Donald Trump said:
“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run… Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.”
And the question is: is that racist? And the answer is yes. The more important point is that this is a great moment for talking about how racism actually works, since racism continues because people don’t know it when they see it.
A lot of people look at what he said, and say, “This isn’t racist, because he never mentions race, and he’s talking about culture of origin, not race.”
The notion that something isn’t racist as long as you don’t explicitly mention race is like saying it isn’t cancer as long as you don’t say that word out loud.
A lot of people believe that a racist action happens because a person (who is racist in every single encounter) gets up in the morning and says, “I sure do have an irrational hate of X race. How can I be more racist toward that group every day and every way?” And, when that person engages in a racist action, s/he says, “I am doing this to you purely because you are X race.” Thus, as long as someone isn’t deliberately hostile, or their hostility isn’t irrational, or they don’t explicitly mention race, they didn’t do something racist.
In that world, someone saying that what you did is racist is accusing you of being that kind of really awful person. And so you are offended, and then the conversation shifts to how you feel about getting accused of getting up every morning and ironing your hood. (This is called “white fragility.”) So, you point out that you didn’t use racist terms, you have friends of X race (which might or might not be true), you have done un- or anti-racist things. None of that–your feeling of having been disrespected, your avoiding racist terms, your friends, your past behavior–is actually evidence that this you just did was not racist.
Think about it this way. You’re driving along, and someone (call him Chester) changes lanes into you and causes y’all to crash. Your car is really damaged. And Chester gets out of his car and you have this conversation:
You: You just changed lanes into me.
Chester: No, I couldn’t have done that because that would make me a bad driver and how dare you call me a bad driver! I am a good person. I foster blind owls, and teach a literacy class at the local public library, and pick up trash on the road.
You: Um, that’s all great, but you did change lanes into me.
Chester: I couldn’t have done that because I’m a good driver. I have never been given a ticket (because I treat police officers with respect, unlike some people), I think terrible things about very unsafe drivers, and I always check my blindspots. And I think the real issue here is that you’ve accused me of being a bad driver.
You wouldn’t say, “Oh, wow, well, yeah, that’s all evidence that you are a good driver, so you can’t possibly have just changed lanes into me.” That would be an absurd conclusion. You would say, “I don’t really care if you’re normally a good driver. I don’t care who you are–I care about what you just did.”
Yet, when someone does something racist, and someone else points it out, we have the “I can’t have changed lanes into you because I’m a good driver” argument.
And that’s how this argument about Trump is going.
But, let’s take seriously the argument that he isn’t racist, but xenophobic. He isn’t xenophobic—his wife, in-laws, and father are or were all immigrants—he is not opposed to immigrants. He’s perfectly fine with engaging in chain immigration, which he has condemned in the abstract, for his family, and his wife’s visa is problematic. And, this isn’t really about immigrants—this is about what counts as a real American.
Keep in mind that all of the women he criticized are Americans. That’s the country they’re from. So, he just said the US has a government that is a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world.
Perhaps we should take him at his word. Or, in other words, paging Dr. Freud.
There are only two ways to interpret what he said—either he is unintentionally showing what he thinks of his own government, or he believes that those women should be seen as coming from the countries from which their parents came. Three of them, after all, were born in the US. And he sees their ethnicity—their parents’ country—as what matters about them. And that is what makes it racist. That is how racism works—as seeing some groups as not really American.
That’s really common among racists. Americans gleefully put Americans of Japanese descent into camps (as they were called at the time) because the assumption was that, if you were second generation Japanese you weren’t really American, an assumption not made about the Italians, Germans, Romanians, or other Nazi countries in the 1940s (but made about all of those groups at some point). That was a political, and not biological, decision. All the decisions about who gets to be white have always been political and not biological.
Again, that’s how racism works. Until the rise of biological racism, “race” was always country of origin. Even after the rise of biological racism, there was a lot of “science” that showed that people from various countries (or continents) were inferior—the Irish, the Poles, the Italians–, biological racism never had a coherent biological definition of race.
Some scholars use the term cultural racism, but I’m not wild about that term, since all racism is and always has been about country of origin (sometimes going back pretty far, as with Latinx whose families have been in the US far longer than Trump’s, or Native Americans who are oddly framed as not native to the US). The Jews are not a race.
So, saying that Trump was talking about country of origin and not race means he’s perfectly in line with how racism typically works.
Trump has had a lot to say about what’s wrong with America, and how the government is awful. In fact, a lot of his base believes there is a Deep State trying to work against him. Trump and his supporters are the ones telling everyone how the government should be run.
So, Trump and his supporters have no problem with someone going on and on about how awful the government is—they think that’s great. That’s what makes them love Trump.
And, really, if you want to have an example of viciously telling people things, Trump’s tweets would be up there.
Again, that’s how racism works. When an in-group member engages in a certain behavior—let’s say disrupting coffee shops with protests—you defend it as required by external circumstances, and the consequence of good internal motives. When an out-group member disrupts coffee shops with protests, you say it wasn’t necessary, and it was the consequence of bad motives.
If you believe that disagreement is useful for a democracy, if you believe that people really disagree, if you believe that we should argue with one another—in other words, if you believe in the values on which the US is founded—then you would attribute someone’s disagreement to their disagreeing.
Either criticizing the government is okay, or it isn’t. And if it’s okay for you, then it’s okay for others. And if you say that someone’s argument should be dismissed because of their race, ethnicity, or country of origin, you’ve made a racist argument.