Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric shows the danger of misplaced empathy
On 10 October, at a rally for his faithful in Wisconsin, the president of the United States spewed lies and spread hate. He claimed, for example, that the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a Somali refugee elected in the blue wave of 2018, supported terrorism and, repeating an obscene rightwing smear, that she had married her brother. He attacked refugees like her: “As you know, for many years, leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and taxpayers. Since coming into office, I have reduced refugee resettlement by 85%.” He added: “In the Trump administration we will always protect American families first.”
But American families don’t need to be protected from refugees. Even to frame it that way is a dehumanization of the most vulnerable and an attempt to induce fear when there is no basis for it. Omar is an American citizen and a congresswoman elected by her fellow Minnesotans, but Trump and his ilk talk about immigrants as though even those who are citizens, even those who vote, are not Americans.
“IMMIGRANTS WILL OUTVOTE AMERICANS,” hate-spreader Ann Coulter recently declared – but immigrants who vote are American citizens. Much of what Trump said was gibberish and garbage, but that line about Somali refugees matters. We have over and over in the United States talked about refugees from the perspective not of the refugees fleeing for their lives – people who have lost everything, and who have rights under our laws – but of the people who are already safe and secure.
So many of our problems are storytelling problems. So often those who do have voices use them to limit who else is heard and to shout down others who speak. Our job is always to listen harder, to listen to who is excluded, to imagine what happens if you shift the center of the story.
I grew up on cowboy movies in which Native Americans defending themselves in their homelands were portrayed as invaders galloping into the frame of the camera. The camera stayed with the actual invaders, the white people in covered wagons, and by making them the fixed center of the movies made them the victims instead of the perpetrators; the stable presence, not the disruptors.
The same night Trump attacked refugees, again, Democratic presidential candidates gathered at a forum on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer rights – which was itself a victory; I don’t think anything quite like that has happened before in American politics. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren was asked what she would say to someone who told her: “My faith teaches me that marriage is between one man and one woman.” It was a weird question. The supreme court has ruled that marriage equality is the constitutional law of the land; we are not going to revisit that decision any more than we are going to revisit the decision that people of different races can marry. No one would ask a politician what they would say to someone opposed to interracial marriage.
Warren responded: “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that. And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman. I’m cool with that.’” She paused for a moment and then added: “If you can find one.” The audience applauded and cheered, a lot, and social media had a ball. But immediately afterward, she talked about the Christianity of her childhood and how at the root of it was “the preciousness of each and every life”. She added: “The hatefulness, frankly, always really shocked me, especially for people of faith, because I think the whole foundation is the worth of every single human being.”
That was a Thursday night. By Saturday conservatives – including Marco Rubio on Twitter – were attacking her as elitist. Their premise was that samesex marriage offends conservatives and her joke insulted “men”, not one madeup man, a framework overlooking that most Democratic men are pro-marriage equality and not a few American men are already married to men. Conservative pundit John Ziegler groused that she was “imbecilic” in “insulting Christian males” and thereby “conceding Pennsylvania and Florida to Trump”. The Washington Post ran a piece by a journalist with a record of concerntrolling Warren. The story dug up a strategist for Bill Clinton who called her joke a “stab” and “a battle cry for men to turn out against Elizabeth Warren”, cited Ziegler complaining “the white male is under attack” and fretted that her stance was “condescending toward white working-class Americans”. Just as refugees are described in terms of how they affect people who are safe in prosperous countries, not in terms of the refugees’ needs, too many people transformed a question about the rights of gay and lesbian people into a focus on the needs of straight men, or even conservative straight white men. Whose story was it?
Their premise in attacking Warren as elitist was that a basic human right – the right to marry who you love – is less important than not offending the minority who don’t believe in this human right. Some people matter more than others, and the people who matter most are the true authentic America to which we must bow down. You could boil the whole argument down to “equality is elitist”. I heard more about Warren’s possible insult of one imaginary man than I did about the president’s attack on the thousands of Somali Americans in Minnesota. It’s a position that comes from people so deeply embedded in unequal ideas of who matters that they cannot see who they are and how they think.
The same is true of the charge that Warren’s tax on the super-rich is, in Beto O’Rourke’s unfortunate phrase, “punitive”. What’s punitive is a system that allows people to live in anxiety and misery and die of treatable conditions in the wealthiest country in the world. Why should the debate about healthcare be focused on the 75,000 richest households in the US, those with more than $50m, rather than the desperate straits of the tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured and those broken economically by medical debt?
When the feminist hurricane called #MeToo swept the US and then to some extent the world, something complex and mysterious changed so that stories that had been disbelieved, rejected, silenced, trivialized, could be heard for the first time in ways that mattered. Some of the stories were, at first, about the most powerful men in media and entertainment; then their women victims; then, eventually, California farmworker women and janitors and restaurant workers.
Yet too often the journalism and conversations focused on how all this affected men. We had so many stories about how men didn’t feel as comfortable and confident at work, but I don’t recall a single story about how women felt more comfortable and confident that their bosses and co-workers wouldn’t harass or assault them. You see this kind of framework over and over: for example, the problem of homelessness gets framed as how it annoys those with houses rather than traumatizes those without.
Whenever a story of social conflict breaks, the first question to ask is: whose story is it? Who’s been put at the center? Who does the narrator tell us matters? Whose rights and needs do they dismiss? And what happens if you move the center?
Rebecca Solnit’s most recent book is called Whose Story Is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters. A version of this essay was part of her talk at the International Festival of Literature in Oaxaca