The year I met Anthony is when I realized just how deeply entrenched anti-immigrant sentiments had become among some Latinos. It wasn't just lone wolves like Anthony who had internalized these beliefs-- those sentiments were also reaching the highest levels of power.
Paolo Ramos, Defectors: The Rise of the Far Right and What It Means for America .
It's early 1970s. I'm attending Northern Illinois University. A few of us blacks, and I mean a handful, received word from the Sycamore, Illinois branch of the KKK that they weren't too pleased with us being on that campus. They were coming.
We sent word that we were coming. I don't think we heard back from these guys.
For the most part, the campus was lily white. Just a few of us. Yet, nonetheless, we were a threat to their perception of white supremacy. Today, their descendants, children and grandchildren, have learned from them to fear us. Fear that we will replace them, replace that idea of white supremacy with this strange idea of democracy.
These believers in white supremacy are organized. Have been for decades. If you read W. E. B. Du Bois, since Reconstruction. If you read legal analyst Eli Mystal, the US Constitution was never intended to include the human beingness of Africans and their descendants. "Democracy" meant the supremacy of the white, male, and wealthy. Particularly, slave owners. Producers of wealth by virtue of their owning enslaved blacks, working these people, often to death.
In this Trump era, there's a necessity to solidify the exclusion of black, latino, and indigenous people. His administration are working fast and furious to deport and disrupt by any means necessary the lives of migrant workers, Haitian, Caribbean, Mexican, Honduran, and others perceived as "polluting" the purity of this notion of a white America.
There won't be a path to citizenship. No latino born in the US will even be considered American (Constitution or not). In other words, the goal is to normalize the harassment, the deportation, the incarceration, and yes, even the outright killing of black and latino people, in order to normalize the theory white supremacy.
Whites won't be replaced. They believe in this notion of white supremacy. A white America. There has always been, for them, a white America! Willing to die for it, they are for real! Because the Replacement theory isn't new. It's always been an aspect of white supremacy. What is also not so new, but disturbing, is the recruitment of the oppressed as foot soldiers.
Some 1,500 January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrectionists who assaulted police received from their lord and master "full, complete and unconditional pardons", according to The Hill. These former "hostages" and now innocent folks, according to the white supremacy narrative, are free to purchase weapons. And use them! Trump, himself a convicted felony, pardoned the Proud Boys' chairman at the time of the insurrection, Enrique Tarrio.
Tarrio tore up a Black Lives Matter banner. Forty percent black, yet what matters to Tarrio is that Hispanic heritage, Paolo Ramos, journalist and author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. The Spanish heritage sailed across to the New World inhabited by indigenous. Rape of indigenous women is weaponsized as is of those African women, kidnapped and shipped Africans to the New World to work the fields and produce wealth to sustain the supremacy of the Spanish (European) conquerors.
What happened to Tarrio didn't happen when Trump came into office. It's the long story those same believers don't want their children to ever know. That "past" that white America doesn't want to know. White America is moving forward, however, reaching the birthplace of humanity when, as journalist Howard W. French writes in Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, a woman described by a Portuguese expedition leader Anta'o Gonçalves "as a black Mooress" is captured. The leader and his team are shouting, "santiago," the patron saint, of Spain.
Gonçalves captures the first victim of "the transatlantic slave trade", a trade that "centered on dark-skinned Africans".
I remember a white male student, in the 1990s shouting out that there were slaves in the world. Everyone was a slave at one time or another. I was one of few blacks in that room that day, and I was the professor. I could see in his face that he didn't want to hear this story. He didn't even want to read a short story written by a black woman about the subject. About any and every African woman captured and never allowed to exercise her right to speak and tell her story. Express what it's like to be separated from family and taken to a strange land. The white student, rather than look with this woman author to see this captured African woman, only wanted a grade. He wanted what was promised to him: a future in freedom.
All the other races of people previously enslaved prior to the TransAtlantic Slave Trade weren't branded and subject to enslavement based on their race. They hadn't become the property of another human being, subject to a life-time of exploitation, and violence. The Slave Trade is normalized in due time, and, as historian Timothy Snyder writes in On Freedom, to normalize could mean to do what everyone does. Or it could mean to do what everyone should do . It's the doing what everyone should do that interests me; however, there is Tarrio (and certainly, he isn't alone). He does what everyone else does instead . He does what is made to appear to him normal .
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Nicholas V's papal bull in 1452 sent more of these expeditions on their way, moving forward, in search of land and gold. The bottom of the ships were filled with human beings too. In Born in Blackness , French writes that Africa is divided between Spain and Portugal. Never mind again about the already existing inhabitants of the land. By 1455, freedom is for the whites and not the Africans or those captured and enslaved.
Freedom, by then, is all about spreading of white supremacy, in case anyone failed to notice.
In 1493, Pope Alex VI decrees that the indigenous in Latin America no longer need their lands. Or their culture. Barbaric anyway. Certainly nothing like the civilized conquerors ravishing the land and killing off whole communities of people.
The decree, writes Ramos, "authorized Spain and Portugal to colonize the New World and subjugate indigenous people and their religion".
The blackness of Africa offers European conquerors "the convenient rationale of a categorical difference from whites". In order to justify "a new and soon to be dramatic "expansion of slavery". Here is the "origins of modern racism".
By the 14 th and 15 th centuries, in the New World, missionaries' work was to provide "religious and ideological cover for the horrors of the recent innovation we know know was chattel slavery". There was competition to be sure, between the Catholic church and Islam for enslaved people. But then there was the Manifest Destiny and US desires to expand too.
The document granted the US the right to explore, settle and continue spreading the supremacy of whiteness and Christianity. "Pioneers", not a whole lot different from the European conquerors, could expand beyond Oregon in the 1800s but soon the US could expand beyond its borders. All of this movement came after millions of deaths in South America and in the US. Millions of indigenous people were no longer in existence.
The brutal imperialism of Europe and then the US doesn't justify Tarrio or any Latino engagement with the far-right and white supremacy. But understand, Replacement Theory is a fear that white supremacy is an imposition on the reality of a multicultural landscape-- thanks to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. What's done is done!
Was there ever a white America?
The US is by far not the only country claiming itself white and free to rid itself of the pollution of migrants, people from Africa and the Arab world. But it's interesting to note, as has Ramos, the embrace of this tyrannical white supremacy ideology and its violence, vigilante violence, by those who have internalized the horrible nightmare of racism.
This is a legacy, as Ramos suggests, that reveals "the silently colonized Latino mind". It's not just that the indigenous of the Caribbean and South America were colonized, it's that for too many the legacy of colonization lives on, giving legitimacy to the ideology of white supremacy.
So why not remove the pollutants. Those attempting to corrupt elections by voting. As citizens!
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If you hadn't noticed, we've been talking about immigrants . Spanish immigrants, blessed by papal bulls to explore, settle while destroying the humanity of existing inhabitants. Is there a fear of retribution-- from the original victims of imperialism? White supremacy?
We are talking about those who make freedom mean their right to destroy and rebuild in their own image. We are talking about what, in time, as a result of this freedom to destroy and rebuild, the normalization of violence. Of white supremacy! There isn't anything human in these rights or in this idea of freedom.
Truly human rights, Snyder observes, "restored to the world the word normal". Human rights that isn't about the conquest of others or the domination of others has a move forward too. It has, he writes, an "ethical direction" that informs us of "what one should be doing".
I have always taught the narratives of the enslaved blacks who escaped Southern plantations because what one hears in these stories is a way forward, a way to recognize our own worth as human beings despite being branded as someone enslaved to another. Our worth is in the effort to claim our human right to freedom. As a black woman, what I hear in these narratives is that it's never a safe time to act. Vigilantes won't award a resister and not all white northerners are to be trusted. Yet, as I agree with Snyder, doing what should be done, while normal, can often result in punishment.
And the "freed," through executive-pardon-insurrectionists, announce that they are seeking revenge, for they won't be replaced by the inferior, the polluted.
If we've learned anything from W. E. B. Du Bois and the civil rights movement in the US, it's that a constant struggle is necessary in order to remain free of this kind of thinking that silently colonizes our minds so that we either accept the status quo or determine that we are of worth. The proclaimed supremacy of one race is the myth of a once "great" America, when, in fact, America, to use Snyder's words, should have citizens encouraged to pursue truth telling. Human rights means people trying "to tell the truth about elemental matters". It means people behaving "decently" while "demonstrating solidarity".
Ramos, quoting activist Moises Gonzales, asks us to consider Latino vigilantes and those who vote against their own interest has having "bought into the Spanish colonial history of being elite and superior". At the foot of past historical figures from the colonial era, these vigilantes worship give honor to a past that perpetrated catastrophic violence on millions of their ancestors.
If you engage in a conversation, as did Ramos, with Anthony Aguero, you would hear a man who seems to have studied the white supremacy blueprint. Although, Ramos writes, Aguero looks "foreign" to a white supremacist, he sees himself as white. He speaks of "predators" crossing the Southern border in Texas. Of "undocumented" folks up to no good.
Yet, as Ramos continues, the whole time she was talking with Aguero, she knew she "was interacting with someone with a long criminal record". There was Aguero referring to migrants as "'roaches,'" and "'mother-------'". After all, he was an "American citizen", and as an American citizen, he tells Ramos, he's not "'out here breaking into countries'".
And by "here" Anthony Aguero meant-- the border. He's a vigilante. And proud of it!
You can never be American enough, Ramos explains. It's all about being American, belonging. Unfortunately, in this case, belonging to the narrative of white supremacy, means that Aguero has opted to normalize the status of latinos as inferior beings. Less than human and, therefore, never deserving the human right to freedom.
It's white supremacy. It's what I've seen too among people who were once oppressed and who join the ranks of the oppressor. So I agree with Ramos, no matter how much Aguero wants to belong, no matter how much he admires defenders of white supremacy, these defenders will never accept him as anyone but, in the end, a rather foolish foot soldier. Aguero, like Tarrio, could draw more latinos, and I have to say this as someone who studied enslavement in the US and its legacy, to the Lost Cause.
And I must believe that the Replacement Theory is a Lost Cause !
Individual latinos who would be safe because not ones to challenge white supremacy would actually legitimize defenders of white supremacy.
Aguero's biggest crime is that he is, to use Ramos's words, "'a puppet for white supremacy'". He believes in the Replacement Theory. He believes the Other is invading and corrupting. And it's a narrative, to paraphrase Toni Morrison, that shouldn't be passed on, but, then, again, how are we to learn about that is happening in this country today. In this era of Trump! Fascism!
And Ramos asks, when we look at our own reflection, "who do we see in the mirror?" She continues: Latinos "have a particular disposition to fantasize and romanticize the past because our complicated relationship with colonialism has not only distorted our perceptions of good and evil, but it has also allowed us to view ourselves as both the victors and the oppressed, as both the colonizer and the colonized".
Many latinos, Ramos explains, want to claim "Europeanness and whiteness" as our inheritance without considering not only what that means to us as individuals but also to the collective, the struggle of all latino survivors of colonialism.
And she rightly asks, how can "whiteness" and the idea of white supremacy secure a democracy?
If many we oppressed, subject to the whims of white supremacy still, claim and continue to normalize the right to be human! What if we thought more about solidarity with those who seek to tell the truth, with those who want freedom that is not sustained by shedding the blood of others?
We know Enrique Tarrio. Too bad for all of us, that he doesn't know himself!
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