Two weeks ago, US President Donald Trump sacked the first African American Chairman of the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown. Trump’s professed rationale for removing the highest-ranking military officer in the US was to eliminate Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) programmes of which the General was an advocate.
Brown had an outstanding record with 3,000 hours flying F-16s including 300 hours in combat. Last week, the Trump Administration also fired another African-American, the highly decorated Lt Gen Telita Crosland, who had led the U.S. Defence Health Agency.
One of the less commented issues arising out of the Presidency of Donald Trump is that of the rise of racism in the United States. Ostensibly this comes under the cover of eliminating DEI policies which have been in place so as to set right the historical injustices against the African-American people, women and other minorities in the country. The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement may not per se be racist, but it provides a platform for racism, misogyny, bigotry and anti-democratic thought.
Trump is using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate the entire bureaucratic structure of DEI policies throughout the US government. It is no surprise that the presiding genius of DOGE is Elon Musk, whose views on these topics are questionable.
The MAGA movement that came with Trump’s first presidential campaign has been associated with racism and xenophobia and the movement has, in essence, sought to promote white supremacy and male dominance.
These traits have been fuelled by racial resentment with many MAGA supporters believing that their status in American society is being threatened by minorities and immigrants. So the movement supports stricter immigration controls and even a shutdown of Muslims entering the US. This became policy in the first Trump administration when through an executive order Trump banned the entry of refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations.
Racism
Trump himself has a history of racism. His company, Trump Management, was sued by the Department of Justice for discriminating against African American renters in the early 1970s. Trump was a prominent proponent of the debunked conspiracy theory that president Barack Obama was not born in the US. This was seen as an effort to delegitimise the terms of the first African-American president. At various times in the run-up to his 2016 campaign, he attacked Obama, often with unsourced claims. Trump’s re-tweeting of vicious racist tropes too indicate his bent of mind, as did his lies about Haitians eating cats and dogs during last year’s campaign. In an interview to TIME magazine, he said there was a “definite anti-white feeling in this country.”
Early February, Trump signed an Executive Order stopping aid to South Africa because he alleged, they were discriminating against white Afrikaners. In 2018, he had falsely charged that there had been large scale killings of white farmers in the country.
The Trump administrations have been fully involved in the various culture wars relating to the teaching of history and civil rights that bring out the discrimination faced by African Americans in the US. Among his principal advisers is Stephen Miller, a white nationalist whose plans are to tackle alleged racism against whites.
The history of race in the United States goes back to the very arrival of the first migrants to America. Indeed, just a decade separates the arrival of the first white migrants and the African-American ones. Needless to say, the latter came involuntarily. The drafters of the US constitution were embarrassed enough not to use the word “slavery” in their high-minded document and used coded language and words to protect the rights of slave owners. At the time of Independence, 19.3% of the US comprised of African-Americans, of which 700,000 were slaves and 60,000 free men.
But the profitability of cotton cultivation gave a boost to the slave-owners who imported ever larger number of African Americans to toil in their plantations. By the time of the Civil War there were 4 million slaves and 500,000 free men. The Civil War led to the freedom of the slaves, but they received no compensation and they lacked any kind of capital, monetary or educational, to get by.
Migrants and DEI
The flooding of the US by white migrants – first the Irish, then the Italians and other Europeans – has resulted in the fact that today African Americans and those of that heritage comprise some 14.16% of the US population. In the meantime, by the 1880s, southern states had passed the so-called Jim Crow laws to subject them to segregation and also reinforced white supremacy by threat, rules, the gun and the noose. The efforts of Reconstruction (1865-1877) to promote equality for African Americans failed and those of the Redeemers, those who sought to overthrow it, succeeded.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s finally led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through which African Americans got the right to vote in 1965. But all through, given their history, Black Americans have been disadvantaged and their education levels and incomes have been distinctly lower than that of whites. It is to deal with the legacy of this enforced inequality that DEI policies and affirmative action were initiated in the 1970s.
In one sense, the Trump administration’s war against DEI is an old American story. The desire to maintain slavery was, after, all the cause of the American Civil War. Thereafter, following a short whiff of freedom, the African Americans were back in servitude in different kinds of chains.
DEI is only one aspect of the Trump administration’s white nationalist thrust. Trump’s desire to ban birth-right citizenship is aimed at wanting to slow and stop the expanding population of African-American, Latino and Asian people in the US. And of course this is linked to the enormous effort being made to deport undocumented migrants.
Today, the DOGE is taking up where the Redeemers left off and the Trump administration is determined to destroy the institutional and legal set up which had been put in place to create a more just, inclusive and fair United States.
Anti-DEI policies do not target just African-Americans, but women, Latinos and other minorities, including Indians. Of course, it must be noted that Trump’s views of Indians is two-faced. On one hand you have the poorer migrants who are being shackled and dumped back in India, on the other there are people like Kash Patel and Vivek Ramaswamy who are viewed as useful advisers and side-kicks. Perhaps, as was the case with the Japanese in apartheid South Africa, the Indians involved in high-tech companies will be treated as “honourable whites.” But the line is very thin, as was evident when the MAGA base erupted following venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan’s appointment as senior White House policy adviser for AI. He seemed to personify the trope of a brown-skinned foreigner taking American jobs.
It is not surprising that many Hindutva groups in the US support Trump’s policies. These align well with their own anti-migrant and anti-reservation stance back home. It also gels well with their anti-Muslim positions. Trump’s America First MAGA does indeed rhyme politically with Modi’s Make India Great Again (MIGA). But the Indians supporting this should be careful what they wish for.
Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
