The Nation - 09.23.2019

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onald trump’s outrageous, xenophobic,

racist, and red-baiting rhetoric has become

an American obsession. His vitriol has target-

ed members of Congress, migrants, refugees,

and Latinx, Muslim, and black people. It has

fanned the flames of racist violence and in-

spired acts of domestic terrorism. We’ve seen

the devastating consequences in El Paso; in Gilroy and

Poway, California; in Tallahassee, Florida; in Pittsburgh;

and, of course, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Liberal pundits

insist that Trump and the violence his rhetoric inspires

are inconsistent with America’s founding creed. It is a

common refrain among liberals—taken up most recently

by former vice president Joe Biden, who said, “This is not

who we are”—that the Muslim travel ban, the inhumane

detention of asylum seekers and separation of their fami-

lies, Trump’s white nationalist sympathies, and so on “do

not reflect American values.” Put another way, Trump and

his ilk are the exception to American exceptionalism.

Yet for communities that have long been subject to

state violence, dispossession, massacre, mass imprison-

ment, and racial profiling, this is who we are. Trumpism

is less an aberration than a more flagrant expression

of long-standing US policy and practice. A democracy

born of a settler-colonial society founded on indigenous

dispossession and racial slavery, America isn’t so excep-

tional. Indeed, as the political theorist Michael Hanchard

reminds us, all modern democracies were founded as

ethno national or racial states.

So who are we, really? The answer rests on our inter-

pretation of history and on how we determine the circle

of “we.” When confronting the violence of contemporary

white supremacists, the “we” is unambiguous, with the his-

tory of white supremacy firmly outside the circle. But in the

liberal land of San Francisco, where a left-wing artist creat-

ed a public work that links America’s white supremacist and

democratic traditions, things are a bit more complicated.

On June 25, the San Francisco School Board voted to

In the wake

of Charlottes-

ville and El

Paso, Joe

Biden said,

“This is not

who we are.”

But for many

Americans,

this is exactly

who we are.