Trump’s tweets personal for this family
About two and a half years ago a middle-aged woman rolled down her car window and screamed at my daughter, “Go back to your own country!” It happened during the holidays, shortly before Donald Trump was inaugurated.
My daughter, then in high school, was walking across the parking lot at the Fairfield Commons Mall in Beavercreek with a few of her friends when this screeching troll verbally assaulted her. She came home shaken and upset. The episode left me feeling enraged and powerless as a father that I could not protect my daughter. My son, her younger brother, wanted to find that woman and stomp her. And in that moment, if he really had been able to locate her I’m not sure I would have stopped him.
Let me be clear. My daughter is every bit as American as any of you. She carries an American passport when she travels, and in 2018, after she turned 18, she was proud to vote in her first election.
She also was born in Anhui Province, China. My wife and I were lucky enough to adopt her when she was 11 months old. Under federal — that’s right, American — law, all children adopted internationally are automatically considered American citizens just as if they had been born here. So let me say it again: my daughter is every bit as American as any of you.
But she isn’t white. And so in the eyes of that ignoramus in the parking lot, she isn’t really an American and therefore doesn’t belong here. After last weekend’s tweets, it is clear Donald Trump agrees with her.
Trump’s tweets weren’t merely stupid. After all, the four Congresswomen he attacked are American citizens and three were born in the United States. More than that, those tweets were genuinely demagogic. Demagogues like Trump see every political disagreement as a personal threat and they respond by creating scapegoats such as women and ethnic minorities.
By attacking the idea of citizenship in this way, however, Trump is participating in a long-running struggle over the definition of what it means to be American. Most of us, at least I hope, believe in a notion of “civic nationalism.” In this view, America is a set of ideas and ideals to which anyone, from anywhere, can swear allegiance.
The uglier version of American identity is what we can call “racial nationalism.” In this view, America only truly belongs to white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The rest of us are interlopers. That racialized view of Americanness drove the anti-Catholic violence and discrimination of the 19th century. It was on display when thousands of hooded Klansman marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, and through cities across the nation, in the 1920s. It crawled out from beneath its rock two summers ago when neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “blood and soil.”
The idea of civic nationalism has allowed this country to achieve greatness. It is an expansive, tolerant notion of citizenship and it distinguishes America. The critic Randolph Bourne saw this potential 100 years ago when he wrote his famous essay, “Transnational America.” A century later former Secretary of State Condelezza Rice saw the same thing when she said: “The essence of America — that which really unites us — is not ethnicity, or nationality or religion — it is an idea.”
Racial nationalism, of course, has been at the root of many shameful aspects of our history — like the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the repeated denial of voting rights to African-Americans. Trump has made it clear now, if there were any doubt, which side of history he is on. His vile tweets make it easier for more women sitting in mall parking lots to scream hateful things at children.
Steven Conn teaches history at Miami University and is a regular contributor.