‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest’. Sweet Honey in the Rock
It’s another sad moment in our history of freedom in the US. My heart breaks open again. This violence of deportation is forcing the separation of families in an attempt to save the ‘purity’ of America.
Trump wants to make America white again, fearing the projections of the US Census bureau showing an increase in mixed-race Americans and more than 25% of the US population being Latinx/Hispanic by 2060. This translates to a co-occurring decrease in non-hispanic white Americans which diminishes the ‘purity’ of America, something that has been the bedrock of a white-supremacist America. The ‘send them back’ chants of Trump’s constituents are the manifestations of the fear of an ‘impure’ America. This is no different from the sentiments and actions of Americans in 1942 when more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly displaced from their homes and incarcerated in camps. Then there was also the chant of ‘one-drop of Japanese blood’ being sufficient for incarceration, the impurity of America.
This is similar to the chants during Jim Crow era, of the impurity of African Americans, demonized as being unnatural, not worthy of marrying whites. Then the ‘one drop rule’ assured that any mixed-race person was impure.
White supremacy, based on purity of a white America, was enacted in ideology and practice in the 17th century to assure land-holding white elites a way to protect its existing wealth and exploit a labor pool through enslavement and free labor. This greed for more wealth continues today and white supremacy continues to assure that wealth accumulation persists- in the same hands. In the past 30 years or more neoliberal policies and practices, led by the US and Britain, opened markets in developing countries resulting in privatization and government subsidies to the rich and a shifting labor market, expanding the gap between the rich and the poor. More demand for land and development, stimulated by different trade agreements has affected the changing climate in these countries more dramatically. This desire for greater capital through exploitation of land and people has resulted in more severe and variable weather changes, lost of crops and famine, and greater poverty forcing more people to migrate. Countries like Guatemala for example have experienced severe poverty forcing migration to the north. Our greed at home here in the US is a cause of the migration effect.
This greed for more and more is not new to us in the US, or any other country. Living without food, clothing, shelter and medicines drives a desire to fulfill our basic needs. When we have fulfilled these basic needs, we then turn to what psychologists refer to as our higher-order needs such as companionship, need to be respected/appreciated, need to contribute to society as a way to actualize our human potential. Where and when in this process does it require us to act in inhumane ways towards each other, actualizing our inhumane potentials such as greed and hatred? White supremacist capitalist systems, embedded with wealth inequality and patriarchy nurture these inhumanities, contributing to the greatest wealth and health inequality the US has ever recorded. The top 5-10% wealthy individuals and conglomerates cling to the tip of this hierarchical system using their greed, fear, and aversion to maintain and enhance their positions. What does Donald Trump do with a net worth of $3.1 billion US dollars and what drives his greed for more? How does he and other billionaires actualize the best part of their humanity through re-ignition of more overt white-supremacist thoughts and actions- through racism, xenophobia, misogyny, anti-blackness?
As America changes color, we need to brace ourselves; those of us who believe in freedom. Continued migration from the global south and a decreased birth rate of white Americans along with an increased birth rate of bi-racial and hispanic/Latinix Americans, will make America a minority white nation, sooner than later (In 2010 the US Census reported for the first time that minority children aged less than 1 yr made up the majority of children in this age range in the US). Driven by the greed of capitalist exploitation and the fear and hatred of white supremacy the gloves are off for Americans who believe in the violence of Trump. In each state, city, town, if we believe in freedom we must act locally to stop this onslaught of fear and greed.
In Baltimore that looks like the rally this weekend by the National Nurses Union and Coalition for a Humane Hopkins against Johns Hopkins Hospital who has been suing low income patients for medical debt-debt that many of them should not have incurred in the first place because they qualify for charity care. And the hospital has been busting nurses for trying to unionize. The struggle for freedom-actualizing our greatest human potential-looks like the rally by United Workers promoting their comprehensive report detailing how a trust fund for affordable housing needs to be funded and deployed. Or it looks like the rally against ICE to stop mass deportations that have sent many new immigrants in Baltimore into hiding, covering their windows and not coming out due to fear of arrest. It looks like the National Black Worker Center Project ‘Working While Black Expo‘ happening in August. It looks like the many organizations in Baltimore, taking on every intersectional issue of injustice. It is this type of intersectional /collective struggle for freedom, this interdependence of all issues, that will win out over the fear mongering and greed of white supremacy of Trump and his constituents. What it does not look like, is normal; because what has become normalized is fear of others and acting into white supremacy.
