This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In his second term in office, Donald Trump has had a few problems so far carrying out his promises to deport a zillion nonwhite immigrants. But give him credit. He did successfully deport one of them, the South African ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool. Born in Apartheid South Africa (like, of course, Elon Musk) into a Muslim family of mixed English-Javanese-Dutch-Indian heritage, he grew up classified as "coloured" in the grim Apartheid system of that time. As a young boy, his family was even evicted from their home after the area was declared part of a "Whites-only" suburb. He would indeed join the anti-Apartheid movement and even serve prison time thanks to that.
Now, in some strange sense, he's been sentenced again -- by President Trump and (assumedly) Elon Musk. He's been quite literally tossed out of the United States, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio labelling him a "persona non grata" and a "race-baiting politician" (for his criticisms of President Trump as leading a "White supremacist movement" at home and abroad).
Mind you, this is the president who cut all aid to South Africa over supposed "unjust racial discrimination" against White Afrikaners (no matter that, though only 7% of the population, they still own more than 70% of that country's private farmland) and who, while putting his administration's energy into tossing non-White immigrants out of this country, has welcomed just one significant group of foreigners, promising them refuge here (not that they need it) with a program called "Mission South Africa." I'm talking, of course, about White Afrikaners!
What a strange planet we now find ourselves on, don't you think? And if you wonder just how deeply strange it is, let TomDispatch regular Aviva Chomsky take you into a world -- ours, as it happens -- that, as she points out, is only growing ever more colonial (at least in Washington) as the years pass, whether you're talking about Donald Trump's reactions to South Africa, Israel, and the Palestinians, or immigrants of just about any sort in this country. Tom
Trump Faces Palestine
The Colonial View of the World Never Dies
In the colonial view of the world -- and, in its own strange fashion, Donald Trump's view couldn't be more colonial -- White European colonizers were embattled beacons of civilization, rationality, and progress, confronting dangerous barbaric hordes beyond (and even, sometimes, within) their own frontiers. Colonial violence then was a necessary form of self-defense needed to tame irrational eruptions of brutality among the colonized. To make sense of the bipartisan U.S. devotion to Israel, including the glorification of Israeli violence and the demonization of Palestinians, as well as the Trump administration's recent attacks on Black South Africa, student activists, and immigrants, it's important to grasp that worldview.
On the Caribbean island of Barbados, Great Britain's 1688 Act "For the Governing of Negroes" proclaimed that "Negroes" are of a barbarous, wild, and savage nature, and such as renders them wholly unqualified to be governed by the Laws, Customes, and Practices of our Nation: It is therefore becoming absolutely necessary, that such other Constitutions, Laws and Orders, should be" framed and enacted for the good regulating or ordering of them, as may both restrain the disorders, rapines, and inhumanities to which they are naturally prone and inclined."
When I read those words recently, I heard strange echoes of how President Trump talks about immigrants, Palestinians, and Black South Africans. The text of that act exemplified what would become longstanding colonial ideologies: the colonized are unpredictably "barbarous, wild, and savage" and so must be governed by the colonizing power with a separate set of (harsh) laws; and -- though not directly stated -- must be assigned a legal status that sets them apart from the rights-bearing one the colonizers granted themselves. Due to their "barbarous, wild, and savage nature," violence would inevitably be necessary to keep them under control.
Colonization meant bringing White Europeans to confront those supposedly dangerous peoples in their own often distant homelands. It also meant, as in Barbados, bringing supposedly dangerous people to new places and using violence and brutal laws to control them there. In the United States, it meant trying to displace or eliminate what the Declaration of Independence called "merciless Indian savages" and justifying White violence with slave codes based on the one the British used in Barbados in the face of the ever-present threat supposedly posed by enslaved Black people.
That grim 1688 Act also revealed how colonialism blurred the lines between Europe and its colonies. As an expansionist Europe grew ever more expansive, it brought rights-holding Europeans and those they excluded, suppressed, or dominated into the same physical spaces through colonization, enslavement, transportation, and war. Enslaved Africans were inside the territory, but outside the legal system. Expansion required violence, along with elaborate legal structures and ideologies to enforce and justify who belonged and who never would, and -- yes! -- ever more violence to keep the system in place.
Ideas Still with Us
The legacies of colonialism and the set of ideas behind that Act of 1688 are still with us and continue to target formerly colonized (and still colonized) peoples.
Given the increasingly unsettled nature of our world, thanks to war, politics, and the growing pressures of climate change, ever more people have tried to leave their embattled countries and emigrate to Europe and the United States. There, they find a rising tide of anti-immigrant racism that reproduces a modern version of old-fashioned colonial racism. Europe and the United States, of course, reserve the right to deny entry, or grant only partial, temporary, revocable, and limited status to many of those seeking refuge in their countries. Those different statuses mean that they are subject to different legal systems once they're there. In Donald Trump's America, for instance, the United States reserves the right to detain and deport even green-card holders at will, merely by claiming that their presence poses a threat, as in the case of Columbia University graduate and Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, arrested in New York but quickly sent into custody in Louisiana.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
