07.20.2019 ________________________________________
First, I was angry – really angry.
Then, I was sad – really sad.
Today, after watching President Trump paint racist targets on women of color, I’m numb, fearful, disoriented.
It began last Sunday when America’s 45th president, as part of a tweet storm that roils the country to this day – a Steinbeckian dust storm darkening prairies; dirty, destructive, unrelenting, stripping souls of nourishment – said that four congresswomen should go back to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” adding “ … you can’t leave fast enough.”
The targets, women of color, citizens, duly-elected US Representatives – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, AKA the ‘Squad’ – apparently aren’t good enough Americans for Trump.
Advancing Trump’s racist tropes, White House collaborator Kellyanne Conway said: “[These women] represent a dark underbelly in this country… ”
Advancing racist tropes, Conway asked a Jewish reporter, Andrew Feinberg, what his ethnicity was.
Advancing racist tropes the White House demanded: “Love it or Leave it.”
What have we become – what is this world we inhabit?
On Wednesday, at a seemingly white supremacist rally in North Carolina, Trump, in an act of brazen incitement, falsely accused Omar of praising Al-Qaeda.
In response his brownshirts chanted:
“Send her back! Send her back!”
This isn’t just a Beltway story. It’s an American story about complicity, cowardice, ignorance, and prejudice.
It’s about Thibodaux, Tulsa, Ferguson, Charlottesville.
It’s about America’s Original Sin.
Racism is not a policy or a political position. It’s a moral failure on the part of those who believe that some people are more worthy, more human, than others, who believe that people of color must be grateful for the noblesse oblige that tolerates their presence.
If you embrace Trump, support Trump, and vote for Trump because he gave you a judge or a boost to your 401K you’re a cheap date; a compromised human willing to rend the American Dream for a red baseball cap and Donna Reed re-runs, yearning for a past that was never all white, never fully moral or just for all.
If you support his policies – or fail to condemn them – you’re complicit with Racism.
Last year, after I wrote a 4th of July column about President Trump, I received a vile letter from a shopkeeper in North Hampton NH that concluded:
“You don’t like it Bob, there’s a plane leaving hourly…..pick one….”
It’s not an uncommon sentiment; I get many such letters. What surprised me was that it was from someone with whom I had done business for years. (NB I’ve posted his full letter at https://tinyurl.com/y6lyyv3q)
It’s not a Beltway story; it’s our story.
In 2006, NH Governor John H. Sununu was presented an award by the American Task Force on Palestine. https://tinyurl.com/y36hyxuw An introduction by his son, Senator Sununu, included that he had a “Palestinian-American father, who was born in Havana and grew up in New York City … the pride my grandfather had at the fact that he grew up in Jerusalem … My grandmother, Abara Hussein…”
“Certainly,” Sununu père (who supported Trump-Pence) responded, “these are not easy times for a young man and his family to participate in public life as and Arab-American, as a Palestinian-American.”
It’s still not easy, Governor. Just ask Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib.
Just ask me.
This week NH Governor Chris Sununu – he with a grandmother named Hussein – refused to condemn Trump’s comments to WMUR.
Coward: Complicit with Racism.
African slaves, some of whom were Muslim, were first brought to this hemisphere in 1619 to work land white settlers had stolen from Indigenous Peoples.
Today, white America is still in denial about the role that race plays in our society and about the economic and societal costs that this “Christian Nation” extracted from its enslaved subjects in order to build the white privileged society that today confronts us with bigotry and violence.
397 years later, in 2016, Ibtihaj Muhammad, became the first American to win an Olympic medal while muhajabah – wearing a traditional Islamic headscarf.
Also, in 2016, when President Obama said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes.” Trump responded, “What sport is [Obama] talking about, and who?”
Ibtihaj Muhammad for one.
“This is my home; this is who I am,” she said in response to Trump’s Muslim Ban. “My family has always been here. We’re American by birth. It’s a part of who I am. This is all that I know. So when I hear someone say something like, ‘We’re going to send Muslims back to their country,’ it’s like, ‘Where am I going to go? I’m an American.’ “
“This is who I am”
Perhaps most vile is Trump’s attempt to deliberately exploit Jewish concerns about anti-semitism and Israel in order to try to pit Jews and people of color against each other.
Collaborator Lindsey Graham pitched in: “We all know that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and this crowd are a bunch of Communists. They hate Israel. They hate our own Country. They are Anti-Semitic, they are Anti-America.”
Coward: Complicit with Racism.
Thankfully, Anti-Defamation League President Jonathan Greenblatt condemned Trump’s “cynical” use of “Jews as a shield” … “Speaking for many people in the American Jewish community, President Trump doesn’t speak for me when he says those things, and I want nothing to do with it.”
In Trump’s white nationalist state there’s no place for The Other; for Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, Mexicans, LGBTQIA peoples and communities of color.
In Trump’s white nationalist state there’s no room for the ‘Squad.’
There’s no room for me.
Today, we must stand with the Squad, not because we necessarily agree with them but because to suppress their courage – their diversity and dissent – is to suppress the very promise of America.
Today, I stand with patriots who resist oppression, patriarchy and white nationalism.
Today, still sad and disoriented, I stand with Ilhan Omar, who answered Trump with a Maya Angelou quote:
“You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
TheOther.Azzi 