Racism beneath the rhetoric

Protect borders; they’re coming to get us! That sums up the ethnocentric, racist nativism that the right cloaks as immigration “policy.”

My refugee mentor taught me: ‘Aunque se viste el mono en seda, mono se queda’ — though the monkey wears silk, it’s still a monkey.

Xenophobic propaganda “keep America safe” is the ugly cliché that rationalized our brutalization and expulsion of Chinese ancestry for 50 years, our cold-hearted barriers to those who “weren’t like us” from Southern and Eastern Europe for decades, and historic marginalization of Catholics, Irish, Jews, etc. Those of Latino, Indian, African ancestry suffered segregation resulting from such rationalized bigotry.

Japanese ancestry paid the price in WWII; remember that military and FBI leaders told FDR we didn’t need to intern “them” (Japanese, Germans, Italians) to be safe, so who persuaded the President to relocate and incarcerate only ‘Japanese’ (but not in Hawaii that was attacked)?

It was West Coast white farmers and fishermen who lusted to erase competition. Germans and Italians weren’t interned, but they were the ‘enemy’ too! Why not? Because underneath that silk excuse lay the real truth, racism, just as banning certain “Muslim” nations doesn’t include Saudi Arabia which did yield actual terrorists that hurt us.

Want to make us safe? Then let’s arrest those in 900+ active domestic hate groups and deport the heads of banks, Wall Street and pharma that have hurt us, and those who promote racism, fear and nativism within the White House and Congress while wearing “silk”.

This story was originally published March 4, 2017 at 6:53 PM with the headline "Racism beneath the rhetoric."