So new polling shows that over half of America favors mass deportations and just under half believe that it is being done in an acceptable manner. So, how are so many people accepting of the way that these mass deportations are being carried out? Well, maybe it’s not a good time to bring it up. Or maybe it’s the best time to bring it up. I don’t know, so here goes.
One of the most insidious aspects of our American brand of racism is how it distorts reality and blinds even good-intentioned people to how all-encompassing and destructive it is. It’s almost impossible to swim in these waters your whole life and not be affected. Sorry people, this is America, it was founded on a principle that some people could be counted as only 3/5th of a person, and that was only to ensure that the rich white men who owned them had more power, otherwise they wouldn’t have been counted at all. We stole every inch of land we’re living on through a thing we called Manifest Destiny, believing we had a divine right to take it. While doing so, we fought a civil war because half of our country wanted to continue to enslave people. Afterwards, we spent a century excluding black and brown and native people from white spaces, including in our government, our media, our entertainment, our restaurants, our stores, our schools, our public spaces, and in doing so, we created a kind of reality distortion field in the white psyche. So much so that people who consider themselves white typically know less about American history than everyone else. Namely because there are always guys like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump who want to erase our actual history and replace it with a fairy tale filled with white knights saving damsels in distress against invading armies of savages. And if you think I’m exaggerating, well, just listen to Stephen Miller’s speech at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, or rally, or whatever that was.
So I think a great litmus test to examine our cloaked racist tendencies—which even in our most nakedly obvious moments, such as now, seem to be obfuscated for far too many—is the general acceptance of the immigration crackdown by the so-called Department of Homeland Security. Not only the acceptance of the concept of mass deportations, but also the cruel and illegal manner in which it is being done. Let’s run through a quick list of what has transpired in just the past few weeks in the city where I live and its surrounding towns.
A Latino man was shot to death after dropping his kids off at school. Eyewitness accounts contradict official DHS reports, and DHS is not cooperating with investigations. But video footage clearly shows that the agents are not in any danger when one of them just starts shooting.
A black woman was shot, seven times (remarkably, she survived), and once again, DHS accounts don’t line up with the facts that are coming out.
An entire apartment building of mostly poor black people, including many families, kids and elderly citizens, was attacked by DHS in the middle of the night. It was reported that kids were sent out into the streets in little or no clothing and detained in vans, some of them fastened with zip ties. Elderly people were handcuffed and held for hours, some in their nightgowns. Almost every apartment was ransacked, with their front doors blown off their hinges. DHS said they arrested 37 people, but we don’t know who they are or what they did, or where they were even taken. Many residents are too frightened to return home, and no repairs or compensation are being arranged by DHS for the damage that they caused. Local community groups have been scrambling to get resources and support for those affected. And somehow, this barely cracked the national news ecosystem.
ICE agents have been carelessly tossing out tear gas in areas near schools and busy intersections where predominantly Latino families and children are just going about their business. In one case, DHS even tear-gassed dozens of Chicago police.
A Latina alderperson, checking on a constituent in a hospital, was forcefully handcuffed when asking ICE agents if they had a warrant for his arrest and was escorted out of the building.
A homeless shelter in Bronzeville, a predominantly black neighborhood in Chicago, was raided, and five people were hauled away. The pastor who runs the shelter said that the agents had no warrant and offered no reasons for apprehending anyone. To paraphrase his account, they just came by and started chasing people.
In general, racial profiling has become the norm for DHS throughout the country. It was sanctified earlier this year by the Supreme Court. So now social media feeds are filled with Latinos being stopped and asked for papers, pulled out of cars, or tackled to the ground needlessly. It’s become an environment of smash and grab and ask questions later for these agents. American citizens are being swept up and detained, often violently, only to be let go later. This level of intimidation has caused entire neighborhoods in Chicago to become ghost towns, with residents even afraid to go to work or take their kids to school.
Hundreds of people, mostly Latinos, are being taken to a facility in Broadview, Illinois, that is not legally equipped to hold people for more than a few hours. But it’s widely reported that people are being held for days or weeks in unsafe living conditions and without access to proper nutrition. Lawyers are not allowed in, and in many cases, it’s unclear who’s being taken there and under what circumstances. But what is known is that none of the detainees are given their constitutional access to Due Process.
Peaceful protestors outside of the facility are regularly met with tear gas and rubber bullets and in some cases, they are just outright attacked and detained. And by the way, Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino are using all of this as a background for photo ops being shared on the right-wing propaganda apparatus. People can say they haven’t heard of this, or that I’m somehow exaggerating it, but it’s all right in front of all of us. If you’re not seeing this, it’s because too many have been conditioned not to see clearly what happens to these populations. Including many in the media whose job it is to report on this. It’s one of the most insidious aspects of the American brand of racism—the inability for much of our population to see everyone as having, and being deserving of, the same human rights. And white supremacist groups like MAGA take advantage of that. You might think I’m being careless to call MAGA a white supremacist movement, but I’m sorry, we have to stop mincing words. They are, you can’t have Stephen Miller as your spokesperson and claim otherwise.
Now, could you imagine if our news and social media were filled with an endless stream of white women being handcuffed in front of their children? Or white guys being tackled while walking down a sidewalk and hauled off into unmarked vans by masked men. Or if just one white father was shot and killed after dropping his kids off at school, and the authorities said, sorry, there will be no investigations. If that were happening, would more Americans, especially white Americans, be asking a lot more questions? Yes, the answer is a definitive yes. That was rhetorical. I hope you didn’t think that there was some other answer to that question, because there isn’t.
Anyway, here’s the rub. What I just did right there would drive many white people into a reflexive retreat from any self-examination. Probably many would have stopped reading in the first paragraph. Pointing out this reality quite often has the effect of driving white folks further into the safety of fairy tales about white knights and fearsome, unidentifiable enemies. That’s endlessly been our problem in confronting this issue. It makes people uncomfortable; the truth has a way of doing that. So here we are, we’re witnessing the most openly racist campaign of violence being conducted by our government at a scale that we haven’t seen since the 1950s, and too many white Americans—the ones who if they just spoke out more could help put a stop to this—don’t seem to recognize it because they’ve been conditioned to not see the violence that takes place against these populations.
And that’s the strategy of MAGA; they know how all of this works better than most. They’re as insidious as the insidious power dynamics that have plagued our country from the beginning. If they can get enough people to buy into the idea that DHS should be allowed to do this to a certain population, or that troops will be needed, or martial law is necessary, well, once that’s established, it’ll be too late when everybody else finally recognizes that it’s also coming for them.
Personally, I think we’re going to beat this thing, but not easily. The world as we knew it is gone; it’s hard to see that, but it is. A new world will need to be imagined, and we can’t let the likes of Stephen Miller be the ones to define it. Because, as Antonio Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks after he was locked up for being a vocal critic of Mussolini:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
Yes, yes, it’s a loose translation, but it’s beautiful and makes sense for our times. Because here in America, we have a lot of monsters. Including some that we have let linger around for far too long. Monsters that people like Donald Trump and the MAGA leaders like to trot out to stoke division and rage. Monsters that have torn this country apart far too many times. So while now may be the time of monsters, it’s also the time when they come out of the shadows, giving us the opportunity to finally rid ourselves of them. If we get through this, for the sake of future generations of Americans, we will need to seize that opportunity.