Manifest Destiny
Slaughtered Native Americans. Stolen and enslaved Africans. DDT-soaked Mexicans. Interred Japanese Americans. Rejected, Nazi-fleeing European Jews. Euthanized “imbeciles” and “defectives”. Compulsorily sterilized inmates, women, poor, disabled, and minorities. All of it encoded into Law, among countless other initiatives, and enacted over centuries. The United States is a nation founded on — and defined by — racism, and its citizens are still deeply entrenched in its practice.
Manifest Destiny was the early settlers’ idea that God himself favored the culturally and racially superior “White” Americans, which demanded that they subdue, convert and/or dispatch “savages” of all other colors and creeds, then take their rightful place as overlords of the world, and the people in it.
Historian David Dorado Romo, a descendent of Mexican origins, told The Atlantic in the latest issue that “we have deep amnesia in this country,” citing his shock at the discovery that his Mexican migrant forebears were forced to wear Zyklon B-soaked clothing and be sprayed in the face with now-banned DDT, while legally crossing the border, in ritualistic cleansing. Says that article’s author, Caitlin Dickerson, “Racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them.”
Adds Romo, “It’s in our DNA… ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”
America’s racist problem goes well beyond its most recent inflammatory incarnation: that of Donald Trump. Trump’s blunt characterizations of the entire African continent as “sh*thole countries”, and of Mexicans as rapists—among other well-documented prejudices—are now presumably shared or at the very least tolerated…
