Gore Vidal was correct when he observed that the American people do not have a memory of the last week. “We are the United States of Amnesia," the famed novelist concluded. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Given America’s state of hyperpolitics, the black hole that is the attention economy spurned on the 24/7 news media, and a public that is not able to concentrate longer than a goldfish, Vidal now looks much too generous.
This absence of memory is especially true for white America and its understanding, or lack thereof, of the realities of the color line and its impact on America’s past and present. The real and complex history of the United States, and how it was and continues to be shaped by racism and white supremacy, is systemically whitewashed and distorted in the nation's schools and culture. This is a form of psychological and emotional abuse for Black and brown people whose history and life experiences are erased in service of protecting white privilege and the many lies that sustain it.
Such acts of racial erasure eventually damage the minds, morals and ethics of white people — and in particular white children. As such it is a threat to American democracy. It is an attempt to deny the American people the lessons of the Black Freedom Struggle and Civil Rights Movement, two of the most successful pro-democracy movements in U.S. history.
White America practices a type of selective remembering that is grounded in an eternal present, where the complex history of the country and the color line are flattened and distorted. In this narrative, there are great men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. show up, read a speech, die by violence and are robbed of their radicalism and inducted into the pantheon of American heroes. Miraculously, the "race problem" is solved. The election of Barack Obama is cited as further proof that racism and white supremacy have largely been vanquished. In the Age of Trump, the long arc of history has been twisted and distorted to such an extreme that now white people are perceived as the "real victims" of racism,” rather than Black and brown people. There is no substantive evidence to support such fantasies of white victimology.
Ultimately, because the American people (specifically many white people and those mercenary Black and brown people invested in accessing the privileges of whiteness) live a selective relationship to history, where the past is almost like a motherless child, they possess a limited ability to confront the challenges we are facing as a country. Thus the American people and their political elites are unable to respond effectively to Trumpism and the neofascist authoritarian movement because they still believe in the fiction of American exceptionalism and believe that fascism is something that happens “over there” by definition, and cannot be homegrown.
In one of the most recent and dangerous examples of how America’s organized forgetting has negatively impacted our public discourse and politics, Donald Trump, JD Vance and other mouthpieces and agents of the MAGA movement have recently claimed that Black Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, are eating white people’s dogs and cats and presumably other pets as well.
The mainstream news media and political class — and many among the general public — are responding with shock and disgust that Trump and his agents would traffic in such obvious white supremacist and racist conspiracy theories that are dehumanizing and inciting violence against innocent people. However, alongside that disgust and outrage is a general failure to understand how these attacks against the Haitian community — which are auxiliary to the larger campaign of racism and misogyny against Kamala Harris — are part of a much older history of white supremacy and racist conspiracy theories and violence in America.
First and most importantly: there is no evidence to support this racist fear-mongering about Haitians. Vance has all but admitted that his claims that Haitian refugees are eating pets are not true. But the facts and the truth have little meaning or importance for racists and white supremacists because their ideology and beliefs are based on the twin lies of the race concept and that race is a real thing. Those people deemed to be “white” are thought to be somehow inherently superior to nonwhites.
Racist conspiracy theories and rumors about Black and brown immigrants eating white people’s pets have a long history. Such lies are routinely circulated by white supremacists and other racists and nativists when there are changes, real or perceived, in the country’s racial and ethnic demographics.
Springfield, like other parts of the country, has a history of anti-black violence including lynchings. Eleven African-Americans were lynched in Springfield, Ohio, between 1902 and 1904, as leading sociologist Joe Feagin explained:
Historically, Springfield, Ohio, like other U.S. cities, has experienced major racial conflict and segregation tracing back to the city’s early 1900s race riots. White riots in 1904, 1906, and especially in 1908 were motivated by white efforts to "cleanse" the city of its growing Black immigrant population. ...
The 1908 Springfield riot was particularly savage. Beginning as an attempt to lynch Black men falsely accused of crimes, when a white lynch mob discovered these men had been moved away, they took out their racist rage on the city’s Black community, destroying businesses and homes and killing several other Black men. This early white violence was followed by much racial segregation and discrimination in the city that targeted the Black community.
Neo-Nazi groups, Feagin continues, "have racially targeted Springfield, starting the false claim that Haitian immigrants there are eating pets, a phony claim picked up and used by GOP politicians like Trump and Vance in public statements."
Phillip Dray, author of "A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age," offered this historical context for the racist lie about Haitians in Springfield"
One thing I've been reminded of during the current Springfield situation is the response of Black anti-lynching crusaders to the lynching scourge of the post-Reconstruction era, that at its deepest level, it represented not whites' fear of Black crime or sexual transgression, which was sensationalized and exaggerated, so much as the opposite, white resentment of the political and economic progress Black people had made, along with their increased social mobility.
Today, the faux claims that Haitian immigrants are eating white people's pets seem to speak of a final desperate phase, much as Southern whites in Reconstruction, as Frederick Douglass argued, first fought imagined Black insurrection, then turned to securing white control of the ballot, and eventually to the fiction that Black men were sexually assaulting white women.
What truly disturbs JD Vance and other dubiously concerned whites is that what is actually taking place in Springfield — a successful integration of Black immigrant workers and their families into a struggling Rust Belt city — is a welcome development that local white officials characterize as a "resurgence." For white supremacists like Vance and Trump, however, it is a glimpse of the functioning multi-ethnic, multi-racial future they most fear.
As a direct result of MAGAworld’s lies and provocations (which now include claims that Haitians are spreading HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis), there have been several days of bomb threats and other terrorist threats targeting the Haitian community in Springfield (and nonwhites more generally). Racist street thugs have also been seen in the streets of Springfield, and the mayor has invoked his emergency powers.
In a speech last week in Tucson, Arizona, Donald Trump, a man who has been found liable for sexual assault, launched into a lurid fantasy "about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens.” At a rally in Uniondale, New York, on Wednesday, he was even more explicit:
I’ve been talking about migrant crime for five years. I said, if you let them in, it’s going to be hell. They are vicious, violent criminals that are being led into our country, their people that their countries, who are very smart, they don’t want them. That’s why, all over the world, a lot of people coming from jails, out of the Congo in Africa.
Where do you come from? "The Congo." ... Where in the Congo? "We come from jail." What did you do? "We will not tell you.” ...They’re coming from the Congo. They’re coming from Africa. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming from all over the world ... and what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. ... For every New Yorker being terrorized by this wave of migrant crime, November 5 will be your Liberation Day. It’s going to be liberation because you are living like hell. You’re living a life like hell.
Leonce Gaiter, author of "A Memory of Fictions," offered the following insights on Trump and the MAGA movement’s race-baiting and appeals to white racial violence:
A Trump campaign on a losing trajectory leans on its main appeals — race hatred and white supremacy. Trump’s and Vance’s blatant lies about Haitians in Springfield are an invitation for their white supporters to revel in their collective revulsion at dark-skinned immigrants and Black people in general. It’s a MAGA team-building exercise. It supports their power to spin lies with impunity while reinforcing Trump’s status as vortex of white grievance-as-religion, as well as white, Christian, male dominance and contempt for everyone else as a political platform.
Philosopher and fascism scholar Jason Stanley warned of the destructive results that await us if Trump and his agents continue with such provocations and incitements:
Dehumanizing rhetoric has become so normalized in U.S. politics that it has become easy to ignore it. In the lead up to the Rwandan genocide, Tutsis became used to being called snakes and cockroaches. They did not expect what this vocabulary prefigured for their lives.
Now, we face from the Republican candidate for president straightforwardly genocidal speech about non-white immigrants, together with very real Nazi like threats of deportation, “remigration” and explicit descriptions of concentration camps.
Is there any country in history where such talk has not led to widespread state atrocities, along a continuum that ends in Rwanda? When will Americans listen to history to understand what will happen?
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Trump has also been mining America’s white supremacist and racist past for narcissistic and political energy and momentum by holding rallies in what are known as “sundown towns.” These are largely white communities, as identified by the late historian James Loewen and other experts and activists, where in earlier eras, either by law or custom, Black people (and sometimes other nonwhite people) were not allowed to be within the city or town limits after dark. Black and brown people who violated these rules would be subjected to prison, fines, physical violence and sometimes death.
Sundown towns were also maintained as all-white spaces through pogroms and ethnic cleansing campaigns. It is estimated that dozens if not hundreds of Black communities were destroyed by such acts of white terrorism and mob activity. American society remains highly segregated by race and class. That is the legacy of sundown towns.
"Although Springfield, Ohio, was not officially a 'sundown town,'" Feagin notes, "it came close to this definition as evidenced by the white race riots and other aggressive white efforts to maintain an all-white Springfield."
When Trump and his agents dream of “Making America Great Again” and fighting back against alleged “reverse racism” or the myth that whites are being “replaced” in their “own country” by nonwhites and nonexistent "voter fraud," this is the social order he and they want to restore.
Donald Trump’s base of support remains solid. His strategy of racism and white supremacy on steroids has not hurt him among his base. Moreover, Trump and the Republican fascists have suffered few political penalties for their racist and white supremacist language, behavior and policies, or for their general contempt for multiracial and pluralistic democracy. White racism and racial resentment remain powerful forces in American life and politics. Trump and his movement are using those beliefs and values to acquire and hold power, even in a country that increasingly rejects their policies.
Wright Thompson, author of the new book "The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi," draws a provocative comparison:
The political rhetoric of August and September 2024 in America reads eerily like a transcript of the political rhetoric of August and September 1955 in Mississippi. Most everyone knows the price Emmett Till paid for whistling on a summer Wednesday night. What almost no one knows is that the day before was Election Day, the culmination of a Mississippi governor's campaign marked by violent rhetoric and fear-mongering. Ambitious humans with no sense of ethics or shame, in both parties, have long said whatever it took to win votes. And ordinary people have paid, and let us not forget collected, a price for those words and votes.
The mainstream American news media remains largely unwilling to strongly, consistently and forcefully condemn Trump and his followers’ racism and white supremacy. This reflects white racial fragility, where the bar for accurately describing racist behavior by public figures is set so high that it is almost unreachable by any standard of evidence. Instead, public discussions of racist behavior often default to vacuous discussions of intent, claims about what is in some white person’s "heart" or "bones." Racism and white supremacy are not simply about behavior or intentions. A mature and serious understanding of these things must focus on actual outcomes, public policies, impact, structures and institutions that unfairly privilege and advantage white people over nonwhites. Intentions and words have very little to do with it.
Donald Trump, his MAGA movement and the other neofascists are enemies of multiracial pluralistic democracy, not to mention human rights, freedom, equality and basic human dignity. That's the story that the mainstream news media, Kamala Harris and the country’s responsible political class need to tell over the next 43 days.
