Memo to Trump
The day after Donald Trump became president-elect of the United States, social media was flooded with reports of racist celebrations and assaults.
A woman from Minnesota posted photos on Facebook of her former high school, its walls vandalized with anti-black slurs and Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again.” A man tweeted that when he stopped for gas, he was accosted by a group of hecklers. “Time to get out of this country, Apu!” they yelled. Reza Aslan, the noted scholar and author, offered his own Day 1 report: “I’ve had a female friend have her vagina grabbed in public. Muslim friend had a knife pulled on her. When your Prez does it . . .”
Many black, Hispanic and Muslim Americans, in particular, are profoundly fearful of Trump’s America — and for good reason. The policies the president-elect has proposed have the potential to tear apart their families and make worse the indignities to which they are already subjected.
Trump has promised the mass deportation of Mexicans; vowed to expand the controversial and unconstitutional police practice of “stop and frisk,” which, like carding, disproportionately affects people of colour; and threatened to ban Muslims from entering the United States in an attempt to curb terrorism, an unprecedented religious screen that would also cut off family members from their loved ones.
He has even called for a national registry of Muslims, a notion that queasily evokes the registration of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. When reporters asked him last year how his plan differed from Adolf Hitler’s approach, Trump would only say, “You tell me.”
But just as frightening as his policy proposals is the virulent racism he has unleashed and legitimized among the electorate. During the first speech of his campaign, Trump characterized many Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and said he would build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border to keep them out. A month later, two brothers in Boston brutally beat a homeless Latino man with a lead pipe before urinating on him. When asked why they did it, one said, “Trump is right.”
This week we are hearing too many stories like this. “I don’t fear Trump as much as I fear the monster he’s awakened,” Aysha Choudhary, a Muslim American, told the New York Times.
Trump vowed in his acceptance speech on Wednesday to “bind the wounds of division” and pledged to “be president for all Americans.” Based on his past behaviour and his history of dishonesty, those words are hard to believe and few will find comfort in them. We can only hope that he, like so many of us, has been sobered by the last week’s events, by the great power granted to him and the moral responsibility that comes with it.
Trump should disavow the racism that has marked his campaign and reassure the millions of Americans who fear for their wellbeing. It is, in any case, encouraging to see so many Americans taking to the streets in protest against Trump’s agenda. It will very likely fall to them to stand up against bigotry and protect one another.