One World House – Mark Davies

There seems to be at least three forms of racism that are fueling Trump’s current hold on power:

First, you have the hardcore racist white supremacists. Not every Trump supporter is a hardcore racist white supremacist, but every hardcore racist white supremacist is a Trump supporter (these are the David Dukes, Richard Spencers, Steve Kings, and Stephen Millers of the world and their followers).

Second, you have those who primarily express their racism through a willingness to use race, racial divisions, xenophobia, and racism in general to gain power. These persons may not understand themselves to be white supremacists, but they are more than willing to use racism as a political tool to gain, maintain, and expand political power (Trump himself and McConnell are at the very least representatives of this form of racism).

Third, you have those who may reject white supremacy and who may not like Trump’s overt use of racism and xenophobia to gain and maintain power, but they have decided that Trump’s policies on taxes, regulations, abortion, and perhaps some other social issues are enough to make up for his use of racial division and unwillingness to consistently denounce white supremacy and his use of racist and xenophobic rhetoric.

Those in the third category likely do not view themselves as racist, but their continuing support of Trump and his agenda that is supported by white supremacists is in effect racist in that it perpetuates experiences of injustice and violence for immigrants, refugees, and persons of color in general. Included in this third form of racism are many corporate supporters of Trump who overlook or tolerate his racism in order to continue to reap the rewards of low taxes and fewer regulations.

These three forms of racism – the first overt, the second crassly utilitarian and Machiavellian, and the third more covert and silent, all worked together to bring Trump to power, and Trump needs all three forms of racism to remain as president. Persons who express the first two forms of racism are for the most part a lost cause in terms of potential conversion, but there may be some hope that some persons in the third group may have had too much of the overt and utilitarian forms of racism to remain silent much longer. Even if that is not the case, as long as Democrats and progressive independents stay united in their resistance to Trump, there is a path that leads us beyond Trump and his racist agenda.

Since the unwelcome arrival of Europeans, American history has been one long tug of war with white supremacy. Our best moments have been when we overcome white supremacy, and our worst moments have been when white supremacy has overcome us. Sadly, we are currently in a moment where it seems white supremacy is overcoming a large percentage of us, especially when it comes to our care (or lack thereof) for immigrants and refugees.

We can have disagreements on how to address challenges related to immigration and refugees, but the use of the term “illegals” as a way of classifying and thereby dehumanizing millions of persons is the kind of language that has led and continues to lead to concentration camps.

The term “illegal” used as an identifier for undocumented immigrants and refugees (as in “he or she is an illegal,” or “they are illegals,” or even simply saying “illegals” without an identifying pronoun), though currently more socially acceptable than using the n-word, is the functional equivalent to calling black people the n-word. Both identifiers are meant to dehumanize the other, thus justifying their treatment as less than human and thus not fully deserving of human rights. Both terms are deeply racist and stem from white supremacy as is evidenced by the fact that “illegals” is almost exclusively reserved by those who employ the term for black and brown immigrants and refugees.

When you think of human persons as “illegals” as opposed to full human beings, your mind can quickly go to places like “they don’t need beds, toothbrushes, and showers,” or “if they didn’t want to be separated from their children, they shouldn’t have come here” or “they don’t deserve basic medical care,” or “if coming here results in their death (even if the death occurs while in U.S. custody), then that is on them.” Describing persons as anything less than human has proven over and over again to lead to treating persons as less than human, often resulting in horrific suffering and sometimes resulting in the death of millions of persons.

In the ongoing tug of war with white supremacy, we must reject all language that dehumanizes anyone, and this means rejecting the language of referring to persons as “illegals,” thus relegating such words to the racist trash heap of history where terms like “illegals” and the “n-word” belong.

Cells at the Old Post Guardhouse – Fort Sill

My hometown is Lawton, Oklahoma. My family moved to Lawton when I was 4, and that was my home until I moved to Oklahoma City to attend college. Though I have not lived in Lawton since, my parents still live there, and it will always be my hometown.

Growing up in Lawton, one is always aware that Lawton is not just Lawton. It is Lawton/Fort Sill. The two are inextricably intertwined. Fort Sill existed long before Lawton, with construction of the fort beginning in 1869 in Native American territory. Lawton came into existence in 1901, 65 years before my birth, after land in the area was “purchased” from the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache tribes by the federal government and auctioned off to white citizens. From that point on Lawton and Fort Sill have often simply been known as Lawton/Fort Sill.

As a child growing up during the Vietnam War, though I was not the child of an army soldier, many of my friends were, and I remember their heartache at being separated from their dads when they were deployed to Vietnam, and I remember their hurt and confusion when their dads came home as different people than when they left or when they never came home alive. I saw early on in my life what the price of war was for families and children.

Some of my childhood memories of Fort Sill were more positive. I remember swimming in the pools on base, playing soccer on the polo field, attending YMCA day camp on land that was part of the base, seeing some of the best firework displays in the country on the Fourth of July, and even going to artillery shows (which seemed really cool when I was a kid).

During one of the YMCA day camps on base, we visited the Old Post Guardhouse and saw the cell where the Apache leader Geronimo was imprisoned. As a child, I did not really understand who Geronimo was or why he and other Native Americans were held at Fort Sill as “prisoners of war,” but I do remember thinking how small that cell was and how sad it must have been to live there. I ended up seeing that cell on more than one occasion, and one time when I was there with my mom who was an elementary school teacher, she said something about how she thought it was wrong that Geronimo should be put in prison for defending his own land. That made sense to me years later as I learned about the European invasion of the Americas and the genocide that followed.

At no time during my childhood did I learn that decades after Geronimo died in 1909 that Fort Sill would once again be a site for wrongly imprisoning members of a non-white population. I learned in high school that Japanese Americans were detained against their will in camps across the United States during World War Ii, but I did not know that 700 of these persons were imprisoned at Fort Sill as part of one of the moral low points of the United States in the 20th Century.

In its history, Fort Sill has imprisoned Native Americans in the 19th Century, Japanese Americans in the 20th Century, and right now in the 21st Century there are plans by the Trump administration to add to this miserable history of unjustly imprisoning people of color by making Fort Sill a concentration camp for children of immigrants and refugees for the second time during this decade (the Obama Administration held refugee children at Fort Sill in 2014).

As a Lawtonian, I cannot sit by and simply watch our government repeat the cruel racism of our past that has once again found expression in our present by imprisoning brown babies, children, and youth whose only “crime” is attempting to escape life threatening violence to find better opportunities in life. I cannot simply watch my hometown and Fort Sill be a place where international law is ignored and crimes against humanity are perpetrated.

The military leaders at Fort Sill need to be reminded by all Lawtonians, by all Oklahomans, by all U.S. Americans, and by all people of the world that simply following orders is no excuse for crimes against humanity. People of Lawton and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I appeal to your humanity, please do not look away while Fort Sill once again becomes an unjust prison and concentration camp for people of color. Please do not look away and please do all in your power to bring freedom to the children who are about to be imprisoned in our hometown.