Trump Is Dragging America Back to Pre-Civil Rights Norms

Basically, everyone knows that “making America great again” means making America racist again—making racism the cultural norm again, unlocking the cage of political correctness and freeing, you know, regular Americans to strut again in a sense of superiority.

This cultural norm was “stolen” by the civil rights movement. Prior to the changes the movement wrought—I’m old enough to remember those days—polite ladies at church could say, “Oh my, that’s very white of you.” And lynchings were not only normal but quasi-legal, or so it seemed, far more likely to result in postcards than convictions.

To worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself.

Permission to dehumanize comes from the top down. This is what the Trump era continues to teach us, as well as how politically convenient it is. Dehumanizing a particular group of people—turning them into “the enemy” of the moment—is such a useful governing tool. And creating the enemy isn’t limited to waging war.

America, America! Half democracy, half slave-owning autocracy: God bless our founding racism, let’s make America as great as it used to be. Here’s how this is done, as Axios reports:

In a tense meeting last week, top Trump aide Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people a day... according to two sources familiar with the meeting.

Why it matters: The new target is triple the number of daily arrests that agents were making in the early days of Trump’s term—and suggests the president’s top immigration officials are full-steam ahead in pushing for mass deportations.

No wonder Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tagents seem like such brutal racists. It’s their job. Perhaps most of them believe in the moral necessity of their work—getting “illegals” out of the country, even if, oh gosh, they’re here legally. But even if they don’t. this is the work they have to do.

It’s not too difficult to scrape past the superficial terms “legal” and “citizenship” to spot the collective dehumanization of brown people. Americans capable of understanding life only in us-vs.-them—me-vs.-you—terms are getting what they long for.

This was exemplified in a recent CNN story about a surge in arrests of fake ICE agents—ordinary American guys harassing, assaulting, and/or pretending to arrest brown people. In one incident, a South Carolina white guy stopped his car on a rural road, blocking the car of brown men behind him. One of the victims recorded the incident on his cellphone.

“You all got caught!” the fake agent blathered. “Where are you from, Mexico? You from Mexico? You’re going back to Mexico!”

He then grabbed the keys from the ignition and started jiggling them in the driver’s face as he mocked his accent. One of the passengers made a call on his cellphone, causing the fake agent to admonish him: “Now don’t be speaking that pig-Latin in my fucking country!” He then slapped the phone out of his hand.

Ah, the enemy! What the incident makes public is not simply the sense of fear the Trumpers are instilling in ordinary Americans, but the fact that they’re returning those ordinary Americans to a sense of... uh, self-worth. We’re better than they are.

But of course this creates fear among everyone in the group declared to be non-American: “the enemy.” As Maribel Hernández Rivera of the American Civil Liberties Union noted to CNN after watching the video:

What we’re seeing here is we have leadership at the top that dehumanizes people who are immigrants and now this is the outcome of that dehumanizing. You end up having a violation of people’s rights, people see and hear this and they feel emboldened to go against immigrants.

Yes, this is part of who we are. Us-vs.-them hatred, fear, and contempt is basic humanity, simplified to its lowest common denominator. It’s so easy to seize a sense of hatred and contempt for an “other”—for someone who seems different. But to worship racism is to deny full humanity not simply to “them” but to yourself. You’re living as half of who you are, locked solely in your certainties—in what you know or think you know—and denying yourself the chance to learn and grow. What someone prone to racism really fears isn’t “the other”—he may well worship having a clearly defined enemy—but, rather, life’s complexity: the unknown.

Removing books from libraries is one example of this—you know, books that make people “uncomfortable,” because they push them beyond their certainties (racist or otherwise). So is the Trump-ICE invasion of universities: arresting and deporting students who make, let us say, politically incorrect statements about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As author Christine Greer asked, “What is the point of a university if we have homogeneity of thought and silence?”

Interestingly, we’re also witnessing a seemingly opposite sort of educational confrontation, as Trump education secretary Linda McMahon recently defended a New York state high school’s right to maintain an Indigenous American name for its sports teams: “the Chiefs.” The state had imposed a ban on stereotypical mascot names. As a spokesperson for the National Congress of American Indians said, “These depictions are not tributes—they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”

No matter! America has a right to maintain its stereotypes, that is to say, keep them in public view, front and center. Toss in a few hoots while you’re at it.

I believe this much: We’ll continue to evolve beyond this smirking certainty, regardless how difficult it will be to do so and regardless how long it takes.