Section:GDN 1J PaGe:3 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 18:43 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
Wednesday 31 July 2019 The Guardian •3
I
’ve never accused anyone of being prone to
infestations. But if I were inclined to sink that
low, I suspect my attention would be directed
towards the 45th president of the United States.
It’s not all Donald Trump’s fault. Who can
blame anyone for spending most of their life in
New York – a city I love, despite the fact that it
harbours one rodent for every four people?
Trump hardly had a choice about moving to the White
House in 2017, home for two centuries , reportedly , to an
unwanted population of rats, ants and even raccoons.
Yet it’s hard to avoid holding him responsible for the
wider range of public health hazards reported at his Mar-
a-Lago resort – 78 in the three years to 2017 , including
soiled kitchen utensils and potentially parasite-aff ected
smoked salmon. Hard, too, to ignore the fact that his
son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been described as a “slum
landlord” for the multiple health and safety violations
reported in his family fi rm’s 9,000 Baltimore properties,
including mice, maggots and mould.
It’s pretty disgusting – enough to make you lose your
appetite but not to break your heart. That feat is reserved
for Trump’s knack – one he has demonstrated many,
many times – of dehumanising human beings, projecting
the idea of “infestation” on to their very existence.
Because let’s be clear : when Trump talks about a place
being “infested”, he means it’s inhabited by people who
are not white , whether Ebola-stricken west Africa in
2014 ; Atlanta in 2017 , home to more African-American
graduates than any other city ; “ sanctuary cities ” in
2018, with their off er of safe harbour for undocumented
migrants ; or the “squad” – four progressive
congresswomen, all Americans, all women of colour- whom Trump said should go “back” to the “crime -
infested places” to which, in his imagination, they belong.
Now he describes Baltimore, a city with proportionally
one of the highest African -American populations
in the US, as a “ disgusting, rat and rodent infested
mess ” , holding the respected black congressman who
represents the district, Elijah Cummings, responsible.
As usual, the people most aff ected by Trump’s
escalation of racist rhetoric – black and brown Americans - have been doing the work of explaining why Trump’s
words carry racial undertones. A CNN anchor who grew
up in Baltimore broke down on air. “A lot of people get up
Donald Trump
and family at
Mar-a-Lago
in 2013
PHOTOGRAPH: ALAMYand go to work there, they care for their families there,
they love their children, who pledge allegiance to the
fl ag, just like people who live in districts of congressmen
who support you, sir,” Victor Blackwell said. “They are
Americans, too.”
It’s as maddening as it is moving to watch Blackwell
feel compelled to explain – after Trump described
Baltimore as a place “no human being would want to
live” – that his friends and family are indeed human. As
black people we keep having to defend our humanity
because, accompanying the racism that is revealing
itself to be a central plank of Trump’s re-election
strategy, the president insists he is “not racist”.
Being racist whil e saying you are “not racist” is
a modern phenomenon of the modern age. It’s the
same story on both sides of the Atlantic. Even Boris
Johnson’s choice of racist slurs mirrors the Trumpian
playbook: when he described Africans as “Aids-ridden”,
or published comments about people of Caribbean
heritage “ multiplying like fl ies ”, connotations of
infestation were equally clear.
One of Johnson’s fi rst acts as prime minister was to
bring back Zac Goldsmith, whose mayoral campaign
even senior Tories denounced, loaded as it was with
Islamophobic rhetoric that attempted to link Sadiq
Khan to Islamic extremism and crudely stereotyping
British Indians. Not only that, but Johnson turned to a
key architect of Goldsmith’s campaign , Mark Fullbrook ,
in his successful bid for the Tory leadership.T
hat both Trump and Johnson claim
to be “not racist” is irrelevant. No
one ever admits to being racist any
more – Trump, for instance, has gone
to the trouble of interspersing his
racist Twitter timeline with support
for the rapper A$AP Rocky , currently
detained in Sweden on an assault
charge, and last-minute meetings with inner-city black
pastors. Johnson has made plenty of ethnic minority
appointments to his new cabinet.
But it’s immaterial, because being “not racist” is a
meaningless claim. Neither Trump nor Johnson seems to
understand that being “not racist” is not, and has never
been, the opposite of being racist. “Not racist” is an
attempt at neutrality, usually deployed because events
have just shown that no such thing exists. As the author
Ibram X Kendi points out in his forthcoming book , the
opposite of “racist” is “anti-racist”, which involves
taking an active stance identifying and dismantling the
legacy of racism that still characterises our societies.
If an anti-racist wanted to unpick this legacy, I can
think of few better places to look than Baltimore.
The Maryland city has chronic problems that are
symptomatic of the American story. From the Great
Migration of African Americans fl eeing the pro-slavery
South in the 19th century, to the 20th-century industries
that kept them on low wages , to “redlining” – overtly
discriminatory housing practices that pushed black
residents into poor, marginalised districts – Baltimore
is as good a place as any to study the racism that any
American leader should urgently address.
It’s hardly news that Trump isn’t interested in
addressing poverty and racism, or that he will try
to distract those who do. But to racially abuse and
dehumanise the citizens who will always bear the brunt
of these ongoing failures of leadership – that is a truly
squalid thing to do.When Trump
says ‘infested’,
it’s clear who he
is talking about
Opinion
The president
has a knack
of dehumanising
human beings.
Baltimore has a
high proportion of
African Americans
Afua
Hirsch
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