Shitholes aren't natural. They were created

During my meeting with the dean, who too has personal connections to the old country, she remarked about how unknown the partition of India is to almost all the students on any American campus.  I wanted to add that the partition is unknown to most Americans of all ages--not only the students.

It is not a historical factoid that is at stake.  Nope. When they don't know about that important part of history, chances are overwhelming that they have no idea that three hundred years ago the Subcontinent was one of the richest places on the planet.  And, therefore, when the President refers to the shitholes of the world, there is a good chance that there is no understanding among most on how these shitholes came to be created by white supremacists.

Of course, there are plenty of modern day defenders of the old fashioned colonialism.  These apologists argue that the colonized browns "lacked the social and intellectual resources to transform themselves":

But the reality, at least in some of its colonies, was the opposite. Consider India. At the beginning of eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was 23 percent, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time Britain left India, it had dropped to less than 4 percent. “The reason was simple,” argues Shashi Tharoor in his book Inglorious Empire. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India.” Britain, Tharoor argues, deliberately deindustrialized India, both through the physical destruction of workshops and machinery and the use of tariffs to promote British manufacture and strangle Indian industries.

And that is how shitholes were created by white supremacists!

It was not just India from which resources flowed back to Britain, though in different countries it happened in different ways. Britain’s West Indian colonies were at the heart of the “triangular trade” by which goods from Britain were used to purchase slaves from West Africa who were taken to the Caribbean, and from whose labor great riches flowed back to British merchants in Bristol, Liverpool, and London.

So, when the white supremacists walk around with condescension towards the browns in the shitholes, well, ...

Without the slave plantations, it is unlikely that Britain would have been able to industrialize, or to forge an empire, as it did.

Slaves and almost-slaves created the wealthy European countries and the US.

In 1807, Britain passed a law banning the slave trade. But for three centuries, that trade had been dominated by Britain; three centuries of savage enslavement, pitiless brutality, and casual mass murder. Twelve million Africans are thought to have been transported to the Americas, half of them in the peak years of the Atlantic slave trade between 1690 and 1807. In those peak years, about half of these slaves were taken on British ships. Historians estimate that at least one in ten, and possibly one in five slaves, died on the Middle Passage, the journey from Africa to the New World. This suggests that half a million Africans may have lost their lives while being transported on British ships.

How horrible!  Just horrible!!!

Supporters of the British Empire argue that its rule was far more benign than the terror of the Belgian Congo. That is not to place the moral bar very high.

Indeed.  Whenever the apologists defend those bastards, I quickly refer them to the Bengal famine, which is one of the most well-documented mass atrocities that the white supremacists committed in the old country towards the end of their colonizing years.

I don't expect white supremacists to disappear anytime soon, given how much they have become emboldened in the US, and across Europe.  Which is all the more the reason why we cannot forget the past and let the white supremacists, including the one in the Oval Office, rewrite history.