By Sikivu Hutchinson
For the thousands of white folk who packed the stadium in Mobile,
Alabama to hear Donald Trump this past Friday it must have seemed like old
times. No PC dogwhistle limpness or vacillation, no pandering to “the
minorities”; just straight talk, the kind of unvarnished alpha male nativism,
Christian evangelicalism and white supremacy that rocketed the Tea Party into the
mainstream in 2009. Trump’s tirades on
anchor babies and repealing the 14th amendment’s birthright
citizenship clause have the GOP presidential campaign clown car in overdrive. As
the rest of the field scrambles
to double down on its racist appeal to red meat Middle America all people of
color are targeted by this rhetoric of criminalization.
It’s fitting that anti-undocumented immigrant hysteria has become
the GOP’s clarion call when the Black Lives Matter movement for racial justice,
police accountability and an end to policies that criminalize communities of
color is on the rise. Similar to the
specter of black lawlessness, anxiety about encroaching “illegals” stealing
jobs, sucking up public services and committing mayhem is one of white Middle
America’s most primal fears.
Yet, many analysts argue that the GOP needs at
least 40% of the Latino vote in order to win the 2016 presidential
election. So Republicans who still want
to party like its 2009 would seem to have a death wish. Back then, former Republican Congressman Nathan
Deal introduced the Birthright
Citizenship Act into the House. The statute
would have denied citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented
women, stripping away a civil right that ostensibly distinguishes the U.S. from
fascist governments. Deal’s amendment
failed, and though the Republicans went on to big Tea Party fueled victories in
the 2010 midterm elections Mitt Romney’s loss to President Obama in 2012 was
partly due to his poor
showing with Latinos. As a result, the
GOP did a so-called autopsy
on its failures and vowed to do better with “the minorities”.
But now they’re back, guns ablaze, with birthright citizenship as
the new-old whipping boy.
Ratified in 1868, the 14th amendment was originally designed
to confer citizenship onto freed African slaves. As Kevin Alexander Gray writes in Counterpunch, “in the
Reconstruction period, as now, racism and white supremacy loomed large in
public debate. Back then, opponents of the amendment talked about ‘public
morality’ being threatened by people ‘unfit for the responsibilities of
American citizenship.’’ Trump’s call for a wall to protect U.S. borders from
marauding Mexican criminals not only demonizes Latinos but evokes toxic themes
of Manifest Destiny that were used to justify American expansionism into
Mexico. Themes that allowed white folk, the U.S.' original "anchor babies", to be legitimized as citizens.
During the 19th century the “Manifest Destiny” of the
United States was one of “God-ordained” expansionism. African slaves, indigenous peoples, Mexican
nationals and other non-Europeans were deemed aliens and enemy combatants,
anathema to the democratizing force of America.
In the 1840s, Manifest Destiny played a key role in the U.S.’ brutal occupation
of Mexican territory. Cultural
propaganda dehumanizing indigenous Mexican populations provided American
imperialism with the aura of moral righteousness. Indeed, commenting on the
U.S.-Mexico War, it was no less than poet Walt Whitman who stated:
“What has miserable, inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque
upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do
with the great mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours,
to achieve that mission!”
Back in the good old days of docile slaves and vanquished savages,
there were no ambiguities about who deserved to be accorded rights. God ordained the universality of European
American experience, civilization and moral worth. Non-white peoples either submitted to the
Enlightenment principles and values of the culturally superior West or were
extinguished. States rights were white citizens’
last vestige of protection from the trespasses of big government ramming civil
rights down the throats of a “victimized” white electorate. So it is no mystery then why these 19th
century ideologies have gained fresh currency amongst a “reloading” white nationalist
insurgency. The GOP has come full circle, drunk on a cocktail of xenophobia, anti-immigrant
hysteria and jingoism that should deep six its bid for the White House.
