The man who is at the front of the reality show called the American presidency raised a salient question yesterday, concurrent with his degrading, insulting and profane comments about people of Haitian or African descent. In a moment which demonstrated his most deep-seated feelings about race, the pretend president asked why he would want “all these people from shithole countries,” adding that the U.S. should admit more people from places like Norway. In other words, we don’t want any people with brown skin or black skin, but we’d be happy to have as many as possible of the white ethnicity.
It’s a good question, one for which there are more answers than time or space to reply. Why would we want people like astronauts Ronald McNair or Guion Bluford? Why did we allow George Washington Carver in? What did Neil de Grasse Tyson or Dorothy Vaughn ever do for us? Hank Aaron should never have been here. Nor Willie Mays. Why would we ever have wanted the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or any of the millions of African-American citizens of this country who were either born in one of these “shithole countries” or descended from immigrants who came from them. The course of our country’s independence, wealth and freedoms would have been dramatically different without the countless individuals who came here, involuntarily or by choice, and dedicated their lives to the character of our country.
Certainly, we don’t want any more immigrants from a place like Haiti. What would we do with another Sidney Poitier? The artist John Jay Audubon was one more Haitian than we probably needed. The likes of Danielle Laraque-Arena, first woman president of The State University of New York Upstate Medical University, surely aren’t needed here. We have plenty of orchestrators, so no more Lee Holdridges, please. In fact, Haiti is the poorest country in the entire Western Hemisphere and we have plenty of “those types” in our nation already.
The President of the United States (in title) has now been crystal clear with his racist and elitist beliefs. That a sitting president of any party would make such insulting and inaccurate statements about entire ethnicities is a desecration of leadership perhaps matched only in history by a man named Hitler.
Winds of Peace Foundation has been and remains a politically independent organization, without political affiliation or endorsement. The President’s comments yesterday are egregious beyond political party….
