Trump Racism in Historical Context

President Trump’s recent outbursts about Somali-Americans and their homeland being “garbage” have been the most xenophobic rants since those a year ago about Haitians eating pets in Illinois. There have been milder explosions about Venezuelans and South Africans and immigrants from anywhere who are not white. The fear that Europe is being overwhelmed by migrants (read Africans and Middle-Easterners) is highlighted in Trump’s new strategic plan — in which we will tilt towards South America in a new Monroe (dubbed the Donroe) Doctrine.

Which takes us back to a long story of White Anglo Saxon and Northern European Protestant dominance in the country.

Immigrant Colonial America was governed by Anglo-Americans from its Revolutionary beginnings. A subtext in the new Ken Burns series on the Revolutionary War is the mistreatment of the Native Americans who were indigenous to the continent and the Africans who were brought here against their will. The most disappointing scene in the ten hours of the documentary was the “victory,” after which Blacks who had been allies of the patriots went back to people who had owned them (including General Washington) and Indians who had been allies went back to lands that would soon be wrestled from them by treaty and settlement and war.

After the Revolution the country pulsated between welcoming immigrants to fuel its economy, settle its Indian lands, and build its railroads. And restricting and evicting them from homes they’d fashioned with their work. There were 19^th century Asian exclusion laws taking aim at immigration, and 20th century quota systems which favored Western and Northern European immigrants.

People with darker skin — Blacks from Africa, but also Southern and Eastern European Jews and Catholics and Asians from many countries — have always had a harder road in the United States.

The Oregon constitution, which outlawed slavery while it outlawed Blacks even living in the state, set a tone. We wanted Chinese laborers for mines and railroads, but when the utility was gone, we burned Chinatown in Portland and shot up Doc Hays’ home and apothecary in John Day. And we murdered 34 Chinese miners on the Snake River in Wallowa County. The “plot” was maybe hatched at the Imnaha school yard.

The “Manifest Destiny” we learned about in high school history classes has in fact been a push by Anglo-American Protestants to manage the continent. It was their “destiny,” the destiny of Marcus Whitman and Henry Spalding in our country.

Oregonian Sarah Koenig, who now teaches at Ramapo College in New Jersey, uses the Whitman/Spalding story to explain what she calls “Providence and the Invention of American History.” America, in this story, was always a white Protestant Christian affair, and white Protestants were destined to conquer and rule the continent. But, she cautions, that this is ”invented” history.

The real history is one of millions of indigenous people in hundreds of tribes speaking that many languages living and managing the continent for millennia, of white Europeans bringing livestock, diseases, slaves, and numerous varieties of Christianity — and forming a new nation with a new canon called democracy. That canon has gradually grown voting citizenship from the original white male property owners to include unpropertied whites, Blacks, women, and, in 1924, all Native Americans.

When President Trump took his first jabs at stopping most immigration (excepting White South Africans) and making the country whiter again, he included Native Americans in his attack on “birthright citizenship.” Deportations mounted, American Indians were advised to carry tribal identity cards, and a Joseph Band Nez Perce friend from the Colville Reservation said, “What are they going to do? Deport me to the Wallowas?”