With Donald Trump using the presidency to criminalize Mexicans, Muslims, and other groups he doesn't understand, it should come as no surprise that he referred to African nations and Haiti as "shitholes." Ultimately, the real issue isn't that Trump thinks countries south of the equator don't measure up, it's that he followed up his vulgar comments by tapping into his Teutonic sense of community to pine for more immigrants from Norway.
Trump's desire for more Scandinavians in America fits into a larger pattern of fear mongering, scapegoating, and racial divisiveness that never seems to end. In many ways Trump's become the Energizer Bunny of racial and ethnic tension in America.
Taking note of Donald Trump's inflammatory racial remarks is important not so much because of the ignorance and race-baiting that it encourages with his base (though this is a problem). No, what's worrisome about Trump's racially charged ignorance is the message his comments send to the rest of the world. It's made even more worrisome because the United States, in our not so distant past, was a model for racial divisiveness and ethnic superiority before.
Was Nazi Germany made in America?
Tablet has a provocative book review of Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, which documents how Jim Crow and U.S. laws, which denied full citizenship rights to blacks in the 1920s and 1930s, were both studied and praised by the Nazis. What the Nazis especially appreciated about the U.S. model was how a liberal state, that was the product of the Enlightenment, was able to turn millions of African Americans into second-class citizens.
Coupled with eugenics laws then in place, and because of laws which compromised the rights of Chinese, American Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos, the Nazis came to view America both as a beacon for the white race, and the home to a Nordic racial empire.
Below are snippets from the book review:
At the end of the day, the ugly reality is what we're seeing in America today is the thinly veiled return of eugenics in America. Only this time it's not so overtly tied to the pseudo science of of controlled breeding, with the simple goal of creating a genetically superior population.
Rather, if we're using proposed congressional legislation as our guidepost, what the Trump administration is trying to do is exclude those who have no money, no education, and no Olympic gold medals from coming to America (see if you could get into the United States under the GOP's proposed immigration score card by clicking here). They're effectively penalizing people who want to come here for the circumstances they were born into.
Still, without admitting it publicly, what the Trump administration is trying to do is also designed to stem the flow of what he and his base consider racial undesirables. It's that simple.
And, yes, the world has seen this picture before.
- Mark
Hat tip to Tove for The Atlantic's Adam Serwer article.
Trump's desire for more Scandinavians in America fits into a larger pattern of fear mongering, scapegoating, and racial divisiveness that never seems to end. In many ways Trump's become the Energizer Bunny of racial and ethnic tension in America.
Taking note of Donald Trump's inflammatory racial remarks is important not so much because of the ignorance and race-baiting that it encourages with his base (though this is a problem). No, what's worrisome about Trump's racially charged ignorance is the message his comments send to the rest of the world. It's made even more worrisome because the United States, in our not so distant past, was a model for racial divisiveness and ethnic superiority before.
Was Nazi Germany made in America?
Tablet has a provocative book review of Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, which documents how Jim Crow and U.S. laws, which denied full citizenship rights to blacks in the 1920s and 1930s, were both studied and praised by the Nazis. What the Nazis especially appreciated about the U.S. model was how a liberal state, that was the product of the Enlightenment, was able to turn millions of African Americans into second-class citizens.
Coupled with eugenics laws then in place, and because of laws which compromised the rights of Chinese, American Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos, the Nazis came to view America both as a beacon for the white race, and the home to a Nordic racial empire.
Below are snippets from the book review:
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... The Nazi regime saw itself at the cutting edge of racial legislation, and America was their inspiration. “Nazi lawyers regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law,” Whitman remarks. In the 1930s, the American South and Nazi Germany were the world’s most straightforwardly racist regimes, proud of the way they had deprived blacks and Jews, respectively, of their civil rights.
Scholars have long known that the American eugenics movement inspired the Nazis; now Whitman adds the influence of America’s immigration policy and its laws about race ...
... Historians have downplayed the connection between Nazi race law and America because America was mainly interested in denying full citizenship rights to blacks rather than Jews. But Whitman’s adroit scholarly detective work has proved that in the mid-’30s Nazi jurists and politicians turned again and again to the way the United States had deprived African-Americans of the right to vote and to marry whites. They were fascinated by the way the United States had turned millions of people into second-class citizens.
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| This map appeared in the Nazi propaganda magazine Neues Volk in 1936 (and in James Q. Whitman's Hitler's American Model). It's a map that illustrates the "Statutory Restrictions on Negro Rights." The Nazis also applauded the fact that American Indians, Mexicans, Filipinos, and Chinese had similar citizenship restrictions, while miscegenation (mixed race marriages) laws were on the books of nearly 30 U.S. states. |
Strange as it may seem to us, the Nazis saw America as a beacon for the white race, a Nordic racial empire that had conquered a vast amount of Lebensraum ... Hitler admired the American commitment to racial purity, praising the anti-Indian campaigns that had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand.”
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You can read the entire book review of Hitler's American Model by clicking here. The Atlantic has another review of the same book, which you can access by clicking here.At the end of the day, the ugly reality is what we're seeing in America today is the thinly veiled return of eugenics in America. Only this time it's not so overtly tied to the pseudo science of of controlled breeding, with the simple goal of creating a genetically superior population.
Rather, if we're using proposed congressional legislation as our guidepost, what the Trump administration is trying to do is exclude those who have no money, no education, and no Olympic gold medals from coming to America (see if you could get into the United States under the GOP's proposed immigration score card by clicking here). They're effectively penalizing people who want to come here for the circumstances they were born into.
Still, without admitting it publicly, what the Trump administration is trying to do is also designed to stem the flow of what he and his base consider racial undesirables. It's that simple.
And, yes, the world has seen this picture before.
- Mark
Hat tip to Tove for The Atlantic's Adam Serwer article.
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