Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Trump Hopes To Win By Disenfranchising Black and Brown Americans

Phil Garber

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Throughout U.S. history, racists have relentlessly sought to keep African Americans and other people of color from gaining political power.

First it was the massive crime of enslavement. Then came the Civil War and a brief period of reconstruction which ended and ushered in a period known as Jim Crow; Blacks were kept powerless through a combination of poll taxes, literacy tests and terrorism in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalists. The period included an amalgam of laws that criminalized petty behavior leading to imprisonment of millions of formerly enslaved people who were then leased out to plantation owners as Jim Crow slaves. The system of mass incarceration, high bail systems and other tactics targeting Blacks has continued to the current day, when Black people, who are 13 percent of the U.S. population are 38 percent of the people in jails and prisons.

The latest front in enslaving Blacks and other people of color is a scurrilous campaign being led by trump who is taking a page from the most noxious period in U.S. history to attack his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

In his blatantly racist and xenophobic actions and words, trump is leading an effort to create nothing less than a new period of Jim Crow and to crush what white supremacists believe is an organized effort by Democrats to franchise immigrants to vote and overpower and outnumber white Americans, a conspiracy known as the “great replacement.”

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

Those were trump’s words in a Veterans Day address on Nov. 11, 2023, after using the same “vermin” term in a social-media post earlier that same day.

D.C. Stephenson had similar sentiments when he said, “There is no assimilation to American standards and ideals, in the case of the great majority of newer immigrants. Masses of human beings of inferior races, ignorant of all the ideals which Americans hold dear, are poured into our factories as so much raw material _ and they are not ‘digested.’”

Trump, a convicted felon, was campaigning for the presidency.

Stephenson, a convicted rapist and murderer, was the new Grand Dragon of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan when he spoke against immigration laws to Indiana coal miners and was quoted on Sept. 21, 1923, in the Ku Klux Klan publication, “Fiery Cross.”

The similarities between trump and the racist, anti-immigrant rants of the Klan are strikingly and terrifyingly similar.

Trump has had a consistent campaign message about the threats posed by immigrants, Blacks and other people of color. He has been a racist his whole adult life; the Justice Department sued him for racial discrimination in the 1970s; in the 1980s, he took out newspaper ads calling for the death penalty in the case of the Central Park Five, Black and Latino men who were accused in a New York City rape case and later exonerated.

Before his race for president in 2016, trump gained notoriety for propagating the false “birther” conspiracy claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and couldn’t legally be president.

Before his Aug. 8 press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump reposted a meme of a fake magazine cover depicting his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with darkened skin and with the body of a screaming dung beetle sitting atop a coconut. On the coconut are the words “Are you buying our BULLSHIT?” Surrounding the coconut are President Joe Biden, former president Barack Obama and other leading Democrats all with broad smiles as they dance with their hands raised in support.

Dung beetles feast on animal feces and the kind depicted in trump’s meme are known as rollers because they roll around animal excrement as a traveling food source. The meme was reposted from #@1776wethepeople1776. Trump has frequently promoted the same account that has shared material calling for Harris, her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and others to be killed.

Trump’s reposted meme is a MAGA version of an actual New York Magazine cover showing Harris sitting on top of a coconut with the words, “Welcome to Kamalot.” Charlie XCX and Beyoncé are shown celebrating around the coconut along with Chuck Schumer, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Barack Obama, George Clooney, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries.

Trump’s latest racist attack against Harris is part of an ongoing assault which includes purposefully misspelling her name as “Kamabla” and insisting that she decided to be Black and turned Black one day.

Stephenson offered similar sentiments in his bigoted speech before the Indiana coal miners, bellowing, “The new immigrant comes here as a foreigner and he remains a foreigner — a citizen of lower class, who just as the negro, is a constant menace to the standards of civilization which Americans hold dear.”

And there was the cartoon in the 1923 Fiery Cross, with an angry Uncle Sam, announcing that the U.S. “is not a dumping ground’ while various men carrying signs accusing immigrants of being “rubbish,” “undesirables,” “castoffs” and “trash.”

Another racist image was shared recently on the Trump War Room account on X. The account is operated by trump’s reelection campaign. The post has the words “Import the third world. Become the third world.” Under the words are two photos, one of a serene, suburban home and an American flag and the words, “YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD UNDER TRUMP.” Alongside is an image of a neighborhood overrun by hordes of mostly Black men above the words, “YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD UNDER KAMALA.”

The trump meme has the same message as another cartoon that was posted in the Klan publication. It showed a tired Uncle Sam trying to keep shut a door marked “New Immigration Bill” as a mob of immigrants tries to enter, with the caption ‘WHOSE U.S. IS THIS, ANYWAY?”

Trump and MAGA have even adopted the same motto, “America First,” that was made popular by the Klan. The Klan was campaigning for passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act or the Immigration Act of 1924. The History, Art and Archives publication of Congress described the act as “a measure which was a legislative expression of the xenophobia, particularly towards eastern and southern European immigrants, that swept America in the decade of the 1920s.”

The legislation drastically limited immigration to the United States through a quota system that targeted specific groups for exclusion. The annual quotas were extremely narrow for many nations while they were much larger for other groups, like German immigrants.

Trump has claimed without any proof that the U.S. is being overrun by millions of criminals who have been released from prisons and psychiatric hospitals from countries in Latin America. Trump’s solution, if he is reelected, is to create concentration camps to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a move that would upend millions of lives and destroy untold lives of families of people of color.

The Trump mantra to “Make America Great Again” has been crafted to appeal to “regular” Americans not unlike the “America First” message of the Klan. The Klan rallies was described in terms that could describe today’s MAGA rallies.

A June 20, 2019, blog in Hoosier State Chronicles noted that the Klan “was not a band of rogue vigilantes, but a nationwide organization composed of average white, Protestant Americans. It included farmers, bankers, railroad workers, suffragists, ministers, mayors, and governors. They dressed their anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, antisemitic message in patriotism and Christian righteousness. Wearing their white robes and masks, they held picnics and parades, attended church and funerals. For many white Protestant Americans, the Ku Klux Klan was a respectable pastime for the whole family.”

Branding Blacks as inferior and people of color as an invading hoard is one piece of three-part scheme to bolster white power.

A second piece is the ongoing battle against abortion which is linked with the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy. The white nationalist, far right conspiracy has roots in pre-World War II Europe. It theorizes that racial, ethnic and religious minorities are displacing the traditional white American population and taking control of the nation.

Harvard professor and author Erika Lee said the roots of the great replacement conspiracy date back to 1894 with the Yankee upper-class founders of the Immigration Restriction League who were, “convinced that Anglo-Saxon traditions, peoples, and culture were being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners from Southern and Eastern Europe.”

The theory claims a conspiracy by globalist elites, often Jews, to overwhelm western countries with immigrants in order to outbreed and replace the white-majority population and take control of the countries. Banning abortion is part of the theory as extremists argue that abortion is hastening a “white genocide.”

Replacement conspiracy believers cite statistics to support their views. For example, in 1980, white people accounted for about 80 percent of the U.S. population. By 2024, whites were about 58 percent of the population. The Census Bureau reported there are still 195 million white people in America but experts believe that they will become a minority sometime between 2040 and 2050.

The replacement conspiracy theory has been used by white supremacists to justify terror attacks and violence. At the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, tiki torch-wielding white supremacists chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”

The great replacement conspiracy was cited by a white gunman who entered the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 2018, and killed 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States. Another white man who cited the conspiracy was angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.

And in yet another deadly mass shooting, a heavily armed white man cited the conspiracy before entering a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022 and killing 10 people in the city’s predominantly Black east side. He posted an online screed that the shoppers came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”

The great replacement conspiracy also was cited by a man who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

In the U.S., some of the harshest anti-abortion politicians have promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

Nebraska Republican state senator, Steve Erdman, claimed that too many abortions by white women had caused white population to fall in Nebraska.

“Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here. Why is that? It’s because we’ve killed 200,000 people. These are people we’ve killed,” Erdman said during debate over a bill to ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

Former Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, argued in 2017 that “culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the far right, American Conservative Union, with strong ties to trump, also drew parallels between abortion and jobs.

“If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

Schlapp has been accused of sexual assault against at least three men. One of the men settled a lawsuit against Schlapp for $480,000 and action by the other two is pending.

The great replacement conspiracy also is sometimes linked with the natalism movement that promotes increased births. The right-wing proponents of natalism argue that falling birthrates could lead to economic stagnation, diminished innovation, and an unsustainable burden on social systems due to an aging population. The movement suggests that without a significant increase in birth rates, the sustainability of civilizations could be in danger. Elon Musk has called it a “much bigger risk” than global warming.

The political right wing began to emphasize natalism in the early 2020s as did wealthy tech and venture-capitalist circles. In Europe, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has made natalism a key plank of his political platform. In the U.S., key figures include Kevin Dolan, organizer of the “Natal Conference,” Simone and Malcolm Collins, founders of Pronatalist.org and Musk, who has repeatedly used his public platform to discuss global birth rates.

The third piece of the effort to cull non-whites from the political structure is the criminalization of immigrants and trump’s plans to create concentration camps in advance of deporting millions of immigrants. Trump has consistently demonized migrants and has frequently and falsely claimed that immigrants cause serious crimes and are being sent to the U.S. by the millions from prisons and psychiatric hospitals in Latin America.

Trump has said he would use the National Guard, and possibly the military, to deport between 15 million and 20 million people. He has not explained how the government estimated in 2022 there were just 11 million migrants living in the U.S. without permanent legal permission.

The American Immigration Council has reported that trump’s plan for the largest mass deportation in U.S. history would leave nearly 4½ million children in the United States partially or wholly orphaned. The sudden disappearance of a parent or a main provider would be devastating as more than 900,000 households with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen would fall below the poverty line if the undocumented breadwinners were deported, the council reported.

Trump first vilified migrants during his 2016 campaign for the presidency when he declared “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” As a candidate, Trump also called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” and as president, referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

Signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now!” were seen at the Republican National Convention and are commonly viewed at trump campaign rallies.

Incarceration of Black Americans is another tool that has had the de facto effect of disenfranchising millions of Black Americans and other people of color. The Sentencing Project reported that Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly five times the rate of White Americans. The vast majority are in prison for non-violent, drug offenses.

The report found that one in 81 Black adults per 100,000 people in the United States is serving time in a state prison. Latinx individuals are incarcerated in state prisons at a rate that is 1.3 times the incarceration rate of Whites, according to the report.

Causes for the high numbers of Black prisoners include the legacy of racial subordination, biased polices and structural disadvantages, such as high cash bail requirements. The report found that pretrial detention is the driver of jail population growth over the last 20 years, and roughly half of all people under correctional control are on probation.

The ramifications of mass incarceration are profound. Suicide is the single leading cause of death for people in jail, as someone in jail is more than three times as likely to die from suicide as someone in the general U.S. population, the report said.

Families are torn apart as breadwinners are suddenly gone. Formerly imprisoned people cannot vote and often find it difficult to find jobs.

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