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.
