The revolution in the "shithole"

This is the first long weekend of a new year; Monday is Martin Luther King Day.  Therefore, I will continue to focus on the slavery history of the United States in Jill Lepore's book.

I have written--many times--even in this blog, that I have no idea how African-Americans live without always being angry at the white folk who proudly claim their slave-owning history.  Or, when they openly talk about white supremacy.

Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country.  I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!

Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789.  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?

It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was "the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest."  Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.

A "democratic" revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power.  So, of course, Haiti's brown people rose up in 1791.

The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti.  Instead, they attacked it.  Not just with words: "Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island."  Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!

American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it "as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy."

America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery.  How awful!

When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled.  Washington "sent a slave catcher" after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom.  "Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a "dangerous precedent.""  When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.

Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a "shithole".

"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

The brown-skin exclusion act of November 2016

The current administration in DC has come up with yet another scheme to restrict immigration by providing yet another phony story:

The Department of Homeland Security announced a proposed rule on Friday that would penalize immigrants seeking permanent status who use public benefit programs such as food assistance and housing vouchers. Under the new policy, those who seek financial help could risk losing their chance at a green card.

It is not about any evidence to back this up, obviously.  It is to merely feed into the false narrative that brown-skinned immigrants are lazy bums who are collecting welfare money paid for by hardworking (white) taxpayers.

Just for the heck of it, what are the facts on the ground?

[Research] shows that immigrants are far less likely to burden the federal government than native-born Americans; if anything, they bolster it.

Yep.  There is evidence that we normal people use, and then there are alternative facts that the current administration uses!

Keep in mind that this is the same administration that said it wanted to encourage immigration from Norway and not from shithole countries.  One doesn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that it is all about restricting the browns from coming to America.

White nationalists and supremacists are having a glorious time thanks to this administration mainstreaming their views that have been unwelcome in the public space for a couple of decades.  Here's what the son of a big time white nationalist has to say about it:

unfortunately, I think we don't have to look very hard for examples of this kind of rhetoric now in our politics. You know, when you have someone in a primary position of power saying that we should be prioritizing European immigration, saying we need to build the wall - which is an idea that David Duke and the Klan spent a lot of time investing energy in in the late 1970s. When we have somebody in a huge position of power who's saying we don't want people from [expletive] countries - when you have somebody in a huge position of power who is constantly referring to his own genetics, which is a huge white nationalist talking point. They love to talk about eugenics and the false science of race. And so when you have somebody who's saying, I'm a credit to my great, tremendous, really wonderful genes - which, it turns out, some people might think maybe weren't so tremendous - that's furthering white nationalist talking points.

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Listen to that entire interview with Derek Black, the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  The son has renounced the white nationalism that he was raised on, and is now an activist on the good side.  While the President might find it impossible, there is only one good side in this.  There are no good people on the other side.

The tightening of the immigration screws on non-Christian browns has had terrible effects already.  I suppose this is what 63 million "real" Americans voted for!

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.

Ich bin ein ... Shitholer

Technically, trump and his white supremacist enablers did not refer to my old country with the "shithole" reference.

It does not matter to me.

As MLK observed:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

It is also the same emotion that JFK reflected when he stood with Germans and proclaimed his solidarity with them.

Of course, this president, thanks to his 63 million enablers, has been on a rampage against a lot more than shitholers.  It is a long list. A very long list.  Injustice defines his every waking moment and tweet, it seems.

I will join the people who will take to the streets all across the country.

Protesting on the streets is not really my thing.  I am a professorial pamphleteer.  I write balanced commentaries.  I am a subversive professor in the classroom.

But, these are extraordinary times.

So, despite my discomfort with crowds, slogans, jingoism, and everything else, I will be out as a citizen who immigrated from a shithole.

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Hobson's Choice with the shithole President

I called up a neighbor/friend and asked if they were home.

"I am finally over my jet lag and have sorted things out. I have brought a gift for you from my old shithole country," I said.

She laughed.  He joined in. "Oh, are you also one of those people?"

"You are also one of us. We all are," was my response to my fellow-brown-skinned balding man, who, in his youth had one huge afro, he says.

Meanwhile, the friend worries that by repeating "shithole" we are allowing the racist to define the narrative.

True. But he is not one that we can ignore.  The awful human being is the President of the United States, after having been elected to that office by 63 million racists.

We can't ignore his spoken and tweeted words.  We wish we could.

We have all lost.  Big time.  The waters have been muddied. Awfully.

Imagine the hassle that journalists face.  They have to be on the alert from the moment that the racist is up, which could be even at 3:00 am in DC when he gets up to pee and gets on the smartphone!

Not even the nincompoop politicians in the old country degraded the public sphere like how this "Christian" President has.

Trump’s racism isn’t news, and we are very unlikely to learn anything new about the inner workings of Trump’s mind and soul, which seem remarkably uncomplicated. What is news is his public behavior and the way it is changing the country.

Obama's election was supposed to have changed the country towards a post-racial America. Ha!  trump masterfully tapped into the racism that never went away and rode that tiger all the way to the Oval Office.

"Trump’s transgression is twofold. First, his vulgar remark broke a taboo against racist speech." So, what is the second transgression?  "The news is that he insists on dragging the rest of us down with him."

Trump’s “shithole” remark presented the media with a starker version of the daily Trumpian Twitter conundrum. To fail to report his tweets or his “shithole” remark is to fall down on the job of reporting the news. To report it is to participate in the ongoing degradation of the public sphere.

Like I said, we have all lost.

All because of 63 million racist voters.

SHITHOLE :(

I walk towards the river.

A neighbor, who has been an ardent trump supporter ever since he launched his candidacy, waves out to me.  I barely wave back.

"Long time, no see" she says.

"Yep. I was away for three weeks in a shithole country to visit my folks," I replied with a straight face.

Or, at least, that is the scene that has been playing in my head more than a few times, ever since "shithole" became the latest about this president.

I think about the people from African countries that I have interacted with over the years and became friends with them.  It is a list that starts back from graduate school, with Kayode.  We both had remarkably identical interests and outlook on life.  We always had a great time together.  Seth from Ghana was always a happy guy with a huge grin.  They have had meals that I cooked, and I have had their foods.  And that was from the first couple of years in graduate school. And so many since then.

A few years ago, thanks to the friend, I invited over for dinner two visitors from Haiti. We had a wonderful evening.  Jean André was so refined, professorial, and an elder statesman. The other Haitian was much younger than him and was so respectful of his older and much more accomplished compatriot.

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I think of all those people I have known when the president so casually refers to their countries as Shitholes.  It continues to shock and depress me that 63 million voted for this racist, who made his racism clear even before he even launched his candidacy!

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