13GWHS ALUMNI ASSOCIATION / TAMMY ARAMIAN
D
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 toIn 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.