"Moonface" and "composite nationality"

While most of the country was asleep, my country's war-time President, Agent Orange, apparently went on a lengthy Twitter rant.

The Dear Leader, voted to power by 63 million, which includes a few of my neighbors and former commenters at this blog, was particularly upset at George Conway, who is married to the cheeto's lying aide.

The racist-in-chief knows all the racist usages out there, and he educates the rest of us who don't know that jargon.  The word today, boys and girls, is moonface.  Who knew there were such words that are used to insult!  He knows them all.

Source

Twitter immediately picked up on that, and Conway chimed in too:

I know you do.

— George Conway, Noble Committee Chair (@gtconway3d) May 5, 2020

Such is the behavior of the President who claims that he has been treated way worse than Abraham Lincoln was!

He and his racist base are trying their best to keep alive the racism and hate that has been a foundational aspect of these United States.  But, their days are numbered.  This is their final, dying, gasp.

What the racists fail to understand and appreciate is how easily immigrants create a “composite nationality" that Frederick Douglass envisioned.

In calling for a composite nationality, Douglass asserted that America’s strength lay in its capacity to welcome newcomers and make them Americans. Speaking at a time of growing hostility to Chinese immigration, he proclaimed that in America, immigrants added their talents, ideas, and energy, but in turn they were incorporated into the nation.

In a post slightly more than a year ago, which was a part of a series when reading Jill Lepore's These Truths, I blogged about Douglass and his open-door to immigration from anywhere.  The following is the unedited post from January 29, 2019:
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Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889!

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?