On the morning that my sister found out Donald Trump had become President of the United States of America, she sent me – amongst several selfies that featured exclusively her scowling and angrily gesticulating at the television and the around the clock news coverage devoted to the election even in England – a text that asked whether I would be deported under his presidency. She was half joking. I replied in a similar fashion that it wasn’t likely; immigration didn’t work like that, and besides, if you were to describe me to Trump, (a nineteen-year-old, white, European Christian), he’d be far more likely to propose to me than deport me. The kind of awful joke that’s a little too close to the bone to be funny.
Because it’s true. Soon after arriving in the states, my then relationship broke down and I was single for the first time in four years, and because I’m a product of the technology generation, where was the right place to go following this? Tinder. I knew instinctively to include on my bio that I was British, (after all, it worked for Colin Frissell in Love Actually, and Ross fell in love with Emily for a while on Friends), and the response was astonishing. Men were matching with me on an unprecedented scale, usually accompanied by any rando reference to British culture they could muster, that they’d been in London for a connecting flight that one time, or the typical ‘do you have an accent? *heart-eyes-emoji*’ (fun fact: my flatmate once flippantly replied to this that no, she was in fact one of the 1% of the British population that miraculously speak in a South African accent from birth: the recipient didn’t pick up on the sarcasm). Inevitably, I did get on well with a few of these men, and would go on to connect with them on various social media platforms, where I was almost horrendously unsurprised to learn that the men who would tell me that they love a girl with an accent, really meant that they love a girl, (well, women really, but there’s a conversation to be had on the infantilisation of women for another day), with a European accent. These men would complement me on my blonde-haired, blue-eyed, ‘Scandinavian’ looks, and within the same minute compulsively share Breitbart links, rabidly type out their desire for immigrants to ‘go back to where you came from’, and unthinkingly generalize all Muslims as being 'evil', (despite Daesh being no more representative of the average Muslim than I am).
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This notion that I am somehow the 'right kind of immigrant', (although, for the record, I'm actually a 'non-immigrant', and if you're going to wax lyrical about immigration laws, you should probably make sure you at least know the right terminology), is so clearly rooted in white privilege. None of these people – because whilst in my own experience it’s always been men, but I know for sure that there are people who are equally bigoted in every gender – assume that I am here illegitimately, or am I here to rape women, or I am here to have an ‘anchor baby’, in the way that they feel free to assume of Hispanic and Black people. None of these people ask me for my ‘real name’, or accuse me of being a secret Daesh agent like they do with Asian people. Worse still, the racism and prejudicial stereotypes behind these assumptions are only going to become worsened and more ingrained under Trump’s presidency.
And yes, before anyone jumps down my throat, I know that not all Trump supporters are racist, but they did, whether they like it or not, vote for a man who ran a presidential campaign that not only exploited xenophobic rhetoric, but empowered those who create and use it. You might not harbor racist thoughts, but as I have said time and time again, in voting for Trump you made clear that racism is less significant to you than whatever you stand to gain from this leadership. That – this normalization and legitimization of racism – has come at a cost.
From the homeless Hispanic man savagely beaten in Boston by two brothers, one of whom told police officers, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported,” to the he travel ban, (which is regardless of whatever spin people attempt to put on it, a ban on Muslims), has negatively affected countless innocent communities, families, and individuals, including students from Georgia State. More recently, the horrific murder of two Indian men in Kansas last week came at the hands of a man who believed that his two victims were Iranian. These men were highly-skilled, university-educated individuals, far more ‘valuable’ as immigrants than I – or my fellow white J1 visa flat mates are – and yet, I know, this man would not have shot at us. America, a country founded on immigration, on tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, does not have a hatred of immigrants overall, only those who do not conform to their euro-centric standards of a 'good' immigrant.
Now, it is more important than ever for professed white allies to act in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of this country. I'm not going to lessen the intentions of those who wear safety pins, or share 'immigrants welcome' posts on their Facebook, or who went on the women's march, because I don't think it's fair to do that. But I will say that for those of us in the position to be doing more, we need to be doing so. We need to listen to what those we are allying ourselves with are asking from us, and since I won't presume to know what that is, I'll list underneath this a few resources from minorities and POC themselves.
http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/kiv...
