At a bipartisan immigration meeting with senators last week, President Donald Trump referred to countries like Haiti and El Salvador as “shitholes” and proceeded to wonder if the United States ought to welcome immigrants from such countries. After reports of the comment leaked, networks held lengthy discussions about whether it was “shithole” or “shithouse,” whether it was outright racist or woefully misguided, whether it was about economics or skin color. From The Rachel Maddow Show to Anderson Cooper 360, pro-Trump hacks fought with anti-Trump pontificators in the same capacity they have been since Mr. Trump declared his candidacy two (very distant) years ago.
Of course, the comment was gravely alarming. It should be gravely alarming. The president of the United States does more than govern rationally — they represent and project American ideals at home and abroad. As a country — although we haven’t always been true to our values — we signed onto a project of inclusivity, progress, diversity, equality, opportunity, fairness and freedom whether we like it or not. Over and above any day-to-day government, any petty politician or any piece of legislation, those basic ideals exist, and they exist in a bold cursive type in our state and federal constitutions. To label, disparage and bar immigrants or potential citizens based on their country of origin, then, flies in the face of that laundry list of quintessentially American values — values that can certainly be chipped away at, but values that are nonetheless durable so long as our constitutions remain intact.
While certainly alarming, we cannot afford to pretend that this is new or unique. Trump’s casual racism and his malignant nativism are as knitted into the fabric of our country as those American values are. It cropped up in the 1700s when slave trade took off in America, which split families apart and tore men and women away from their homelands — it cropped up in the 1800s when President Andrew Jackson led a mass slaughter of indigenous people across the United States, when the Civil War broke out and half the country seceded in support of slavery, when Chinese workers were harassed on the West Coast for simply working on railroads to send money back to their families. It cropped up in the 1900s when Jim Crow was instituted, when mass lynchings took place across the United States without any repercussion, when Japanese Americans were locked away in internment camps, when voting restrictions like the poll tax and the grandfather clause were voted into law, when police beat Rodney King half to death with clubs, when Nixon declared a war on drugs. It crops up even now, in the 21st century, with voter ID laws, anti-Muslim hysteria and comments like “shitholes.”
If we want to learn from our history, it is not enough to emulate the good. We have to understand the bad and learn from our mistakes. Certainly, great and noble values exist and were written into hard law in 1776 and expanded on into the 1780s with the Constitution and Federalist Papers that defended it. Later, in the 1950s, Martin Luther King Jr., against all odds and obstacles, fought for voting rights in Selma and won. But at the same time, the men that crafted our Constitution and codified our values, hailed from the elite slave-owning class, and a majority of Americans, including a vast swath of our high level government, disapproved of the Civil Rights movement.
Our history is a duality of good and bad, a tapestry knitted together with both deeply malicious and profoundly benevolent threads. Once knitted, it can’t be undone, but we can look at the bigger picture and figure out how to go about the rest.
So, as unprecedented as Trump seems and as disgusting as his comments are, he and his ideology (and believe me, he has an ideology) don’t exist in a vacuum. They are the result of a historical narrative that’s been in the works since the first settlement of Jamestown. They are malicious threads in the tapestry, suspiciously similar to those of the past.
