“What do we want Haitians here for?”
Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America – a nation of immigrants – asked that question Thursday during an Oval Office meeting on DACA and immigration.
“Why do we want all these people from Africa here,” he continued? “ Why do we want all these people from s***hole countries?”
“We should have people from places like Norway.”
I was neither shocked nor surprised by such comments. Trump had long-ago abandoned his dog-whistle for the vulgar plain-speech “best words” racist commentary that he reserved for his “base.”
At times like this, when I want to learn what his “base” is thinking (I use that term expansively) I don’t turn to FoxNews or Breitbart – I turn to Facebook. I turn to Facebook to check in on a few New Englanders who aren’t shy about flaunting their ignorance in public. They live in familiar places like Salem, Concord, Boston and the North Shore.
They aren’t “friends” – it’s just that their pages are open to everyone and I occasionally check in on them to see what they’re “thinking.” They don’t think much.
So, this morning, as I opened the page belonging to a North Shore woman to see what she and her friends had to say about Trump’s abhorent “s***hole” comments I wasn’t expecting much outrage or even nuance. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised – her first post read: “It’s about time we have a President who speaks the truth”>
The responses, from your neighbors and mine (there are now dozens) included:
“Seriously? You're offended by people calling a s***hole country a s***hole country? Since when did calling a spade a spade get people offended? These countries are s***holes. Their leaders rape the inhabitants. Take them out back and shoot them. Time for these s***hole countries to have a revolution like ours. Stay over there and make your s***hole country great again.”
”Then go trade places with your favorite s***hole country migrate (sic) of your choice. Its not the bounden (sic) duty of the USA to take the world in. If God wanted everyone of the planet to be in the US – he would have started his world that way.”
“Have you seen the new reports on eradicated diseases reappearing in US?”
”Bring all there (sic) germs to America build the wall there here for welfare free everything free thanks dems"
“Challenge to all the people claiming racist, go one night with your white ass to blue hill ave Dorchester, 80-20 you never come home. That's being a realist, there's good and bad in every nation or nationality some just have more dirt bags, go walk the streets of Haiti you will be robbed and murdered”
”Many of these third world countries runneth rampant with poverty, corruption, and flat out ignorance! Their leaders are often evil despots who will do everything they can to keep them down! I knew a few people that were in the peace corps and they indicated it was a horrible place!"
”I’ve met some people here from Haiti and wow, were they nasty and bitter. Younger folks in their 20’s and 30’s. Real bad attitudes. My one trip there was very depressing with extreme poverty and of course a totally corrupt government”
This was all on one person’s page; these are the public revelations of your, and my, neighbors.
We learned this week what Trump truly believes. We learned that he, an un-empathetic liar and vulgar, ignorant, nativist narcissist, is the same unreconstructed racist that was successfully sued for housing discrimination, who still believes – even after they were exonerated – that the Central Park Five are murderers and who believes President Obama is a foreign-born Muslim.
Today, he feels free to publicly channel his racism – and be cheered on Facebook!
He’s a president who called the torch-carrying racists, white supremacists, fascists and KKK-ers in Charlottesville “very fine people,” who called all Mexicans rapists, who wants to ban Muslims from America, who talks about Nigerians not wanting to return home to “live in huts” and who believes all Haitians are AIDS carriers.
International condemnation of Trump’s words was immediate:
United Nations human rights spokesman Rupert Colville said in Geneva: “There is no other word one can use but racist. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘s***holes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”
President Macky Sall of Senegal, whose country is considered an exemplar of a stable democracy in Africa, said he was “shocked” by Trump’s comments, and added, “Africa and the black race merit the respect and consideration of all.”
African Union spokeswoman Ebba Kalondo said, “This is particularly surprising as the United States of America remains a global example of how migration gave birth to a nation built on strong values of diversity and opportunity.”
Perhaps Ms. Kalondo knows more about America than many Americans do.
Today, we must ask who will stand with principled Americans like Utah’s Mia Love, the first Haitian-American woman and first black Republican woman elected to Congress. Love called Trump’s comments, “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of out nation’s values,” and called for the president to apologize.
We will learn who will proudly stand and demand an apology from Trump on behalf of all whom Trump, as Love articulated, “wantonly maligned.”
We will learn who will remain loyal, remain complicit with his racism. We’ll learn who will weasel, who will equivocate, who – by refusing to call out this obscenity as racism – will remain complicit in normalizing racism and hate speech.
We will learn who are the cowards; who, along with Speaker Paul Ryan and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will remain silent and continue to support this administration’s “exquisite” white-supremacist leadership.
We must learn to discern between those who are complicit with racism through their silence and inaction and those who truly believe that such racism “wantonly malign[s]” every American who believes that “all men are created equal” with “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
I just read, as I finished writing this column: “BREAKING: Reuters reports: John Feeley, the U.S. Ambassador to Panama, resigns on principle, saying he can no longer serve the Trump administration #enoughisenough”
Enough is enough.
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. He can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.