Stereotyping of Africa in US helps shape Trump’s views
US President Donald Trump’s recent reported query about why his country was accepting so many immigrants from Haiti and “sh*thole” countries in Africa has been widely condemned. In a reversion to Hitlerite notions of Aryan racial purity, Trump also wondered why the US did not bring in more presumably blonde and blue-eyed immigrants from Norway.
He had earlier reportedly depicted Haitians as AIDSinfected and Nigerians as living in huts. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump called for Muslim immigrants to be banned from the US, promised to deport 11-million undocumented migrants and termed Mexican immigrants “criminals” and “rapists”.
Trump was expressing views that are widely held within the US political establishment and among the wider general population.
It was the fact that these were so publicly expressed in such vulgar terms that made them so striking. Antiblack and antiforeigner prejudices and policies have been displayed and supported by US presidents and officials for decades.
Dwight Eisenhower noted in 1954 that segregationist white Southerners were “not bad people.
“All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes”.
Lyndon Johnson — who shepherded major civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965 — regularly referred as a US senator to civil rights legislation as “nigger bills”. Richard Nixon described black people as “Negro bastards” who “live like a bunch of dogs”.
The apartheid-supporting Ronald Reagan vetoed sanctions against the racist South African government in 1986 that required a two-thirds congressional majority to overturn. He also stereotyped black women on social benefits, resulting in media depictions of “welfare queens”.
More recently, Bill Clinton — often erroneously depicted as a good friend of Africa — delayed acknowledging the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 to avoid a legal obligation to intervene. He then forced the withdrawal of most of a 2,500-strong UN peacekeeping mission from Rwanda in one of the worst cases of racism in global relations. He later admitted that doubling the UN force would have halted the genocide.
Domestically, his signing of crime legislation in 1994 that led to the incarceration of millions of nonviolent black and Latino youths and his support for welfare reform two years later resulted in the immiseration of the most vulnerable people in the US.
Hillary Clinton’s support for these policies did much to damage her support among African-American voters during the 2016 presidential elections.
In 2001, George W Bush, demonstrated his ignorance of Africa by speaking about the continent in stereotypical terms, as if it were a country rather than a continent.
Bush’s vice-president, Dick Cheney, voted against Nelson Mandela’s release from prison as a congressman in 1986, branding the ANC a “terrorist organisation”. In 1995, Bush’s Jamaican-American secretary of state, Colin Powell, described Nigerians as “scammers who just tend not to be honest”.
Six years later, the head of the US Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, argued that AIDS drugs would be ineffective in Africa because “people do not know what watches and clocks are, they do not use western means for telling time. They use the sun”.
Even the first black US president, Barack Obama, was not free of peddling stereotypes about Africa. In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama talked about the continent in broad-brushed, Afropessimistic strokes: “There are times when considering the plight of Africa — the millions racked by AIDS, the constant droughts and famines, the dictatorships, the pervasive corruption, the brutality of 12-year-old guerrillas who know nothing but war wielding machetes or AK-47s — I find myself plunged into cynicism and despair.”
Most of the references in Obama’s 2009 Nobel peace prize speech were to Somalia as a “failed state” of terrorism, piracy and famine; genocide in Darfur and rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
BILL CLINTON LATER ADMITTED THAT DOUBLING THE UN PEACEKEEPING FORCE WOULD HAVE HALTED THE GENOCIDE IN RWANDA TRUMP ALSO WONDERED WHY THE US DID NOT BRING IN MORE PRESUMABLY BLONDE AND BLUE-EYED IMMIGRANTS FROM NORWAY