white supremacy

Not Too Nice

August 19, 2020 by Alan Bernstein 2 Comments

[Information learned after posting has been added at end.]

During the run-up to the First Gulf War, when the U. S. led an international coalition to force Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1990, James Baker advised George H. W. Bush that he could ignore the disfavor his rescue of Kuwait might arouse among America’s Jews, because “they don’t vote for us anyway.” Although the Secretary of State’s cynical attitude addressed only Jewish Americans at that time, now, under Donald Trump, the Republican category of despised others has expanded to marginalize all minorities, especially when they tend to be Democrats.

It is interesting that Trump never or rarely refers to people of color as such, which is hardly remarkable for someone who made his reputation ridiculing political correctness. “People of color” (a term of art, it would seem, used only by academics, journalists, and other elites Trump scorns) belong to the groups Trump wants to send back to what he calls “the shithole countries.” They are brown and black, Muslim, and female. And opponents — those he terms “low IQ,” “horrible,” “weak,” “nasty.” They are “animals.”

President Trump and his supporters seek to diminish these people they despise. Exploiting the well worn dog whistles of populism, he charms his base using his and their racism to assure them that, being white, they are superior to these “others,” the people Trump calls “losers.” By this strategy, he seeks to boost the ego and consolidate the in-group bonding of stereotypical white Americans – especially those left unemployed by globalization (exporting jobs), affirmative action (they think), and every other current in the present culture they don’t like: women’s reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, religions other than their own (all religions but one being evil), and recipients of public funding, like everyone who receives food stamps or Medicaid or any other “handouts” to “parasites.” This is the classic strategy of the ruling class: divide and conquer. They flatter underpaid, under-educated whites, who also lack adequate medical insurance, with the illusion that they are superior to equally persecuted people of color to prevent an alliance that would be irresistible. It must be a thrill to hear them complain, as Arlie Hochschild reports (Strangers in Their Own Land, 221), “There are fewer and fewer white Christians like us.”

Because that strategy has worked so well, now the ruling class has only to prevent people of color and their liberal allies from voting. Trump made this goal explicit on March 30, when he said on Fox news that high levels of voting (not just mail in, but all voting) would mean “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” This strategy builds on long-standing gimmicks dating back to the Jim Crow South that have now spread wherever Republicans control the statehouse: have fewer polling places in strategically chosen areas (inner-city zip codes), limit the hours polls are open, restrict early voting, enforce voter ID laws with abusive strictness. If citizens wish to vote from home, cripple the postal service to prevent voting by mail — or try to.

These measures are shocking enough because they so clearly attack democracy, but the appearance of the coronavirus gave this unscrupulous, vindictive, authoritarian bully of a president a new opportunity. He chose to downplay the virus and allowed it to hit those already exploited, vulnerable populations. As early as April 12, 2020, Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced that in Michigan, “Some 14 percent of Michiganders are African-American, yet more than 40 percent of COVID-19 related deaths in Michigan are African Americans.” It was not only Democratic governors who made this analysis. A story in the Wall Street Journal of April 8, 2020, had already observed the problem as big-city mayors began to take action. In another Journal article of April 22, 2020, Dr. Lauren Weber of Meharry Medical College analyzes the causes of this situation: those people disproportionately dying from the virus live in multi-generational households, hold essential jobs that put them in close contact with many others. They are more prone than whites to have underlying conditions that derive from the environments in which their poverty forces them to live (in crowded, urban areas, near polluted, industrial zones, or, even in the country, near the open air lagoons of factory farms). The same holds for whites who live in similar circumstances, but Blacks live there in disproportionate numbers. If essential workers were paid a living wage, this situation would change. Given the erratic, state-by-state implementation of Medicaid, the availability of health insurance falls unevenly on people of color. The Kaiser Family Foundation has published a graph detailing the “Percent of Nonelderly Adults who are Uninsured, by Race/Ethnicity, 2014.” Of the nonelderly adults with no medical insurance, 11% are white, 16% are Black, and 27% are Hispanic. So, even if these patients recover from a bout of Covid-19, they will not be able to handle the resultant medical bills. The inequity that these figures make predictable continued for at least four months. As of August 8, 2020, adjusting for age difference in race groups, 3.6 times more Blacks and 3.2 times more Hispanics have died, nationwide, than whites. Moreover, the absolute numbers (as opposed to ratios) are astonishing. Between April 15 and August 15, 2020, Covid-19 infected 4,726,003 and killed 141,386 Americans. The chronology here is vital. By mid-April at the latest, the disproportionate impact of the pandemic was clear. If outsize harm, especially for the most vulnerable, was to be averted, immediate action was needed.

WHAT ACTION? TESTS!

The dangers deriving from the novelty of this unknown virus were apparent early on. Some early tests used in China were inaccurate up to 47% of the time, but even in this country, even now, the tests are inadequate in number, in reply time, and in accuracy. Supplies such as swabs for collecting samples have been in short supply. Chemical ingredients have been impure. Given the resulting disorder, only patients with symptoms could get tested. Tragically, though, infected people do not manifest symptoms until about the fourth day, so they could still transmit their disease before their illness manifested itself. In crowded conditions, these circumstances were a recipe for great suffering and, indeed, death. In July the CDC circulated a paper by Le Chang, et al., based in Beijing with this advice: “As more asymptomatic cases occur, screening donors for viral RNA with high-sensitivity assays, as we are doing in Hubei Province, will be critical to ensure blood safety.” That means testing even people with no symptoms. In China, they began that policy by January 25, according to these authors. Drawing on information from Johns Hopkins University, as early as March 9, the Wall Street Journal explained the problem of asymptomatic incubation periods and the need for quarantines. These facts make extensive testing imperative. The need was clear by mid-March at the latest. In this country it was not done.

WHY NOT?

The disadvantages people of color endure make them likely to vote Democratic. 83% of Blacks, 63% of Hispanic voters are or lean Democratic, whereas, among whites, 53% are or lean Republican and 42% Democratic. That is one reason President Trump has ordered the U. S. Census takers to end their data collection a month early. If there are “fewer” of them, they will have less representation. It would also follow that, as Reuters put it on August 13, Trump used (or tried to use) the new coronavirus relief bill to block “Democrats’ effort to include funds for the U.S. Postal Service and election infrastructure” and so “to block more Americans from voting by mail during the pandemic.” The two policies reinforce one another:

REDUCE THEIR VOTE, REDUCE THEIR NUMBER.

Given the evident inequity that afflicts our most vulnerable populations, Trump’s despised losers and Democrats, it is hardly surprising that he offered no comprehensive initiative to combat the infection’s spread. Neither Donald Trump nor Howard Baker is the first Republican strategist to aim at a given minority group. In 1981, when describing Richard Nixon’s famed “Southern Strategy,” Lee Atwater, an advisor to Ronald Reagan and chair of the RNC under George H. W. Bush, approved abandoning explicit use of the N-word in shaping policy and instead recommended more neutral-seeming measures such as cutting taxes: “economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Trump also had his own priorities. In order to allow business to continue as usual and avert the economic costs of sheltering in place, and because he thought its predictions were too negative and its scientific judgments contradicted his own intuitions, Trump purged scientists he considered disloyal to him and effectively crippled the CDC. In this weakened state, the CDC now proposes measures not as mandates but only as “recommendations” because they are contrary to Trump’s dream of a smoothly functioning economy not distracted by the health needs of the population. Besides, the racial minorities or ethnic groups disproportionately affected by the virus generally vote for his opponents. So Trump continued to ignore the virus or deliberately underestimate its impact. “It’s just like the flu.” “It will just disappear.” He offered no centralized, federal plan to distribute needed equipment (testing supplies, respirators, PPE). He allowed the pandemic to spread knowing it would disproportionately impact people of color, his target. This calculated policy of inaction during the first 6 months of the virus’s presence in the U. S. was achieving the desired result:

REDUCE THEIR VOTE, REDUCE THEIR NUMBER.

Here are the measures the Trump administration took or deliberately did not take with devastating disregard to the injury that would follow. He withdrew from international organizations, thus reducing the extent of global scientific cooperation. He left the American seat on the World Health Organization’s executive board vacant until May, 2020, when that “lapse” became too embarrassing. He removed “disloyal” staff from CDC. He dismantled “The Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit” in charge of national pandemic preparedness set up under Obama by Susan Rice as part of the National Security Council. And, as the keystone of his efforts to expose the very poor and unemployed to whatever illness might strike them, Trump dismantled Obamacare, as far as he was able. He has encouraged or pressured Republican governors (Abbot, DeSantis, Doucey, Edwards, Kemp, for example) not to order their states to wear masks, practice social distancing, and close businesses like bars and restaurants that involve close personal contact. He has actively opposed the expansion of diagnostic tests because he thinks tests embarrass him by revealing cases. Consistent with his xenophobia, Trump’s bans on immigration have deprived us of health caregivers. “The Trump administration’s policies have exacerbated the problem by reducing the influx of immigrants, who make up a quarter of long-term caregivers.” This goes with a neglect of public health administration because, as Ed Yong puts it, Americans view “health as a matter of personal responsibility rather than a collective good.” Indeed the Republican scorn for the word “public” feeds into this prejudice, as does the belief that the government should be as small as possible. These attitudes call for budget cuts and the reduction of staff responsible for public health. The reasons for these disparities follow from other policies favored by Trump and the Republicans. Don’t just scorn them, let them die. “They don’t vote for us anyway.”

How can people like those in Trump’s base, who object fiercely, on grounds of conscience, to being forced into complicity (through government payments for medical care that funds birth control and abortion) force us into complicity, against our conscience, with a policy that causes disease, suffering, unknown long-term consequences, and death for their living fellow citizens? Trump and his faithful accuse us of “cancel culture” for removing statues while he himself tries to cancel segments of our population. Our military proudly displays its promise to “leave no one behind” and heroically rescues those in trouble. We might expect this ethical system to spread and benefit all Americans, but rather than “leave no one behind,” we get efforts to “push them behind,” with the weight of the administration, like the knee of Derek Chauvin on the neck of George Floyd, to hold down persons of color, women, liberals, Democrats, and all those despised “others.” Some ascribe this indifference to Trump’s callousness, his lack of empathy. These results, they say, are indirect, collateral damage resulting from his obsession with the economy to the neglect, as the Constitution puts it, of “the general welfare.” That analysis is inadequate. We all navigate between the pursuit of health and wealth, but Trump places the wealth of a few over the health of the many. This is not just negligence. Remember how Trump advised police not to be “too nice” to suspects as they arrest them; not to bother shielding their heads as they put them into squad cars? In our country, arrestees, suspects, are innocent until proven guilty. No harm should come to them until sentenced by a jury of their peers. Given the racial makeup of police arrests in this country, winking at rough treatment encourages it. There is a word for this de facto, systematic mistreatment of large populations. I hate to pronounce or even write it, because it is happening in my own country. Before the coronavirus, it was “merely” persecution. Now, with widespread death in the picture, it is more than criminal neglect. It is genocide. OK, maybe only murder.

NEW INFORMATION.

Update 1. August 23, 2020. As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of 2020, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus is significantly higher than the official toll. And half the dead were people of color—Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans and, to a marked degree unrecognized until now, Asian Americans. . . . People of color make up just under 40 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for approximately 52 percent of all the “excess deaths” above normal through July, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project and The Associated Press.

Update 2. August 29, 2020. In testimony first before the Senate and then the House, on August 21 and 24th respectively, Donald Trump’s new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, promised that changes he wishes to effectuate in running the USPS would not be implemented until after the election. Today, however, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Lauren Hernandez reports that 6 mailboxes have been removed from their accustomed places in downtown Oakland. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports even more systematically distributed issues in its metropolitan area.

Update 3. Sept. 5, 2020. Paul Weyrich, key political advisor to Republicans, founder of the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and, with Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, clearly understood the need for voter suppression. He had this to say: “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country, and they are not now. As a matter of fact our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down. ” Not “voters,” but “voting populace.”

Update 4. Sept. 9, 2020. Donald Trump’s taped interviews with Bob Woodward, revealed an hour ago, establish that, by February 4, the President was fully cognizant of the danger the virus posed. Already then he understood the implication of its being airborne. This shift in chronology is crucial. The longer he knew and the clearer his knowledge, the more deliberate his inaction and the more certainly he is guilty of murder by omission.

Update 5. Oct. 3, 2020. Two days ago, Thursday, Oct 1, at about 1:00 AM East Coast time, the White House announced that President Trump had tested positive for Covid-19. But today, Saturday, Oct. 3, Dr. Sean Conley announced at Walter Reed Hospital that the President had first tested positive “72 hours ago.” That would put the date of the positive test on September 30, about 36 hours before Mr. Trump’s condition was publicized. No statement by the White House on this situation is accurate. The Trump people have concealed when he last tested negative, whether he gets tested daily, as they have repeatedly said, or how serious a case he has. Because a person can be contagious before symptoms appear, it is possible that the President was infected at the time of his debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland on September 29th. Then, because he and his entourage refused to wear masks, he and they could have spread the disease to the Biden party, who did wear masks. Most important: on Thursday, Oct. 1, even knowing that he had already tested positive for Covid-19, Trump went to a fund-raiser for wealthy donors at his golf course in Bedminster, NJ and mingled with influential, wealthy people from around the country. This is not negligence; this is reckless endangerment. Whatever the crime (homicide, manslaughter), it is wrong for an infected person to knowingly expose others, especially others who had gathered to offer him their support. Matt Friedmann of Politico quotes Peg Schaffer, a local Democratic leader, who calls Trump’s behavior “unfathomably selfish.” Note that some accounts, such as in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post go with a slightly different chronology. In this schema, it was only Hope Hicks who had already tested positive before Bedminster, and the President would have tested positive only on Thursday evening, possibly after Bedminster, with the announcement coming at about 1:00 AM on Friday morning.

Update 6. October 5, 2020. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman of the NYTimes report today that President Trump’s first got a positive reading on a “rapid” test in the evening of Thursday, Oct. 3, after Bedminster. Later that night, a more sophisticated PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test was done that was also positive. Soon thereafter, the President tweeted out the result. It seems, then, he did not test positive prior to his fund raiser at Bedminster, but he did go there knowing that his close associate Hope Hicks was already showing symptoms and had isolated herself on the plane ride back from Cleveland. Kayleigh McEnany (not known for her honesty) asserted that the President did not learn of Hicks’s positive test until Thursday, just as he was about to board the helicopter to go to New Jersey. As for the President, “the first positive test he received (i.e. the rapid one) was after he returned from Bedminster.” A chronology published today by Christina Morales and Allyson Waller of the NYTimes also states that although Hope Hicks had been obviously ill on Wednesday, her positive test results were known only on Thursday “as Mr. Trump left the White House by helicopter around 1 p. m.” to go to Bedminster. This implies that it would have been too late to call off the trip. However, Hicks had clearly been ailing for much of the previous day while traveling in close connection with the President, who was therefore exposed in close quarters over an extended period to a symptomatic person.

Race: How We Got Here

August 8, 2019 by Alan Bernstein 7 Comments

Our country’s founders foresaw a continuous contest between the federal government and the states. The government was to have only those powers ceded to it by the states, but it would claim more. Trust in, and the amount of, power accorded to the government is what divides conservatives from liberals (and their many derivative systems) in our country now. Conflict over racial difference and human rights has driven that division more than anything else.

Although the problem is much older, the most recent major turn occurred when the Supreme Court declared in Brown vs Board of Education (May 17, 1954) that education could only be equal if blacks and whites were schooled together. In the South, resistance was intense. Many whites retreated into what they called Christian academies to preserve segregation. Mississippi closed all public schools (Sept. 16, 1954). Virginia allotted public money to support segregation academies (January 9, 1956). Southern resistance to court-ordered enforcement of Brown also took the form of murdering civil rights activists, black and white. Gradually, the federal government actively enforced Brown and extended equal rights via the courts, the congress, presidential executive orders, and by dispatching soldiers.

At first, the Republican Party, founded by Abraham Lincoln, was the strongest proponent of civil rights. The staunchest defenders of segregation in the opposing party were Southerners called Dixiecrats. After a court ordered still-recalcitrant Alabama school districts to obey the Brown decision, there followed an eleven-day wave of bombings. On September 15, 1963, a Sunday, members of the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham AL exploded a bomb that killed four girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The nation was outraged. Encouraged by the Democrat Lyndon Johnson, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of July 2, 1964, which banned segregation in public places and discrimination in employment. Even then, only 61% of Democrats in the House supported this action but 80% of Republicans. Again in 1965, still under Johnson, only 73% of Democrats as against 94% of Republicans passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to remove legalistic obstacles to black voter registration.

The Civil Rights act passed with the 1964 presidential primary campaigns in full swing. Eleven days later, the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, who filibustered against the Act, over runner-up Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate. Dwight Eisenhower’s former vice-president, Richard Nixon, backed Goldwater. Five states in the Deep South that had voted for the Democrat Kennedy in 1960 (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina) voted for the Republican Goldwater in 1964, along with his home state of Arizona. Rejecting their segregationist tradition, the Democrats nominated Johnson, who won.[i] During the 60s, the parties, therefore, reversed their positions on civil rights. Among blue-collar workers about 60% voted Democratic in 1960; in 1968 it was 30%. African Americans went the other way. In 1960, one-third voted Republican; by 1972, only one-in-ten did.[ii] Segregationists fled the Democrats; African Americans fled the Republicans. Race was the pivot.

The cohesion of segregationist voters as they switched parties reflected an underlying belief in a standard American identity. Consciously or not, over time, a mythical type pervaded the country: white, male, Christians of northern European stock were held to form the American ideal.[i] “Their” women accepted and promoted this notion. History textbooks and scholarship exaggerated the influence of this group. New England’s sole experience was said to have shaped the new country. After they were physically almost eliminated, Native Americans were not mentioned except as “heathen savages.” Those enslaved and brought here forcibly from West Africa were viewed by Christian writers like Josiah Priest, as children of Ham, doomed in Genesis 9:25 to be forever “the lowest of slaves.” Mexican American ties to an Aztlan culture that linked the American Southwest to Mexico and the Spanish language was ignored. The ordinary European American identity that many assumed and propagated encouraged them to assert their own group’s interests and limit the potential of others.[ii] From their aggrieved viewpoint, Brown versus Board of Education forces them to educate their children together with those they scorn—violating, as they said, freedom of association. When the Nineteenth Amendment expanded the suffrage in 1920, women gained political equality with men — a monopoly lost. From this perspective, affirmative action (the phrase was coined by John Kennedy in Executive Order 10925 of 1961) constitutes government betrayal. Defenders of the ideal identity see it as reverse discrimination. For white opponents of civil rights, these actions amount to saying not that blacks are equal to whites, but that whites are no better than blacks. Worse, in affirmative action, they believe the government saw minorities, specifically blacks, as being preferable.[iii]

Sensing this resentment, Richard Nixon devised his “Southern Strategy:” Lose the blacks, win the white working class. He targeted, and often won, in his words, “Democrats, blue-collar workers, and working-class white ethnics.” Nixon implied that racial minorities sought not equal rights or opportunity, but superiority. “They refuse to start at the bottom of the ladder the way you did,” he lied. “They want to surpass you. . . . They want it [your success] handed to them.”[i] The need to interact with these “others” as equals inspired fear in those who saw them as threats. When stoked by demagogues, that fear becomes hatred. The toll on all concerned has been horrific.

Condemning Nixon’s exploitation of white backlash is not a criticism of whiteness but of a false superiority—white supremacy. Some members of any group will exaggerate a natural pride in what they consider their outstanding qualities. In the U. S., historically, though, the white, male, middle-class, nuclear family was assumed to be the “American norm” used, sometimes unconsciously, to disparage others of different genders, ethnic backgrounds or skin colors and therefore to exclude them from the norm. Discrimination against others for the color of their skin is racism. This advertisement for U. S. war bonds shows how a white farmer and his children are considered typical and assumed to represent all Americans.

John Steuart Curry, Our Good Earth. . .Keep It Ours.
© John Steuart Curry. Chazen Museum of Art, Madison WI. https://embarkkiosk.chazen.wisc.edu/Obj1873?sid=11350&x=477858&port=1599
SAAM-2001.83_1 American Art Museum, Gift of Roger Genser–The Prints and the Pauper, 2001.83

The farmer stands with two children in the middle of a seemingly boundless field of wheat. His grasp of sheaves in either hand indicates ownership and power. The mother is lacking. The children imply a connection between the father’s genes and the land. The appeal for war bonds suggests that battle will keep the land “ours” for families like this one and their descendants. The non-white and other minority ethnic American combatants are omitted, here, from those whose land it is. Those who identify with this standard feel a loss to their identity as the government protects others and causes, they fear, this image to fade.

This ideal, and the anxiety occasioned by deviation from it, pervaded the entire U. S. What the South resisted openly, those outside the old Confederacy opposed covertly but with similar oppressive effect. Using silent shunning rather than actual legislation, whites confined blacks into segregated neighborhoods, ghettoes. The neighborhood schools they extolled were a cover for segregation. For that purpose, busing was no problem. Indeed, in the case for which the landmark Supreme Court decision was named, the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had bused Linda Brown away from her neighborhood school to keep it white. Although the history goes back years, it was Boston’s 1974 confrontation over busing to bring blacks to white schools that focused national attention on this northern pattern. Busing was another way to achieve integration, and northern, white, ethnic neighborhoods resisted it fiercely.

Opposition to federal integration orders —anti-black animus— helped reverse the prestige enjoyed by the government since World War II. Whereas victory in war followed by the presidency of its allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower, and the economic growth that came from having the world’s strongest economy (and its only atomic weapons) had boosted the reputation of our government, things began to change in the 1960s. The war in Vietnam tarnished our military and cost our foreign policy much prestige. At home, three liberal leaders, including a president, were assassinated. Ronald Reagan blamed the government itself when he lamented its tendency towards “over-regulation.” In his inaugural address on January 20, 1981, he declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem: government is the problem.” Reagan thus applied white, working class and segregationist arguments against civil rights to many other areas where corporations and some churches opposed the state’s liberal efforts at regulation or reform.

To undermine the legitimacy of government, some have attributed to Ronald Reagan this remarkable statement. “Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.” It is curious how this statement turns back on itself. The government’s duty to protect the rights of every (even the “least”) individual among us is precisely the rationale for civil rights. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King (had he not also been assassinated), and many other Christians would have caught this biblical allusion to the command that all should care for all.[i] Strange, then, that opponents of government neglect this moral responsibility.

Objection to Big Government became the springboard for many other conservative attacks on liberal programs. The conflict thus expanded from race relations and minority rights to the federal government’s relationship to local jurisdictions, corporations, and religious denominations. Businesses opposed government regulations requiring them to have clean, safe factories, to limit workers’ hours, to label products, to bargain collectively, to avoid polluting the environment. Other conservatives opposed government-enforced women’s rights (e.g. to abortion, paid maternity leave), gender equality, and gun regulation. This opposition can become violent. Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, did it, he said, “to put a check on government abuse of power.”

To conservatives, limitation of government is a primary civic responsibility. It follows the Ninth and Tenth Amendments that restrict government to those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. To liberals, such opposition attacks the statement in the Declaration of Independence that people create governments to secure the inalienable rights bestowed on all and the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” There could hardly be a more American debate than one opposing the premises of the Declaration of Independence to those of the Constitution.

Here is the dilemma that divides us today. Instead of seeing the protection of another person’s rights as a guarantee of our own, some feel a loss. It is a false supremacy, an assumed privilege, that allows some to neglect or even trample others’ rights because they are certain the system will defend their own. Our liberties are best protected when we understand our citizenship, indeed our humanity, as part of a net whose flexibility is its strength. Like every net, our social fabric has many intersecting knots. Each is composed of overlapping aspects of identity: gender, religion, homeland, family, neighborhood, school, and other ties. With enough empathy, we can see the whole differently from each knot. Our ability to grasp reality from all these angles can bind us as a nation.

[i] Matthew 25:40 “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” Cf. verses 41-46.

[i] Lepore, 637-8.

[i] See the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which initiated country-of-origin quotas, favored northern Europe, and excluded Asians altogether. For the characteristics of an American identity, see Que-Lam Huynh, Thierry Devos, and Hannah R. Altman, “Boundaries of American Identity: Relations Between Ethnic Group Prototypicality and Policy Attitudes,” Political Psychology, 36, 4 (2015), 449-468; doi:10.1111/pops.12189.

[ii] Huynh, et al., 449, 466.

[iii] For a more nuanced analysis of this Middle American perspective than this summary permits, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), esp. 221. Hochschild notes in Mississippi the “perceived betrayal by the federal government,” and the sense that their type is disappearing, “There are fewer and fewer white Christians like us” (221).

[i] Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018), 613-14.

[ii] Lepore, 633. These percentages are approximate.