As noted in previous blogs, I cannot ignore what’s happening in the United States these days. It appalls me — and plenty of others. We are witnessing a 21st century version of fascism, emboldened by social media and made possible by an increasingly unhinged electorate that dabbles in mindless conspiracy theories and treats truth and knowledge like enemy invaders. I am determined to speak my piece in this blog, just so everyone will know where I stood when all this went down. Or just so my kids will know one day. So here we go again….
Government-sanctioned racism has been a part of the American experience since before the country was even born, although a lot of Americans pretend that it hasn’t. Efforts to fight racist policies (and politicians) have proven a mixed bag. There have been some wins, some losses, and a few ties. But it never really goes away — and seems to have made a roaring comeback under the Trump 2.0 administration.
Already this year, the administration has rounded up thousands of brown-skinned Latinos and sent them to detention facilities, foreign prisons or just back over the border – all without the normal Constitutional or legal protections. Everyone is fair game: babies, children, mothers, the elderly and infirm, refugees, whoever.
Officials couch these mass arrests/deportations in law enforcement terms, suggesting that they are only rounding up illegal immigrants and criminal gang members. That’s not true. Some of those who were rounded up have a legal right to be in the United States. But no matter. They fit the general profile of criminals, so away they go.
Similar actions have been taken against brown-skinned Arabs and Muslims who came to the U.S. to study – legally – but found themselves on the wrong side of the Middle East debate. Pro-Palestinian activists have been snatched off the streets in broad daylight and in clear violation of free speech rights and the law of the land.
Lawyers, judges and civil rights groups have pushed back against these actions, but the Trump regime doesn’t care. They just ignore the court orders and do whatever the hell they want. In some cases they even arrest the judges and lawmakers who stand in their way.
If you want an accurate definition of fascism, that’s a good place to start.
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At the same time authorities have been rounding up brown-skinned people, they’ve warmly embraced white Afrikaner refugees who claim to be victims of racist government policies back in South Africa. As near as I can tell, the refugees’ main problem with current South African policies is that those policies no longer favor white colonists who spent generations oppressing brown and black people under apartheid.
I’m guessing Trump’s buddy Elon Musk, a white South African himself, had something to do with this. Just a hunch.
Meanwhile, the Trump regime has wiped away historical records, online documents, books, artifacts and monuments dedicated to the accomplishments of black Americans – all while keeping white Nazi propaganda on the library shelves at our finest military academies.
Loads of white Americans seem to be just fine with all this. It’s not a problem in their eyes. On the contrary, many applaud it. For all I know they’re breaking out the bubbly every time another non-Caucasian from some non-English speaking country gets rounded up and detained.
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Sadly, I can’t say I’m surprised by what’s happening. Racism (or racialism, or race consciousness) is part of the human experience, as embedded in our DNA as blood cells and muscle tissue. Racism has been around for thousands of years in every country and culture you can name. There is literally not a spot on earth where racism doesn’t exist, except maybe in homes for the blind where nobody can see what color you are.
What does bother me is how quickly so many Americans have embraced this new strand of racism, or at least remained silent about it. We are making the same mistakes now that our forebears made – allowing racism to become official policy rather than just a human condition that we’re all susceptible to but can overcome with the right amount of effort.
Let’s be clear about something: The United States was built on racism – literally. White colonists enslaved millions of black Africans and brought them over here against their will to work the fields. These same colonists wiped out whole populations of indigenous Native Americans in a fevered quest to expand their colonial empire inland and westward.
More recently, Japanese-Americans were removed from their homes during World War II and sent to internment camps because the USA was at war with Japan. The USA was also at war with Caucasian countries like Germany and Italy, but there were no German- or Italian-American internment camps in America.
I personally spent my early years in a region of the country, the American South, where Jim Crow laws were still in place. These laws banned blacks and other “colored” people from using white restrooms, going to white schools, eating at white restaurants, staying in white hotels, etc. The rest of the country was a little less racist, but only just so.
Civil rights laws were eventually passed to do away with racist policies and ensure more equality and a more balanced playing field. Now the Trump regime is working overtime to undo all that progress – quickly, and with a huge, aggrieved chip on their shoulder.
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What’s mind boggling to me is that Trump returned to the White House in part because he got a lot more support from minorities during the 2024 election than he did when he lost in 2020.
Trump always had the white “Christian” vote in his back pocket – despite the fact that he knows literally nothing about Christianity. But because he also has a long history of racism – like this and this – I figured the nation’s non-white population would vote against him in massive numbers.
That didn’t really happen. Trump actually increased his support among black, Latino and Muslim voters. I don’t understand why, but whatever. It’s not for me to figure out.
What I do understand is that the same non-white voters who supported him are now getting a heavy dose of reality in the form of policies and actions designed to keep them in check or get rid of them altogether.
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Here’s something I’ve been wanting to write about for quite some time now, but have largely resisted:
America’s long history of racism – including and up to this very minute – would not have been possible without the blessing of the “Christian” church. That’s not my opinion. It’s simple fact. You’d have to be an idiot not to see it.
Notice that I put “Christian” in quotation marks. That’s because many Americans who claim to represent the Christian faith could not be more misaligned with the actual teachings of Christ. They are “Christians” in name only.
For hundreds of years, the white “Christian” church in America has either outright supported or turned a blind eye to slavery, genocide, Jim Crow laws, discrimination and bigotry on a mass scale. Church leaders have gone to great lengths to rationalize racism, regardless of denomination. It has happened with Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Mormons, Lutherans, Episcopalians – you name it.
I was raised a Methodist, which is considered a comparatively progressive denomination as these things go. Even during that time and place – the conservative Bible Belt South of the 1960s – our church did not gravitate toward fire-and-brimstone ravings, or spend its time railing against the marginalized and less fortunate. On the contrary, Sunday school classes focused on the value of compassion, generosity, and acts of kindness.
But: You’d still hear n****r jokes from certain church members. You’d still walk out of church secure in the knowledge that you didn’t have to worry about the kind of brutality and injustice that your fellow black Christians had to endure only a few miles away. More importantly, you didn’t have to give it much thought one way or another because your church leaders never bothered to tell you how very wrong it all was.
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America likes to think of itself as a God-fearing nation. People wear their faith on their sleeves. They share their thoughts about God at the drop of the hat, whether you ask for those thoughts or not. They claim devotion to Jesus Christ and are not shy about professing it.
But I wonder how Jesus would react to what we’re seeing right now. I wonder if he would be okay with separating children from their mothers, sticking them in cages, and shipping them to places where they are almost guaranteed to live in misery. I wonder if Jesus would turn a blind eye to the tears and heartache and injustice.
Most of all, I wonder how many of America’s “Christians” even think about these things.
If you want to know why I haven’t been an active churchgoer since I was 16 years old, that’s also a good place to start.
Image: A Ku Klux Klan rally, in front of a burning cross, published by the University of Chicago.
Vance Cariaga 
That sitting that our president had with Trump last week was hilariously sad. The fake news on display (the Afrikaaner genocide – complete with printouts and videos) was clear for all of us who know the truth, while this man with the highest office in your land sat there insulting American journalists who didn’t conform to his agenda. And then our government officials sat there trying to reason with the man, sucking up to try to repair the damage already done earlier this year, because his callous aid cuts have had such a huge impact. The presence of white South African golfers and businessmen – Trump’s buddies, who all had their say – just further reinforced the agenda that this was a whites-only club, and our president was sitting there as if he was a naughty schoolboy in the principal’s office.
Thank you for covering the facts of American history being built on colonialism and racism. When I look at what’s happening in Gaza today (and what has been happening in that part of the world for over 75 years prior), it’s really no mystery how those in power – the colonisers – can do such things. It’s simply a repetition of what colonisers have done for centuries. The only difference is that it’s never been so visible to the masses all over the world. But even with that visibility – mostly on platforms owned and run by these same forces – the sad reality is that nobody outside of the political and financial elite can actually stop the carnage. It’s really a clear indicator of how close we’re getting to a dystopian future.
As for the role of religion, people in power have always tried to used religion as a tool for domination – as did the Apartheid government here. Fortunately, nowadays, we have far more access to religious sources than historically, where the clergy / religious scholars were seen as the only sources of religious knowledge, which meant that the masses were subject to manipulation by those who, deep down, acted against the authentic teachings of their religions. It’s far easier nowadays for people to learn about religious teachings – the ones they were born into, and others – which, I think, makes for a much more enlightened environment…there’s more hope that people can find their way to truth and universal good values, without being boxed in to ideologies which have been perverted.
Anyway…good on you for putting your views out there. We need people of conscience to keep speaking out in these days of madness.
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You know, this blog was published just before Trump’s meeting with Ramaphosa, which was too bad because that meeting perfectly encapsulated exactly where Trump stands. It was yet another international embarrassment for the U.S. in a recent series of them. And it could not have been more racist in its intent — this rich white boy, the billionaire son of a millionaire (like Musk), berating the black leader of a sovereign country that has its own history of white colonialism and racism.
Plus Trump apparently backed his lies with images from the Congo instead of South Africa — although he probably doesn’t know the difference between the two countries and couldn’t name five African countries if you quizzed him. He could not care less about any parts of Africa that don’t include white people.
As you point out, what’s happening in Gaza is yet another example of colonialism/genocide wrapped in racism, arrogance and greed. Humans never learn. I just don’t understand it.
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