Underdeveloped ‘sh*tholes’
22nd January 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
When President Donald Trump decided to use the word “sh*thole” to describe El Salvador, Haiti and African nations, he knew exactly what he was doing and saying.
He thought he could get away with it the way he has already gotten away with more than a bushel of racially and culturally offensive remarks during his first year in office and many others during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump is accused of using the offensive word to describe the aforementioned nations during a bipartisan meeting on U.S. immigration policy on Jan. 11, the eighth anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. Talk about timing.
During the meeting with six U.S. senators, Trump is also accused of questioning the need to admit more Haitian immigrants to the U.S. and suggesting that the nation instead seek more immigrants from countries like Norway.
For some reason, he was not happy about the word getting out about his remarks and has repeatedly denied making them.
The Associated Press reported that the President vehemently denied making those remarks, which unleashed criticism on him from both sides of the political aisle and prompted CNN journalist Don Lemon to announce to the world that Trump is a racist on Jan. 11.
“No, No. I’m not a racist,” Trump said Jan. 14, after reporters asked him to respond to those who think he is. “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you.”
According to The Associated Press, Trump also denied making the statements attributed to him, but avoided the details of what he did or did not say.
“Did you see what various senators in the room said about my comments?” he asked, referring to lawmakers who were meeting with him in the Oval Office on Jan. 11 when Trump is said to have made the comments. “They weren’t made.”
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the only Democrat who attended the meeting, told The Associated Press that Trump had in fact said what he was reported to have said. Durbin called the president’s remarks “vile, hate-filled and clearly racial in their content” and added that Trump used the most vulgar term “more than once.”
Durbin told the AP that when the conversation on U.S. immigration policy turned to talk of extending protections for Haitians, Trump replied, “We don’t need more Haitians.”
“He said, ‘Put me down for wanting more Europeans to come to this country. Why don’t we get more people from Norway?’” Durbin said.
The Associated Press reported that Trump insisted in a tweet on Jan. 12 that he “never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said ‘take them out.’ Made up by Dems.” Trump wrote, “I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings — unfortunately, no trust!”
A Trump confidant told The Associated Press that the president spent the evening of Jan. 11 calling friends and outside advisers to gauge their reaction to his remarks. The confidant said Trump wasn’t apologetic and denied he was racist, instead blaming the media for distorting his meaning.
In typical Trump fashion, the president attempted last week to shift the blame to Democrats of undermining the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“Honestly I don’t think the Democrats want to make a deal,” Trump said. “I think they talk about DACA, but they don’t want to help the DACA people.”
Trump has been called everything from an egomaniacal, power-hungry tyrant to a bold-faced liar. And the comments he reportedly made on Jan. 11 are not the first things he’s said that led to him being accused of being a racist.
Why, then, would he even attempt to deny making racially and culturally offensive remarks that he clearly made and trying to determine for himself what the fallout might be?
Perhaps because he is hemorrhaging support among his power base, blue-collar, angry whites who voted him into office but have since decided that the president’s support of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore is cause for concern.
Perhaps because mid-term congressional elections are looming on the horizon and someone has whispered in his year that another debacle like the one that took place in Alabama could severely impede President Trump’s power to get things done during the remainder of his presidency.
Nobody can really say for sure how the president’s mind works or what motivates him.
What can be said is that what Trump said on Jan. 11 is consistent with everything else he has said about people of color in the U.S. and immigrants of color.
He clearly has no respect or appreciation for non-white people and has shown no signs of having benefited from a quality education. He clearly has no understanding of true U.S. history or any appreciation for the role immigrants of color and enslaved Africans played in the building and strengthening of America. Nor does he have a solid understanding of world history and the role the Western world played in promoting global white supremacy and exploiting, undermining and oppressing non-white nations.
He simply does not get it and is completely fine with being arrogant in his ignorance.
Never mind the damage that he is doing to America’s standing in the global community or its relationship with other world leaders.
If the nations President Trump described as “sh*tholes” are in fact that, it is largely so because of a centuries-long tradition of Western nations draining the life, natural resources and human resources out of non-white countries and taking a dump on them.
Despite opposing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Germany, the U.S., Great Britain and other Western powers have a long, troubled history of carrying out carnage, destruction, terrorism, colonialism and enslavement in the name of profit and Manifest Destiny.
The nations of the Western world saw nothing wrong with carving up the continent of Africa during the Berlin Conference to divvy up profits and expand their empires.
Africa is still reeling from the horrific oppression and violence the Western world unleashed on it, not to mention the ongoing, neocolonial efforts to strip the continent of its natural resources and precious minerals.
Haiti is still suffering because it had the audacity to seize its independence from France by any means necessary. Ironically, the Haitian revolution was inspired in part by similar uprisings in the American colonies and in France.
Haiti’s independence has never been forgiven by France, which has demanded that the Republic of Haiti provide hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution for France’s losses.
To the naked eye, that sounds an awful lot like reparations.
The rest of the Western powers, including the United States, has backed France’s play, refusing to engage in commerce with the first Black republic in Western Hemisphere.
Adding insult to unspeakable injury, France magnanimously announced after the devastating earthquake in Haiti eight years ago that it is forgiving the remainder of that nation’s debt to France.
Haiti continues to struggle, despite the inspiration it represents to conscious Black people around the world and its symbolic meaning for all oppressed groups around the world.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation legally ended slavery in the United States, those who amassed great fortunes from exploiting African slave labor have outsourced their oppression to other undeveloped nations, many of which are being run by officials handpicked by Western countries in exchange for access to those countries’ natural resources and cheap labor. Essentially, these “underdeveloped sh*tholes” have become for Western nations no more than satellite plantations around the world where the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet can do to people what the Emancipation Proclamation said it could no longer do to people in the United States.
If you think that President Donald Trump is the only high-ranking elected official in the nation’s capitol or in the Western world who feels this way about non-European nations or immigrants of color, you better think again.
U.S. immigration policy, foreign policy and the operations of multinational corporations make it clear that to many of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations and individuals, non-European nations and immigrants of color have virtually no human rights that the 1 percent is bound by law or custom to respect.
We should perhaps be grateful to President Donald Trump for being brutally honest and saying what many global leaders and business luminaries are too intelligent, polished or prudent to say about non-European nations and immigrants of color.
And perhaps this should be a wake-up call to our Haitian American and African brothers and sisters who come into the United States and buy into the State Department’s efforts to divide and conquer Black and Brown people by telling Black immigrants that they are nothing like their lazy, undereducated and defective African-American cousins.
We are all people of African descent who should have no problem coming together to defend our very human right to be and to fight against global white supremacy.
All power to the people.
This article originally published in the January 22, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
