I just went through a couple of very intense years of cancer treatment. My doctor is an award-winning researcher and my cancer is extremely rare and extremely difficult to manage. She was one of the world's experts in it and she saved my life. She was born in China and I consider myself very lucky that her family immigrated to America, to California, where I live. Another specialist who my primary care physician suggested I also talk to suggested a much less intense treatment for the disease, much less stressful treatment. Everyone dies within a couple of years who goes that route. He's just a few years behind the times.My China-born doctor wasn't the only one who treated me though. The hospital had a lot of very skilled nurses working on me on a day ti day basis. One who I came to absolutely love is a woman named Cindy. My heart leaps when I go see her every three months for my on-going treatment. Cindy's family immigrated from the Philippines. Other nurses who worked on me were from Latin America and Asia and they all made me feel wonderful and all contributed to my recovery. But in California it seems like most of the nurses are from the Philippines.In South Florida, though, it appears that most of the nurses at from Haiti. While I was going through my ordeal, one of my oldest friends was dealing with his mothers passing. His mother was very wealthy and didn't want to die in a facility. So she lived out the last years of her life at home in Miami in her palatial home. My friend lives in New York and he tried to go down to see her every week or so, She needed pretty intense 24/7 treatment and her head nurse, a Haitian woman, was in charge. I'll tell you how great of a job she did-- a woman with her own life and her own troubles. When my friend's mom eventually died, me friend gave the nurse $250,000. Nice tip. He sometimes wonders if he gave her-- this Haitian immigrant-- enough. "Take them out," said the worthless piece of shit head of the kakistocracy this week. Up top is a commentary from American Alisha Laventure, a Dallas TV news anchor whose parents immigrated from Haiti, a "shithole country" according to the racist slob sitting and stuffing his ugly face with McDonald's in the Oval Office. Below is a much more overtly emotional commentary from MSNBC's Joy Reid, one of who's parents came from Haiti and one from the Congo, another "shithole country" according to Trump. Please find the time to watch both.I spent the holidays in Thailand. Thais are too polite to bring up Trump, but Europeans we met there-- there are far more Europeans traveling these days than there are Americans-- always brought up Trump, none, at least none that we met, admiringly, the way they talked about Obama. "How could you?" they all asked, almost accusingly. What do you think Africans think about our ignorant racist slob of a leader?
The African Group of UN ambassadors is "extremely appalled at, and strongly condemns the outrageous, racist and xenophobic remarks by the president of the United States of America as widely reported by the media," a statement said.After an emergency session to weigh Trump's remarks, the group said it was "concerned at the continuing and growing trend from the US administration toward Africa and people of African descent to denigrate the continent and people of color."While demanding a "retraction and an apology" from Trump, the 54 countries also thanked those Americans "from all walks of life who have condemned the remarks."The resolution was passed unanimously after four hours of discussions.
Why hasn't Speaker Paul Ryan or Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy introduced a resolution in Congress disassociating the United States from Trump's vile comments? Really-- why haven't they?NPR's Karen Grisby Bates tried figuring out what's going on with all this Republican racism and xenophobia. "He's saying exactly what he wants to say," she wrote about Trump. "As the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out, 'Make America Great Again' really means Make America White Again."
One way to do that is to cut back on people from the aforementioned "shithole countries"-- countries that, coincidentally, are full of black and brown people-- to make room for immigrants from countries the president deems more desirable. He seems to like Norway. (Although as one Twitter user asked, why would most Scandinavians, who have higher education rates than their U.S. counterparts and a far more extensive social service system, want to trade that for what we have here?)People from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are who Trump doesn't want. But he cannot turn back time. The country is getting browner, and America 2018 is never going to look like America 1918. Interracial marriages continue to increase; the bi- and multiracial population steadily grows. And the world has not stopped spinning.So yes, calling most of Africa and the Western world's oldest independent black nation the institutional equivalent of a latrine is a new low in racial vulgarity for this president. But we probably haven't reached an absolute nadir yet.Nevertheless, we should worry at the constant stream of racist, crude remarks this president unleashes on the public. Normalizing that kind of behavior leads to what sociologists call "otherization"-- making the subject of one's remarks different from one's self to the point that it is easier to neglect, harm, even kill people one doesn't see as people. It happened in Germany in 1939. It happened in Rwanda in the '90s. It's happening now in Myanmar.Donald Trump's relegation of whole nations filled with black and brown people to an undesirable inconvenience is another step down a slippery slope. If it's not called out and stopped, it could lead to something far worse than hurt feelings.Which is why we should still take a moment to be shocked when the president of the United States says racist things. Even if you know his history.
This weekend, a NY Times editorial reminded its readers, few of whom need reminding, that "Trump is not just racist, ignorant, incompetent and undignified. He’s also a liar." In a new notorious meeting with congressional leaders he asked "why the United States should accept people from places like Haiti or Africa instead of nice Nordic countries like Norway, and then tweeting his tiresome demands for a 'Great Wall' along the Mexican border... The president of the United States is a racist. And another: The United States has a long and ugly history of excluding immigrants based on race or national origin. Mr. Trump seems determined to undo efforts taken by presidents of both parties in recent decades to overcome that history."
No one is denying that Haiti and some of these other countries have profound problems today. Of course, those problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name just a few, kidnapping and enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generationsThe United States has long held itself out as a light among nations based on the American ideal of equality. But the deeper history tells a different story.The sociologists David Scott FitzGerald and David Cook-Martin have shown that the United States pioneered racially based exclusionary immigration policies in the Americas in the late 18th and 19th centuries. (Not long before he was elected president, for example, Theodore Roosevelt asserted the bigoted but then-common view that the Chinese should be kept out of America because they were “racially inferior.”)It should sober Americans to know that authoritarian governments in Chile, Cuba and Uruguay ended racist immigration policies decades before the United States....What is concerning is not the wall, or the word “shithole” or the vacillation on the Dreamers or the Salvadorans. It’s what ties all of these things together: the bigoted worldview of the man behind them.Anyone who has followed Mr. Trump over the years knows this. We knew it in the 1970s, when he and his father were twice sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to black people. We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black and Latino teenagers charged with the brutal rape of a white woman in Central Park. (The men were convicted but later exonerated by DNA and other evidence, but Mr. Trump never apologized, and he continued to argue as late as 2016 that the men were guilty.) We knew it when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims while promoting the lie that America’s first black president wasn’t born here. Or when, last summer, he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as “very fine people.”Just last month, The Times reported on an Oval Office meeting on immigration during which Mr. Trump said that the 15,000 Haitians now living in the United States “all have AIDS,” and that Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa once they had seen the United States. See a pattern yet?...Republicans in Congress are spending most of their time finding ways to avoid talking about their openly bigoted chief executive. Some claimed not to have heard what Mr. Trump said. Others offered tepid defenses of his “salty” talk. House Speaker Paul Ryan called Mr. Trump’s comments “unhelpful,” clearly wishing he could return to his daily schedule of enriching the wealthiest Americans.Mr. Trump has made clear that he has no useful answers on immigration. It’s up to Congress to fashion long-term, humane solutions. A comprehensive immigration bill that resolves all these issues would be best. But if that is not possible, given the resistance of hard-core anti-immigration activists in Congress, legislators should at least join forces to protect the Dreamers, Salvadorans, Haitians and others threatened by the administration’s cruel and chaotic actions.
Up to Congress? That means it's up to us, the citizens of this country to defeat every Republican-- and every Democrat who enables Republicans (corrupt, paid off Blue Dogs and New Dems like Dan Lipinski and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) this year so Congress can deal with the shit Trump and the GOP are clogging up the system with.