By David K. Shipler
If you
spread out on a table all the categories of stereotyping inflicted upon Blacks
and other people of color throughout the history of the United States, you’ll
see how some of the ugliest are being chosen and brandished by Donald Trump and
his running mate, J.D. Vance. Like crude weapons of mass destruction, these
instruments of bigotry cannot be precisely targeted. They wound both their
intended victims and mere bystanders—and perhaps, in the end, the perpetrators
themselves.
The
latest example is the poisonous lie that Haitian immigrants, who came to this
country in the naïve belief that it would be a refuge of safety and
opportunity, are stealing and eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. That
Trump and Vance would repeat and inflate this toxic nonsense after the city’s
officials denied its truth exposes, first, their own hatred toward “others,” and
second, their faith that the hatred is harbored by millions of American voters.
The
concocted story fits the longstanding American narrative of Blacks as
primitive, violent, immoral, and unclean. Those supposed traits helped feed the
rationalizations of slavery, persisted through the Jim Crow era of legal
segregation, and continue in the barely concealed warrens of today’s right-wing
electorate.
Trump has proved dangerously
skillful in tapping this base bigotry. Whether by instinct or calculation, he locates
and gives voice to the worst characteristics of his society. He garners broad
support by his vicious fabrication that immigrants are invading as hordes of
disease-ridden criminals released from prisons and mental institutions abroad. It
doesn’t matter that official statistics show lower crime rates among immigrants
than native-born Americans. It doesn’t matter that most are fleeing persecution
and danger to the ideal that they imagine America to be. It doesn’t matter that
the two would-be assassins who have targeted Trump were white Americans.
He doesn’t have to say explicitly
that the hordes are swarthy; the picture in his voters’ minds is clear enough.
Evidently, he says what many people think. And what they think, about Blacks in
particular, has deep roots in American culture.
The stereotypes fall into five
basic categories, as I saw during five years of research for my book A
Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America.
Others may find different patterns, but in my interviewing across the
country, negative images of Blacks seemed to organize themselves around these
themes: Body, Mind, Morality, Violence, and Power.
The body is the first
encounter: the color of the skin, the shape of the nose and lips, the style of
the hair—the most superficial attributes that are taken to suggest the most profound
qualities. Here is where bigotry begins in its likening of Black people to primates.
In social media, President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were widely
portrayed as apes, including by some local Republican officials. The
implication of Blacks as subhuman is a longstanding caricature, which Trump
plays on in spreading the pet-eating claim. He seems to think it resonates with
his supporters.
Uncleanliness has also been a
long-term stereotype in the body category. It generated the Jim Crow laws in the
South that kept swimming pools, lunch counters, and drinking fountains
segregated. Vance summoned it up recently in smearing immigrants as
disease-ridden. Trump has said
that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” an echo of Nazi antisemitic
ideology. The fanciful notion that some pure blood exists and the fear of its being
tainted underlay state laws banning racial intermarriage until 1967, when the prohibitions
were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The mind is the area where
Blacks are stereotyped as less intelligent and less capable, a belief
reinforced when Trump speaks of “Black jobs,” meaning those requiring lower
skills. The smear of mental inferiority is also intrinsic to Republican arguments
that affirmative action has advanced unqualified Blacks. But affirmative action
if done properly does no such thing; it should actively recruit, accept, and
promote equally qualified Blacks and other minorities who have historically suffered
discrimination. The goal is to broaden the pool of qualified people. Until the Republican-dominated Supreme Court
struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, for example, elite
universities insisted that Blacks they were accepting were highly capable, a
small segment of the outstanding applicants who number many more than the
colleges can admit. Yet polls show whites embracing that stereotype of Blacks’ mental
inferiority.
Negative assumptions about Blacks’ morality
has fed Trump’s insistent repetition of the lie about Haitian immigrants
stealing and eating people’s pets. It’s his way of saying: They are primitive,
subhuman, and criminal. He also labels them “illegal,” although most are here
legally under the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them to
work. The permission, with time limits, is offered to residents of certain
countries in crisis, including Ukraine.
Violence is a constant theme
of Trump’s vitriole against immigrants—again, immigrants of color, not whites
from Norway. His portrait of the United States as awash in disorder and wallowing
in crime—whose incidence has actually declined—contradicts what most Americans
see with their own eyes. Yet it strikes a chord when he links the specter of
violence with nonwhite immigrants, who bear the burden of the violent
stereotype.
Power relationships across
racial lines can be emotionally fraught. As more and more Blacks gain authority
in workplaces, the military, and government, some whites chafe at the reversal
of old, expected hierachies. Obama’s election as the first Black president was
both inspirational and disorienting for whites, depending on their upbringing,
assumptions, and expectations about where Black should fit in the country’s power
structure. His very presence in the White House triggered a backlash among
right-wing whites, and Trump is capitaliziing on it.
Much of his support comes from the
white working class experiencing alienation, marginalization, and economic insecurity—and
anxiety about the nonwhite population gaining ground at their expense. Trump’s rants
against immigrants taking over the country doesn’t have to be taken literally
to be effective in animating many whites’ resentment over what they believe to
be the inversion of the racial power structure.
Kamala Harris, the daughter of a
Jamaican father and an Indian mother, can’t win those votes. Trump need only remind
people of her race, albeit awkwardly, which he’s done by asserting falsely (“falsely”
is the requisite adverb modifying verbs associated with Trump’s statements) that
she only belatedly decided that she was Black. Whites who are worried about a Black/Indian
woman in power can see their worries on their TV screens every day. Trump just
has to keep their flame of fear alive.
Meanwhile, the Trump-Vance bigotry,
their weapon of mass destruction, is causing collateral damage to the society
as a whole, demolishing the inhibitions to expressing racial prejudice.
Perhaps enough voters will see this to deny them a victory in November. But even
so, rebuilding a civil society will be a long project.
