MAGA needs Haitians as a bogeyman for its whiter America vision | Opinion

NEW YORK — Well, here we go. Trump won the election and Project 2025’s efforts to make America great again, aka make America white again, is off to the races. So to speak.

Between the election and the inauguration, we saw mass deportation efforts, attacks against white-collar Black and Brown immigrants and now, the threat of revoking birthright citizenship. Yes, the principle guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment that states “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” The same principle that the Supreme Court confirmed in 1898 applies to children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

All this makes one thing crystal clear: Securing the border isn’t about fixing a broken immigration system. It’s about securing white supremacy. 

For immigrant communities like ours, this moment is not only about looking out for those who might get snatched up by ICE. It’s about understanding fundamentally how race in America affects us all. It’s about recognizing that no matter our skin tone or economic class, how many languages we speak or status symbols we own, or whether we came into this country by plane, boat or on foot, racism has us all twisted up in ways we don’t even realize. 

As we stand between MLK Day and Black History Month, it’s also about knowing to our core that no one’s personhood is “safe” until we’re all safe. By that, I mean free from the subjugation that our color-based caste society imposes to maintain the myth of whiteness. Yes, we have new work to do. 

Fallacy of “the right” immigrants

If anyone doubts the premise that this administration is about keeping America majority white after looking at the executive orders, please watch this clip:

@larryjackmac Destiny debates MAGA are bigger threat to America than immigrants #destiny #liberal #leftist #politics #debate #adamfriedland ♬ original sound – Obamabinballin

Yes, he said: ‘When I say America doesn’t need immigration, I don’t mean America doesn’t need people coming from northwest Europe. I mean America probably doesn’t need Haitians.’

Let’s let this sink in for a sec. Two many thoughts came up for me, but I’ll share just my top two.

One: MAGA is about thinking, believing and wanting the United States of America to be and stay a white country even at the risk of America’s ultimate decline.

Take, for example, the Twitter tiff that broke out between Trump’s original MAGA base and Indian American MAGA over immigrant workers here on H-1B visas. The beef escalated into Vivek Ramaswamy saying Americans should stop being mediocre and lazy, and to celebrate jocks over nerds if they don’t want H-1B workers replacing them. White MAGA told him to go back where he came from, among the tamer stuff. Some Indian MAGA cried racism and were surprised at the vitriol. Gasp!

Clearly, these are the immigrant types who think that coming to America by air, with work visas and some other “right way” exempts them from the racist, xenophobic treatment poor immigrants receive. Hopefully, the clash helped them see that their wealth’s purchase of proximity to whiteness is valid only with conditions.

Two: That last part about Haitians was a cheap shot. But gratuitous vilification of “others” is part of the script to maintain whiteness. To hold on to the ridiculous idea that one group of people, those whose skin palette  ranges from pearly pink to sad beige, is naturally dominant over every other group with more pigment, a bogeyman can be helpful. In this scenario, the darker,  the better the contrast. 

Enter Haitians. We’re Black, and we have the temerity to be proud of it. To racists and eugenicists, the very notion of a proud Black Republic is like a jab in the face. To them, we’re the worst as the children of Ham and we commit an even greater sin by having pride in our sinful selves.

That’s why Haitians have been used as guinea pigs to test out restrictive, race-based mandates and policies to curb immigration and justify inhumane treatment. Now the lies are coming from the top, with policies to match, we can expect a barrage of assaults meant to demean, disparage and disrespect us at every turn. 

For immigrants: A primer on racism in America 

Surviving a flood of whiplash-inducing clips and laws meant to hold us down means shoring up our defenses, starting with knowledge. Whether you’ve been here for two decades or got here two years ago, understand that the U.S. of A. runs on a race-based caste system. It demands blind loyalty, and often pits groups against each other to preserve money, power and privilege for those at the top.

Most of this is broken down in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. With extensive research across continents, this Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist meticulously explains caste as the assigning of roles to maintain an economic, political and social order that benefits those at the top. She lays out how caste both creates and is sustained by social signifiers such as education, gender, family ties, country of origin. But race, as defined by rich, western European men trumps them all. 

Wilkerson writes: 

In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste… What people look like, or, rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. (Wilkerson, 2023, p. 18) 

She further explains how this separation by color made it easy to keep African people enslaved for the country to prosper. For example, Europeans who first arrived in America as indentured servants, and worked the fields right next to enslaved Africans, were later allowed to blend into the society. Similarly, when immigrants arrived from Europe in dire straits, they too were allowed to move up the ladder, past the bottom rung where enslaved Africans and their descendants were forced to exist.

Wilkerson shows how Europeans who hated each other over centuries old ethnic differences banded together in the U.S.A. on the fictitious belief that their skin meant they were better than people of African ancestry. Wilkerson documents that at different times in the U.S., the Mayflower Americans called the Irish, Italian, Germans, Hungarian, Czech and other European ethnic groups terrible things. But when it needed their labor, it labeled them by their skin, “white,” instead of their nationalities.

“Oppressed people from around the world, particularly from Europe, passed through Ellis Island, shed their old selves, and often their old names to gain admittance to the powerful dominant majority… It was in becoming American that they became white.” (Wilkerson, 2023, p. 49)

Make history new again

With white people facing a decline in population, Wilkerson also raises the question of whether whiteness may eventually be extended to people in between European and African  – people of Asian / Indian ancestry, Latinos, mixed-race and others who don’t quite fit skin-wise, but still have enough skin in the game economically and politically to pass into whiteness.  

We’ve seen this play out before in Haiti with colorism. A brown-skinned person with money can be considered a mulat, but a beige–skinned  Haitian with meager means might be assigned black. All this is so nutty that if it weren’t so dangerous, the fluidity of race would be laughable. But the invention of race in the 1500s has been a central pillar of caste all these years and led to such human catastrophes as the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. So we have to take its sheer cruelty very seriously. 

Meaning that whether you voted for Kamala or Trump, are an independent, skipped the elections entirely, or agree with Wilkerson’s theories, we must unmask race in America and within Haitian society too. A deeper appreciation of African Americans’ battles, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights era, is a way to start. During Reconstruction, their challenges paved the way for immigrants to even have birthright citizenship as an option. In the 1960s, their anti-discrimination calls led to the Hart-Cellar Act that allowed more people in from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. 

Now, as Haitians are under attack in policy halls, on the streets and online, this is the time to make this shared history a priority. If we don’t, we’ll remain a whipping post for white supremacists, indefinitely.

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MAGA needs Haitians as a bogeyman for its whiter America vision | Opinion was first posted on January 28, 2025 at 12:29 pm.