The Pattern of ‘Othering’ in the U.S.
We have an ugly history when it comes to abducting people and holding them against their will. Sadly, history is repeating itself.
As early as the 1600s, Africans were captured like animals, brought here to be enslaved, sold like cattle and abused. Attempts to correct human rights injustice suffered by African Americans has played out for hundreds of years. It took a Civil War, an ugly era of Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws in the South to grant Black people freedom. Bravery on the part of John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, resulted in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s prophecy came to pass. He said that, in signing the Civil Rights Act into law, he knew he was delivering the South to the Republican party for a generation.
Over the years, the Constitution has provided context for equality. Other laws have been instituted to impose fairness when it comes to being hired for a job or accepted at U.S. universities. But equal never has really meant “equal.” Why else would the U.S. have embraced Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) on a broad scale in our century? We keep trying to set things right, to no avail. Thanks to the Trump administration, worthwhile DEI programs and practices have been set back.
It's obvious that racism is still pervasive in U.S. culture. We repeatedly take steps forward and then back. White nationalists march proudly in our streets to remind us that not everyone believes in equality. African Americans are no longer physically enslaved, but I argue that a different type of enslavement still exists in the minds of those who refuse to be enlightened.
Civilized Native American tribes, mostly Cherokee, were another group of Americans who endured being rounded up in mass numbers, forced from their homes and held in captivity. About 4,000 lives were lost along the Trail of Tears when then President Andrew Jackson, one of Donald Trump’s heroes, defied the Constitution and the Supreme Court and sent troops to gather members of native tribes in the Southeast in 1838. He ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia, which recognized the sovereignty of the Cherokee Nation and their right to their ancestral lands.
Prior to their long trek to Oklahoma, Cherokees were held in stockades while U.S. soldiers burned and looted their cabins and farms. Some Cherokees escaped, hid in the woods or passed as white people to avoid captivity and cruelty. Those who hid and stayed in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee eventually became the Eastern Band of Cherokees. (My own maternal great-great grandparents passed for white in order to survive and own land in the South. They were recorded on federal Indian Census rolls as Cherokee or “Indian” in 1900 and 1910. Then, mysteriously, they were listed as “white” on future Census documents when they moved from North Carolina to Georgia and purchased farmland.)
Fear of having land taken away must have stayed with Native Americans for generations after Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. The horrors that took place on the Trail of Tears show how insignificant the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes were to the federal government.
Sweet Water’s words below resemble modern-day accounts of abduction:
“The soldiers came and took us from home. They first surrounded our house and they took the mare while we were at work in the fields and they drove us out of doors and did not permit us to take anything with us, not even a second change of clothes…They marched us to Ross’ Landing, and still on foot, even our little children, and they sent us off.”
- Oo-loo-cha, widow of Sweet Water, 1842
In 1942, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor during Word War II, some 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese descent, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens, were rounded up without due process and held in 10 U.S. detention camps. It’s worth noting that this was the result of an Executive Order signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of contorting the intent of our laws in order to rationalize perverse actions. In this case, the Constitution was used to justify removals of Japanese American people.
In Korematsu v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of Japanese American removals under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court decision questioned the validity of the exclusion orders but the same court acknowledged that a “loyal citizen” could not be detained. It began the process of releasing incarcerated Japanese Americans. By the end of 1945, nine out of 10 detention camps were shut down. Detainees had been held in camps where conditions were dire and many children were separated from their parents.
Does this sound familiar? We’ve always “othered” one other, looking at entire groups of people as different and separate from ourselves. Othering is not like observing diversity in a healthy way — accepting that the U.S. has always been a mosaic of people of all stripes and colors. Instead, othering leads to discrimination, sometimes violence, and sometimes rounding people up as if they were cattle or sheep.
Now we have ICE raiding businesses, neighborhoods, schools and other public places looking for undocumented members of the Latino community. People are vanishing the same way they vanished in Nazi Germany, the Southeastern United States and Western U.S. where Japanese Americans were collected. Once again, people are being profiled and detained without due process. Many of them are U.S. citizens. Once again, we have a bully president who is willing to defy the Supreme Court and the Constitution.
Latino community members are hiding now, perhaps in basements or attics, not unlike Anne Frank and her family and others in Amsterdam during World War II. Before they met their demise in Nazi concentration camps, the Frank family, the van Pel family and Fritz Pfeffer survived for two years in hiding with the help of non-Jewish friends. Perhaps like those who helped them, we should think about how we can help our Latino friends.
I have little faith in our conservative-packed Supreme Court. If America’s highest court won’t stand up for what’s right and push back at Trump, who will? We can only hope federal courts will continue to rule against the Trump administration more often than not.
The ultimate answer is us. Lock arms, figuratively or literally, as Civil Rights activists such as the late John Lewis did. Lock arms in solidarity. Stand up for people who don’t look like us instead of “othering” them. It’s not too late to change our culture and the course of history in this country.
We have a long way to go. Please stay in the fight. It’s not only a fight for democracy but for decency as well.
well said
Great perspective. Thank you.