all said someone else did the rape, but they didn't agree on who. Their "confessions" didn't match. In his recommendation that the charges be vacated, District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said simply, "A comparison of the statements reveals troubling discrepancies."

If the original prosecutors had been honest, the prosecution of those five youth would have been stopped right there. If those reporters had integrity, they would demanded clarity as to which character in the racist photo was Northam before they reported that he was in the photo at all.

Jumping the Shark

After Northam came out on Saturday and took back Friday's confession by saying that after having studied the matter, he had determined that he was not in the photo in any capacity, he tried to explain why he was so sure. It was because he had vivid memories of something else he did that year. He told of how he had won a dance contest in San Antonio by moonwalking as a Micheal Jackson lookalike, and that as part of his costume he had used shoe polish to darken his face.

Faced with this retraction, and the need to seriously modify their claims against the governor, or develop independent proof that he was now lying and really was one of the students in the picture, many commentators, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, were seize by cognitive anchoring, couldn't find room to change their minds, and jumped the shark by saying that this use of theatrical makeup was also "blackface" and every bit as bad as appearing in blackface with a Klansman.

This maybe the worst thing they have done. They have collaborated in an attempt to redefine "blackface" from the use of theatrical makeup to look black for racist purposes, to the use of theatrical makeup to look black for any reason at all. This could be bad news for me if I were to try to do a play or narrative film exposing the racist history of blackface and wanted to use white actors in "blackface" makeup to best illustrate how that was done.

If you extend the logic that condemns Northam's sympathetic and winning portrayal of Micheal Jackson, because he darkened his complexion with shoe polish to make it more realistic (and not to parody), you probably should also accept that there can be no more compelling dramas about World War II, or the holocaust, because actors appearing in Nazi uniform for any reason should also be banned.

Their logic makes no sense at all!

Many backwards cultures, such as the ancient Greeks, didn't allow women to act on stage, and so the only way a female character could be portrayed in plays was for a male actor to be made up to look like a woman. While the culture that so restricted the role of women certainly should be charged with misogyny, only an idiot would accuse the male actor willing to represent these banned women on stage of hating women.

More on the history of blackface

Blackface was widely used in English theatrical productions even before the English started calling themselves "white." In fact, the first known use of the phrase "white people" came in a production by Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton on 29 October 1613 named "The Triumphs of Truth." It is first uttered by a character in blackface playing an African king, who looks out over the English audience and declares:
‘I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.’
There weren't a lot of African actors in England at the time, so those that wanted to portray people of color in their theatrical productions, either positively, or negatively, as was the case with Middleton, had to resort to theatrical makeup.

Before Middleton's play, there was a host of actors in blackface. Probably most famous was William Shakespeare's 'noble Moor' Othello, staged just a few years before Middleton's play. Ed Simon likes Shakespeare's portrayals of people of color:
Consider the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In sonnet 130, he says of his mysterious paramour that ‘her breasts are dun’; in sonnet 12, he references her ‘sable curls’; and in sonnet 127 he writes that ‘black wires grow on her head’. As is commonly understood, and taught, Shakespeare subverted the tradition exemplified by poets such as Petrarch who conceptualised feminine beauty in terms of fairness. Part of this subversion lay in pronouncements such as the one that states that black is ‘beauty’s successive heir’, a contention of Shakespeare’s that can seem all the more progressive when our contemporary racial connotation of the word is considered. 
If Shakespeare had applied the new "Michael Jackson" definition racist blackface, none of this could be seen on stage in his time, and a production of Othello would have to wait for our modern age.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actors in the role of Othello. (l-r) Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, Tommaso Salvini, Thomas Grist, Edmund Kean. Images from the Folger Shakespeare Library collection.
In "The hidden meaning of Northam's racist yearbook photo" on Saturday, I wrote about how white supremacists would use blackface to terrorize white people, and that the picture might depict two Klansmen, one in their traditional pointy sheet, and the other in blackface. On such uses of blackface, Christopher Lamberti, Brown University, wrote:
White men in black grease paint posing as African Americans frequently committed crimes in the South around the turn-of-the-century, and in Chicago as early as 1914, when the Defender complained, "With a blackened face crimes of all kinds are committed and laid at the door of an innocent Afro-American." The number of robberies and assaults by white men in blackface increased in Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration.
The paper had many such stories as “White Man, Blackened, Snatches Purse,” Defender, October 3, 1914; “Police ‘Wash’ Blackened Morons, Lo! They’re White” Defender Jan 7, 1922; “White Holdups Black Faces to Commit Crimes” February 2, 1918; “Black Face To Commit Assault On White Woman,” Defender, September 21, 1918; but far more systematic uses of blackface to stoke racism could also be found in the Chicago race riots of 1919.

The most destructive fire of the riots took place on a Saturday morning in a poor neighborhood  of Lithuanian and Polish immigrants situated behind the stockyards. It was meant to look like African Americans had started it, but later investigation revealed that it had been set by white men in blackface, most likely from the Irish neighborhoods west of the Black Belt. This racist "false flag" terror attack left thousands of stockyards workers and their families homeless.

Even after it was generally accepted that the stockyard fire had been set by white men in blackface, many anti-communists, including General Dickson, and the US Department of Intelligence, maintained that the men in blackface were "I.W.W. plotters."

 [I should add, as a side note, that one of the things this campaign has already accomplished is that it has made any research into the real history of blackface just that much more difficult.]
This 1919 Chicago fire in a poor immigrant neighborhood behind the stockyards was set by white men in blackface to stoke racism
In a New Republic piece by Alison Kinney titled How the Klan Got Its Hood, 8 Jan 2016,  she tells us that their distinctive white uniform was a Hollywood creation. Before "Birth of a Nation" they were the "Invisible Empire," hiding in the shadows, although:
Some Klansmen wore pointed hats suggestive of wizards, dunces, or Pierrots; some wore everyday winter hoods, pillowcases, or flour sacks on their heads. Many early Klansman also wore blackface, simultaneously scapegoating and mocking their victims.
This was the blackface of Northam's racist yearbook section, not the blackface of Shakespeare, or a Michael Jackson fan. It is a triumph of white supremacy that those two are now being conflated and confused.

Back to the Present

As soon as the demands for Governor Northam's resignation caught hold in the mainstream, the same source that broke that story, Big League Politics, broke a story on Monday about sexual assault allegations against Virginia's LT Governor Justin Fairfax, who is African American.

And so it goes.

This just in:

Syria is the Paris Commune of the 21st Century!

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Saturday, November 24, 2018

Tijuana anti-immigrant protests & Tucker Carlson's definition of races

In 1978, I led a group of American educators on a tour of China. It was an exciting time to visit. President Nixon had ended 25 years of US attempts to isolate the People's Republic of China just six years earlier, and we were among the first western tourists to visit since the revolution in 1949.

While in Beijing, we were given a tour of the National Minority Institute, where we were told of the more than fifty national and ethnic minorities that live in China, the ongoing struggle against discrimination and great Han chauvinism. As we were leaving the institute, I overheard a white member of our overwhelmingly white tour group say:
I don't believe they have any minorities in China. They all look Chinese to me.
I was reminded to that comment Monday evening by Tucker Carlson. He was focused on one of his usual subjects - the Honduran migrant caravan making its way through Mexico to the US border. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, he and the rest of the Fox News crowd have been crying wolf about what they call an "invasion" of poor refugee families. US white supremacists, led by Donald Trump, have effectively taken over the Republican Party, and have been using anti-immigrant agitation as a gateway to their more extreme goal of creating a white ethnostate.

Tucker Carlson, Fox News 19 Nov 2018
In Tijuana, on Sunday, there was a small anti-immigrant protest by Mexican citizens who support Trump's position on the Honduran caravan. While most Mexicans have been very accepting and supportive of these Central American refugees, Tijuana has become the center of anti-immigrant activities in Mexico. There Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum, who has been called "The Trump of Tijuana" and "Donald Trump Jr.," because of his hateful rhetoric directed at the caravan, has created a favorable climate for that opposition.

It might be said that Donald Trump has adopted him with this tweet:

The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer also supports him. They quote extensively from the Mayor's "choice words for this group of brown movers," saying "those certainly sound like statements that someone from ICE or the KKK would make," before complaining that "Simply saying that a group of brown people are committing crimes is an act of racial hatred."

Of course, one reason Tijuana has such a massive problem is although thousands of refugees are trying to seek asylum, the US is playing a game of asylum suppression, not unlike the Trump campaign policy of voter suppression, by accepting claims at a handful of legal ports of entry like San Diego, where they are processing only 100 claims a day.

Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum in a Trump styled "Make Tijuana Great Again" hat. Does he realize how ironic it is that he says this in ENGLISH, or did he just want to make sure it could be read by his target audience? Does he also agreed with the way Trump talks about Mexicans? Trump talked about the Mayor again in his Thanksgiving call to the troops in which he said he also authorized the US army to use "lethal force" at the border "if they have to." Does this "Mexican patriot" also support Trump on that?
Tijuana has already had its own challenges in recent years, like more than 2000 homicides in 2018, before 3000 refugees started camping out near the border crossing. Given encouragement from the mayor, the anti-immigrant propaganda coming from north of the border, and who knows what other incentives, it's surprising that they could only muster about 300 "Mexico First" protesters willing to say things like:
"Trump was right! This is an invasion!"
However, those 300 where enough for Tucker Carlson to build a show segment around because he thought he could use this protest to demonstrate that the dislike of immigrants he promotes nightly was universal [xenophobic], and not racist. Tucker thought that since they were Mexicans protesting immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, he could use them to argue that white supremacy was not behind the anti-immigrant campaign in the US either. The Daily Stormer thought they could use the story the same way:
It looks as if the Jew-run media is mostly trying to ignore what’s happening in Tijuana. That’s because there’s no way they can really spin a narrative in their favor. For weeks they were claiming that the bad orange man in the White House was lying about the caravan. But what’s happening in Tijuana proves that he was right. The mere fact that the Mexicans want these invaders to go back to where they came from is proof of this.
...
They do however have multiple videos about Jim Acosta’s press pass and a video about Apple’s CEO Tim Cook talking about how he wants to brainwash children into becoming faggots.
...
Their narrative about the caravan was wrong and they can’t start calling Mexicans racist for being angry at the situation. And they definitely want to ignore the fact that Tijuana’s mayor is basically agreeing with Trump in saying that these invaders need to go back to their shitholes.
Since Tucker pretends to be "Fair & Balanced," he can't be that direct, so he invited on Enrique Acevedo, an anchor at Univision, to be his guest for this segment on the Tijuana protest.

Tucker played Fox News interviews with four protesters. The show used subtitles even though all the Mexican protesters they interviewed were speaking very intelligible English. They said things like "these are bad people", "they don't belong here", "this is not about racism," and "these caravans are committing crimes." Tucker then proceeded as though those were majority opinions in Mexico, and put his main premise to his guest:
Tucker: I'm confused. We just saw a group of Mexican citizens in Tijuana saying basically the same things that President Trump says, almost to the word endorsing Trump. Are they white supremacists?

Enrique: Well, you have to understand that unlike human beings, intolerance, hate, and even racism flow freely across borders, and that's what you saw in those interviews. They're not running for president. They're not running for president in the United States either. They are part of a group of around 300 protesters in a city of 1.3 million who, like many others along the way of this Caravan, are opposed to their presence in Tijuana, and you know, the overwhelming majority of people in Tijuana welcome immigrants. It's a city of immigrants.

Tucker: Wait but, wait but, I'm sorry, can I just backup a little bit? Its a big city for sure. Hold on. Woe, I think you just said that they're racist but they're Latino, Spanish-speaking Latinos attacking other Spanish-speaking Latinos. So where's the racism?

Enrique: Well, we're not a monolithic community Tucker. We have people from Central America, from Venezuela, from Colombia. Different backgrounds, different ethnicities, and yes, racism exists in Mexico toward Central Americans. It's not new. It's happened through...

Tucker: Okay, but I'm not quite sure how it's racism if they appear to be of the same race?


Like that educator on my tour that could see only Chinese in China, Tucker Carlson puts everybody south of the US southern border into the same race of brown people. That's how he thinks about race. He is white and all of them are brown, including, no doubt, the Mayor of Tijuana, and those are objective, immutable racial categories, and not his subjective and culturally derived opinion.

He is delusional.

He should start with the objective reality that while humans of all races and nationalities have eyeballs and teeth that are white (more or less), nobody has skin that is objectively the color white. The main determinate of human skin color is its density of melanin. As the English rulers of colonial America begin to create a system of African slavery as a solution to their labor problems, they sought to built a pro-slavery unity among all those exempt from slavery based on their lighter skin color, and for this new synthetic "race" they appropriated the label "white" because it carried with it many positive attributes. Soon after that, they began to label the Africans they were enslaving "black," although their skin color was not black like their hair color. They labeled them "black" because that color already had many negative connotations. These labels were chosen to support slavery and white supremacy. This happened in the 17th century in what would become the United States.

It was a marketing and branding coup d'état, and the inauguration of white supremacy. People like Tucker, who don't understand the fraudulent nature of the title "white," and think of themselves as white, also assume that racism or white supremacy is limited to the sphere of conflict or interaction between "white people" and "people of color," indeed they strive to limit it to that, as though the racial categories he has in his head have some objective, persistent reality to them. This makes it hard for him to understand that their was a time when people he may now welcomes into the white race, such as the Irish, Jews, and less than a hundred years ago, as I reported in The Rise of Xenophobia, the Poles, where not considered white and were subjected to racism, or white supremacy, by those that did consider themselves white. I wonder in Tucker considers Jews white, even today. I know his Daily Stormer buddies don't. I'll bet Gastélum thinks he is white, although Tucker thinks he is the same race as every other Latino.

It is also problematic for racists like Tucker to conceive of a white supremacist hierarchy existing among people he considers all to be in another race. This is a simpleminded view of the world.

Anyone familiar with African American culture and history knows very well that there is a racist hierarchy of discrimination based on skin color, with lighter skin being favored. This discrimination is supported by the white power structure, but it also is a reflection of white supremacy within the oppressed race. In other places, I have report on how even in Sudan, Africa, among the brown and black skin population, where exists a white supremacist hierarchy enforced by those who think themselves "white" no matter how brown they may look to European eyes.

The Guardian also reported on this protest. Sarah Kinosian wrote:
On Sunday, anti-caravan protesters chanted: “Out Hondurans, we don’t want you here”, “Tijuana first” and “Long live Mexico”, and waved Mexican flags and signs reading “no to the invasion” and “no more migrants”.

The group, which at its height numbered about 300, gathered in front of a statue of the Aztec warrior Cuauhtémoc before making their way to a sports complex serving as a temporary shelter to about 2,500 migrants from the caravan.
She also wrote about how this Mexican anti-immigrant movement had been influenced by the US:
While many have welcomed the migrants – as they have the thousands of others who have come to the city over recent years – some Tijuana residents have expressed hostility to the caravan, amid intense media coverage and aggressive rhetoric from the US president, Donald Trump.
The Associated Press echoed this sentiment, saying that while some blamed the backlash on the sudden arrival of the caravan:
Others point to social media and the hostile rhetoric of U.S. President Donald Trump, who said it harbored criminals and gang members and was planning an "invasion."
There has been a well developed social media campaign at work building this anti-immigrant movement in Mexico. Karla Zabludovsky on Buzzfeed wrote about this 15 November  2018 in The Racist Backlash To The Migrant Caravan Is Building In WhatsApp Groups In Mexico:
Several Facebook and WhatsApp groups advocating for the caravan's deportation have sprung up in the month since the migrants set out from Honduras, underscoring escalating anti-immigrant sentiment in northern Mexico. The violent language used against Central Americans in these groups echoes that used by Trump supporters in the US, referring to the caravan as an "invasion" and issuing a call to arms in defense of borders.

Inside the WhatsApp chat, people have felt free to share their unfiltered views:

"These people are a Cancer that signals the end of Mexico."

"I'm asking the men here to defend their women and children... Since the majority of Central Americans who've arrived are men, violent thefts will start any moment now."

"Plagues are confronted with venom. And [bullets] are the venom here. Hondurans are equal to gonorrhea."

Other messages in a WhatsApp group called "Citizen’s Blockade" — which BuzzFeed News had access to after joining a related, closed Facebook page — included suggestions to deliver pizza and hamburgers filled with pesticide to migrants, and a call to burn down one of the biggest shelters in the city. The group has more than 250 participants.
Considering that all that they still had only 200-300 protesters at their rally. These are the people Tucker supports-a minority of haters who advocate violence. James Fredrick, writing for NPR described them as a "few hundred Tijuanenses gathered in the city's high-end Rio area." While some of the marchers headed for Mayor Gastélum's office, other headed off towards a shelter where more than 2,500 immigrants are staying. Alonzo Castillo, 37, a construction worker from Honduras was not intimidated by their tactics, and had no trouble putting a name to what they are facing:
“I’m not afraid of them, this is just racism.”
Tucker Carlson may think that opposition to Central American immigrants in Mexico can't be based on racism because they all "appear to be of the same [brown] race," but as CNN Contributor Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote in 2012 In Mexico, racism hides in plain view:
The enduring taboo subject is skin color, whether an individual's complexion betrays an allegiance to the Spanish who conquered the Aztec empire in 1521 or the Aztecs who were conquered. It's no exaggeration to say that, in this country and especially in this city, the best, highest-paying, most important jobs often seem to go to those who, in addition to having the best education and the strongest connections, have the lightest skin.

On television, in politics and in academia, you see light-skinned people. On construction sites, in police forces and in restaurant kitchens, you're more likely to find those who are dark-skinned. In the priciest neighborhoods, the homeowners have light skin, and the housekeepers are dark. Everyone knows this, and yet no one talks about it, at least not in elite circles.
He also talked about the role this racism has played in holding Mexico back:
Nor do Mexicans seem all that eager to discuss the larger dynamic that race feeds into: the fact that this is, and has always been, a country of deep divisions. In the 100 years since the Mexican Revolution, one part of Mexico has often been at war with another: urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor and, yes, dark-skinned vs. light-skinned.

It's one reason that institutions such as the economy, the political system and the social structure haven't matured as quickly as they should have, given Mexico's advantages.

This country of 120 million people has ports, highways, airports and skyscrapers. It takes in billions of dollars every year in revenues from oil and natural gas, and billions more from tourism and remittances from Mexican migrants living abroad. Mexico's economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy, and investments are flowing in from Asia and Europe. It's consistently within the top three of trading partners for the United States. But what good is all that when only a small number of the population can live up to their full potential? Prejudice kills progress.
Those like Tucker Carlson who promote the narrowest possible view of the problems caused by racism are just wrong. It was a core feature in the development of early capitalism because white supremacy was developed as a ideological tool that could be used to justify domination not only of the newly created "non-white" people of the Earth, but the very Earth itself. Just as it has held back Mexico's develop, so has it held back revolutionary development worldwide. Capitalism can never be transcended so long as white supremacy has so many under its spell.

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Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The Rise of Xenophobia

After a white supremacist murdered eleven Jews in a Pittsburgh synagogue because of their support for Central American immigrants, Amy Goodman on Democracy Now said this about the killer:
Robert Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content.
She put it the same way on the next show:
Bowers has a history of posting anti-Semitic and xenophobic content and was posting on the far-right social media site Gab until just before the shooting.
The Washington Post less charitably called Gab "the white supremacist sanctuary" in a headline.

Xenophobia is a much used word on Democracy Now. It's been used more than two thousand times by Google's count. It is especially favored when describing Donald Trump. Here are a few examples:

22 July 2016 Title:
Classic Authoritarianism: In a Speech Filled with Fear & Xenophobia, Donald Trump Accepts Nomination
28 September 2016:
In the wake of Monday night’s first presidential debate, the establishment Republican Party and conservative newspapers continue to distance themselves from Donald Trump amid increasing accusations of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia.
5 September 2017 Title:
Trump Slammed for Siding with “Hate and Xenophobia” by Rescinding DACA for 800,000 “DREAMers”
31 January 2018 Title:
In Xenophobic Speech, Trump Attacks Immigrants, Pushes War with North Korea
Of course, Democracy Now is far from the only white Left organ to make liberal use of the word xenophobia in the age of Trump. It is widely used as an all encompassing super-category under which a host of hatreds or "phobias," including racism can be subsumed. For example, Jacob Bacharach, writing on Jacobin had a similar assessment of the Pittsburgh massacre:
"this murder is a project of the political right, who deploy xenophobia and antisemitism to incite senseless violence"
Calling it xenophobia favors the conclusion that it was "senseless," violence, whereas racist violence has a purpose. It generally serves the economic interests of the capitalist class. Anti-Semitic violence is also employed with a purpose by fascists.

In another example, an article by Joseph Natoli in counterpunch, titled "Über-Globalization or Über-Xenophobia?," 9 September 2016, two months before the election, promoted the view that xenophobia is the natural root of many ethnic, racial, and religious issues. He begins by quoting Jim Harrison:
“We are all naturally xenophobic.”
Before going on to say this about what he calls Über-Globalization:
Revolt against this now remains with Trump and his supporters, its manifesto being what I call über-xenophobia, xenophobia being the mildest preamble to the ugliness of the whole.
And this is how he appears to justify this xenophobia:
Indeed, a fear of difference, whether of skin color, religion, language, culinary passion, dress code or shocking idiosyncrasy, is woven into the cloth of our cultural imaginaries.
We saw a big increase in the usage of the word "xenophobia" on the Left in 2016. That year, the word "xenophobia" was often mobilized to give a minimalist description to the outright racism of the Trump campaign by those out to defeat Clinton by any means necessary. The cardinal sin of the white Left in 2016 was to disparage the distinction between what Clinton represented, another vanilla Democratic regime, and what Trump represented, an extreme white supremacist regime with fascist inclinations. For those on the Left telling progressives "Don't vote! for the lesser of two evils," substituting "xenophobic" for "white supremacist" helped cloud the differences, and sell that very bad advice.

In a pre-midterm Left Voice piece titled "Democrats Were Not "the Lesser Evil" for the Migrant Caravan," Tatiana Cozzarelli recounted the very bad record the Democratic Party has on Central America and immigration, and then argued that progressives should've sat out the midterm elections that took the House away from Trump sycophants. Under the banner of "No Votes for an Anti-Immigrant Party," she wanted to see progressives repeat the same mistake that allowed Trump to win in the first place. She describes Trump supporters as "the xenophobes who are terrified of people rushing to the border." I assume she would also include under that umbrella the "terrified" terrorist who wrote "Screw your optics, I'm going in" before he massacred eleven Jews in Pittsburgh.

Many on the Left position xenophobia as the higher, all encompassing category, with racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim [Islamophobia] attitudes operating as sub-categories of xenophobia. This is how John Reiman, who blogs as the Oakland Socialist, and thinks himself a Marxist, used it in discussions with me. He defines xenophobia simply as "hatred of foreigners" [email 23/7/2018]:
Yes, the anti-immigration issue is and will be used to build the forces of white supremacy, but you could also put it the other way around. In any case, I think that the xenophobia that is being built also has its own component. And let’s not forget that this is a global development. Yes, white supremacy is often part of it elsewhere, but consider this: The Brexit vote was largely an anti immigrant vote, but a large part of that xenophobic, anti immigrant sentiment was directed against Polish immigrants into Britain.
The Poles and white supremacy

Actually, anti-Polish attitudes have their own phobia - polonophobia. More to the point is this BBC News article from 19 July 2012:
The Polish Association of Northern Ireland has called for action after Poland flags were burned in several locations across Belfast on 11 July.

They have described the burning of the flags as "racist intimidation" of the Polish community.
The reason they called it "racist intimidation" and not "xenophobic intimidation" is that it was being done by white supremacist gangs that don't consider the Poles to be really "white," no matter how hard the extreme right-wing government back in Poland tries to be white nationalist. Such are the odd contradictions of "whiteness."

Because Reiman considers the Poles to be "white," he thought they would make a good case for why xenophobia, as opposed to white supremacy, was the operative force at work in this case. What he overlooks is that it is the racists that determine who is "white," and the Poles aren't always considered white.

The white race was invented in the pre-United States between 1650-1705, after the colonial ruling class decided to solve its labor shortage problems with African slave labor, and needed to cobble together the various European nationalities into a new synthetic one that would enforce racial slavery. After about 1690, "white people," and along with the "white race" even started showing up in English language dictionaries.

It wasn't easy to get the various European people to give up their native heritages, and buy into this new synthetic "white race." It isn't widely recognized that the earliest "whites only" legal restrictions {circa 1670s} were not designed so much as to restrict the rights of the few free blacks, as they were to force anyone who was deemed as qualifying for membership in the white race to apply for membership. Under the new racial laws, if you wanted to own land, do legal business, etc, you had to declare yourself "white," not English, Irish, French, or German. The white race was created by force, just as the black race was, and by the same people.

Today, the Trump administration wants to put a citizenship question on the US census. It is widely recognized that the promotion of white supremacy {or as the white Left would say "xenophobia"} is behind this demand. The US census of 1790 recognized only three categories of Americans: “free whites”, “other free people”, and “slaves.” There were many advantages that came with being able to check the "free whites" box. As for the other categories: White slaves {indentured servants} had existed in abundance in the colonies before lifetime racial slavery had become solidified with the Virginia 1705 Slave Codes. By 1790 they were history.

Still, not all whites were free, and the category of "other free people" was a multiracial one that included whites still in bondage or prison, free Africans, native Americans, Asians and others such as the Irish, Jews and Slavs, that weren't initially considered white. Reiman may consider the Poles "white," but they became white much later than white Americans from England, or even Ireland. {The first prototype for white supremacy was the English oppression of the Irish.}

In a piece titled "How do you become “white” in America?," Sarah Kendzior describes the status of Polish immigrants in the United States before 1919 in some detail, and then sums it up by concluding:
The Poles, in other words, were not considered white.
In this period when racism is on the rise, there seems to be a lot of obfuscation about just what is racist. Recently, NBC host Megan Kelly lost her job after asking:
"But what is racist? Because you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween,..."
Kendzior gave us a lesser known example of why blackface will forever be associated with racism in her description of how the Poles became white:
In 1919, Irish gangs in blackface attacked Polish neighborhoods in Chicago in an attempt to convince Poles, and other Eastern European groups, that they, too, were “white” and should join them in the fight against blacks. As historian David R. Roediger recalls, “Poles argued that the riot was a conflict between blacks and whites, with Poles abstaining because they belonged to neither group.” But the Irish gangs considered whiteness, as is often the case in America, as anti-blackness. And as in the early 20th century Chicago experienced an influx not only of white immigrants from Europe, but blacks from the South, white groups who felt threatened by black arrivals decided that it would be politically advantageous if the Poles were considered white as well.

Over time, the strategy of positioning Poles as “white” against a dark-skinned “other” was successful. Poles came to consider themselves white, and more importantly, they came to be considered white by their fellow Americans, as did Italians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, and others from Southern and Eastern Europe, all of whom held an ambivalent racial status in U.S. society.
As you can see, the attitude of the Irish to the Poles was all about whether they were to be considered in or out of the white race, so-called xenophobia had little to do with it.

These post-war years were very tumultuous ones for race-relations in the US. During the war, many African Americans migrated North to take part in war production while others went abroad to fight in it. Both were changed by their experiences. In Chicago, the African American population increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 in 1919, when many veterans were returning to find them in the industrial jobs that were "whites only" before the war.

"Xenophobic" groups like the Ku Klux Klan were taking full advantage of these disruptions. The KKK was making a comeback, and bringing racial violence back to the South. There were 64 lynchings in 1918, and another 83 lynchings in 1919. One would hope that such "xenophobic" lynchings are history, but even now, Monday, 12 November 2018, CNN is carrying a story about a white US Senator from Mississippi joking about her desire to sit "front row" at a "public hanging," as she faces a 27 November run-off election against her African American opponent.


In the "Red Summer" of 1919, resentment against the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North prompted by the war came to a head, and race riots broke out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and Chicago. The riot in Chicago started on 27 July 1919 after an African American teenager was stoned and drowned to death by a group of white youths because he had strayed over an unofficial segregation line. Police refused to arrest the white man that eyewitnesses said was responsible, and that sparked a week of rioting that saw more than a thousand black families burned out of their homes in violence that also took the lives of 15 whites and 23 blacks.

While some of those homes may have been burned by white men in white sheets, others were burned by white men in blackface. Blackface wasn't just for minstrel shows at the time. As Christopher Lamberti wrote in Riot Zone: Chicago 1919:
White men in black grease paint posing as African Americans frequently committed crimes in the South around the turn-of-the-century, and in Chicago as early as 1914, when the Defender complained, "With a blackened face crimes of all kinds are committed and laid at the door of an innocent Afro-American." The number of robberies and assaults by white men in blackface increased in Chicago during the early years of the Great Migration.
Characteristically, some of these blackface crimes involved assaults on white women.

Here's an interesting tidbit that turned up in my research: One of the Irish-American gangs that took part in the riot was the Hamburg Athletic Club. At the time, the legendary mayor of Chicago (1955-1976), Richard J. Daley, was a 17 year old member.

A Polish gang member of that period told researcher Frederick Thrasher, “A Jew or a ni@@er can be a pal of mine if he’s a good fellow.” Such was the contradictory position the Poles occupied in the US at the time. It was in the context of this sharp struggle that Chicago's Poles were finally admitted to the white race, less than a hundred years ago! Some might call this a part of the rich history of "xenophobia," but they would just be misappropriating the history of white supremacy.

It is the racists that get to define the races. Hitler didn't label the Poles white, although he did the English. I'll bet the pro-Brexit "xenophobes" don't see the Polish immigrants as "white" either.


The Rise of Xenophobia

Above is a graph of the popularity of word "xenophobia" from 1800 to 2008, it is based on the Google Books collection as constructed by Google's Ngram Viewer. It seems to indicate that nobody was describing the attitudes of the Irish or Poles in terms of "xenophobia" at the time of these events. The word didn't even get noticeable usage until the 1900s. It saw a steady increase in usage after WWII, followed my a kind of leveling off and then its sharpest rise beginning with the Reagan years. No doubt there has been another sharp rise recently that this tool, which only goes to 2008, can't show. Such has been the meteoric rise of xenophobia over its relatively short life.

Fashioned from the Greek prefix "xeno," and the Greek suffix "phobia," it has the feeling of being a very old term for a timeless condition. In point of fact, it was coined about 1880. It didn't even exist until the 200+ year regime of racial slavery had been overthrown, and white supremacy was re-positioning itself for the age of imperialism.

Xenophobia is a political term and not a recognized medical phobia. Phobias are legitimate anxiety disorders. Those with a genuine fear of something don't seek out and harass the objects of their "phobia." Xenophobic harassment is a method of racist control. A part of the "charm," shall we say, of "xenophobia" is that it masquerades as a psychological disorder when it decidedly is not one. The same can be said about Islamophobia, homophobia, and the above mentioned polonophobia, for that matter. The use of the suffix "phobia" in these cases is a fraudulent one, but clearly it has been embraced by the white Left.

Merriam-Webster tells us a bit more about the history of the word:
Word History
The History of the Word 'Xenophobia'

The word isn't as old as you might think

Xenophobia—"fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners"—has the look and feel of a word that has been in the English language for hundreds of years, borne of the tumultuous political climates of the Renaissance and the penchant that many writers back then had for fashioning fancy new words from Latin and Greek. It is not that old. In fact, the word is relatively new (with an emphasis on "relatively"), with all evidence suggesting that it originated near the end of the 19th century. Our earliest citation is from 1880:
Here, however, as in other cases, we are inclined to think that intelligent xenomania is decidedly preferable to the Xenophobia which is of necessity and always unintelligent.
—The Daily News (London, England), 12 April 1880
Xenophobia was formed from a brace of words found in ancient Greek, xenos (which can mean either "stranger" or "guest") and phobos (which can mean either "flight" or "fear"). More...
More History

The use of African slavery in the colonies produced a theory and practise of white supremacy with deep roots that go back to the earliest days of capitalist development. The development of white supremacy was inextricably tied to the creation of the white race itself.

Once richly developed after 200 years of racial slavery, white supremacy became the antecedent from which a multitude of oppressions sprang. It was the model applied to oppress people everywhere, even white workers. For example, the slave owners need to control human reproduction determined much about the status of all women, as white supremacy came to influence the system of domination not only of people of color, but also of nature, and the Earth itself.

How does this compare with the relatively brief history of xenophobia? African slave labor was central to the economic development of the US for a very long time. That was the material basis for the development of white supremacy. This involved detailed and expensive material world elaboration:

Here is just one example from American history: Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia so that the sons of slave owners would not be "corrupted" by a liberal Northern education. A new appraisal of Jefferson's role in creating UVA, issued just this year by the university admitted to “his vision in creating a southern pro-slavery Ivy League school.” He wanted UVA to be “an institution with slavery at its core.” What this meant is that Jefferson created a university in which every course was corrupted by white supremacy, because truth could not be allowed to interfere with commerce. Such were the foundations of white supremacy. Upon what pillars does "xenophobia" stand, beyond the assertion that it is natural and forever?

Since "xenophobia" as a concept that has earned it own word goes back a little over a hundred years, it is hard to credit it with a long history, or with having great impact on social development before it was recognized. Generally, when it is proposed as a reason for behavior today, it is given no particular foundation in economic development. Instead it is left to stand on its own as though the term explains itself.

Nativism, Tribalism and Identitarian

Two other words often associated with xenophobic behavior, tribalism and nativism, turn out to be older than xenophobia, but not much older. Etymonline.com dates nativism from the US anti-immigrant movement ~ 1845, and tribalism from 1868. Identitarian is too new for Etymonline.com to find, but the Ngram Viewer has it showing up around 1938. Although it is the least used of any on this list, it has been sharply trending up since 1991. It also is a white supremacist movement by another name.

Here is what the Google Books Ngram Viewer tells us about the usage of white supremacy, xenophobia, nativism, tribalism, and identitarian.

We can see that since 1954, the year of the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, xenophobia  had pretty much caught up with white supremacy, and has been running neck-and-neck with it ever since.  Tribalism and nativism have been bringing up the rear, with identitarian looking for market share.

In Australia, the "nativists" adopted "White Australia" as their policy. Asian immigration was severely restricted, and most Pacific Islanders were deported. When Japan tried to get a racial equality clause included in the Covenant of the League of Nations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Australia collaborated with Britain to block it. Japan's own Wajin supremacy having developed around 1880, after being influence by white supremacists from the West and their pseudo-scientific ideas about race.

In the United States, the nativists were first represented by the Native American Party, more commonly called the Know Nothings. Abraham Lincoln had no trouble seeing the racism of these "nativists," he wrote in a 24 August 1855 letter to Joshua Speed:
I am not a Know-Nothing—that is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equals, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
From the above we can gather that one difference Lincoln had with the Know Nothings was that he considered "foreigners and Catholics" to be among the "classes of white people," and they didn't.

What is being sold to us as xenophobia, nativism, and tribalism are recent elaborations of white supremacy. All were founded long after it, and like symbolic links, have no independent existence without it. Of course, their promoters can always go back and claim various early behaviors represented xenophobia, just as they can claim the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were "white," no matter what color they really were, or how little attention they paid to it.

When you include racism in the NGram chart, all the others fade towards insignificance.

After racial slavery had finally been overthrown, and while black reconstruction was being overthrown, and white supremacy was being refitted for a larger, if subtler role, under imperialism, "xenophobia" was created as a way of excusing white supremacy without ever even acknowledging it.

Google Trends show us how "xenophobia" has been doing lately. I find it curious that it peaked so sharply just when Trump was becoming president.


In Summary

Xenophobia is often used by the white Left to describe the motivation behind the current anti-immigrant movement. They are doing the fascist a great service by promoting this limited framework. Xenophobia is made to stand in as reason enough to explain anti-immigrant attitudes without invoking racism, but the white supremacists who are building the anti-immigrant agitation are consciously trying to create a white supremacist fascist state. They see the anti-immigrant agitation as but a step up the ladder, even while the white Left strives to disguise the danger by explaining away the current movement with talk of "xenophobia," and such.

What these various white Left commentators are doing is very dangerous because this explanation for racist behavior tend to favor the white nationalist argument for ethnostates.  If there is a natural fear of people that are different, say different skin color, maybe the best thing for all is that we go our separate ways. People of color can leave the US, or live under a white apartheid regime. This is genocidal nonsense, but it is what the white nationalists conclude about xenophobia.

It is also dangerous because it divorces racism from its material and historic roots. It favors thinking of racism as simply a personal dislike of the others, so all people can be racists, just as all people can be xenophobic or whatever. It is no longer connected to that long history in which the employers of labor systematically used differences in skin color to divide the laborers between white and black. This opens the door to the situation in which our "xenophobic" president is publicly accusing African American reporters of being racist.

This too, is part of a plan. Last week Trump verbally attacked three female African American reporters. Observers have noted that he has a record of attacking black women, including Michelle Obama, April Ryan, Abby Phillip, Brenda Snipes, Mia Love, Myeshia Johnson, Rep. Frederica Wilson, Jemele Hill, Susan Rice, and Rep. Maxine Waters to name a few. This is a program fully supported by Fox News and the rest of the Alt-Right [white supremacist] media. This week they are also loudly blaming a black women for incompetence and voter fraud in Florida. We can expect a lot more of this. They have long vilified African American men, but they understand that if they are to build white support for taking down a people, they must vilify the women as well.

Likewise, the have seized upon the issue of immigration as a gateway to much more extreme white supremacists' policies. They know exactly what they are doing. They have a plan to lead people step by step to accept conditions and commit atrocities that most who consider themselves anti-immigrant would find unthinkable now. The white Left is obliging this white supremacist movement by blaming the current anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim movements on "xenophobia," and failing to expose its deeper roots and long-term program.

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