Trump's Whitening of America

A hard lesson in manufacturing consent for ethnic cleansing

Image courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society | Creative Commons

We’ve heard a great deal over the last two years about manufacturing consent, with many asking what it means. To manufacture consent is to drive a narrative in the media that creates an environment where the population will support acts of aggression and oppression, war, oppressive policing, mass surveillance, and mass incarceration, just to give a few examples.

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During the colonization of the Americas and the slaughter of Indigenous people, the divine right to take the land was invoked in what was referred to as Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile, those defending their lands were referred to as savages for fighting back. An oppressor painting itself as innocent through politicking and propaganda that paints everyone else as the enemy by villainizing and dehumanizing them, is manufacturing consent to justify atrocities.

This Western-styled strategy was previously employed by many nations as they laid waste to Indigenous populations all over the world. However, the more refined process that was used in the U.S. has since been embraced and adopted by other world leaders, such as Adolf Hitler and Slobodan Milošević, among others, including the United States, which continues to export the idea to support colonization efforts globally. That Hitler would praise the genocide in the U.S. along with Jim Crow laws, adapting them to suit his needs, speaks volumes on its own.

This brings us to today, where a presidential administration that spent years manufacturing consent from its base of voters to target Latinos, or nonwhite immigrants, is operating at full throttle.

All the talk of the “Browning of America” (based largely on the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that posits there is a concerted effort to make white people extinct) is how they created fear of Latino immigrants. The news media's framing of immigration in the context of Latin America helped drive this Latinophobic narrative that is being weaponized today.

The targeting of immigrants, the $175 billion allocated in the Republican budget bill for immigration enforcement, and $75 billion going to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) just shows how far believers in the racist conspiracy theory are willing to go to ensure a “white” America. ICE is set to become the largest domestic federal law enforcement agency in the country and the nation’s largest jailer with a budget bigger than the Bureau of Prisons.

One of the biggest promoters of the theory is Trump advisor Stephen Miller. But he’s not alone in the White House. Dozens in the administration believe similarly or are willing to weaponize the idea as a means to an end for their own beliefs. Many Christian nationalists may know the idea is ridiculous, but say nothing as it is used to justify inhumanity because it suits their needs.

Everything from issuing Notices to Appear in immigration court, only to arrest noncitizens doing everything the so-called “right way,” to taking away temporary protected status and raiding jobsites is all meant to make the Latino population vulnerable. The growth in detention centers like “Alligator Alcatraz,” whose name is meant to invoke fear and anger, highlights how the private prison industry that operates the modern-day system of slavery is about to profit from all the inhumanity.

The circus around it highlights just how much glee they feel from intentionally treating nonwhite people as less than human and how happy they are to make themselves richer from it.

What is becoming apparent with each passing day is that this is a backlash against nonwhite people for making the country browner. To make us pay for their “white extinction anxiety” as if that's a real thing. They want all nonwhite groups to suffer for their fears of white extinction, despite the idea being an impossibility, largely due to no one being able to clearly identify what “white” is, aside from a social construct as a tool of oppression.

Note that this strategy is reminiscent of El Blanqueamiento (The Whitening) of Latin America, a strategy that attempted to make the majority population white, much like the whitening of Australia and other countries. In other words, it’s not unprecedented, and the administration has many examples, both successful and failed, from which to garner ideas.

The system today is not much different from that of our post-slavery past in that the wealthy profit off the exploitation of humans who are darker than they are. But what is happening now with the targeting of nonwhite people is nothing short of an attempt at ethnic cleansing in a country that, no matter how hard they try to make a white only nation, never was and never will be.

Even the Republican budget bill slashing Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to give rich people tax cuts and fund ICE like never before is built on the idea that it wll harm Latinos, Black people, and Indigenous people more when in reality, more than 45% of people on government assistance are white. Which brings us back to the adage about white people voting to cause themselves harm if they believe nonwhite people will suffer more.

Republicans have mastered the art of creating divisions to promote this agenda in the 1970s. In the words of former Republican National Committee chairman and consultant to Republicans from anti-civil rights lawmaker and segregationist George Wallace to Ronald Reagan and Goeroge H.W. Bush.

Atwater also created the Southern Strategy, focused on white grievance, that launched Nixon into the White House.

“By 1968, you can’t say “ni**er”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract,” said Atwater in a 1981 interview. “Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”

The only difference today from Atwater in 1981 is that it includes Latinos because we are a much larger population than we were back then. Now, the so-called “welfare queen” of today is Black and Latino. The “super predators of the 1990s went from Black teenagers to all Black people and Latinos. Once again, everything wrong with the U.S. is laid upon non-white people and not the white people doing the oppressing.

The oppressed are still the savages in America.

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Arturo is an independent journalist whose work can be found at Unicorn Riot, The Antagonist Magazine, Latino Rebels, and more. Arturo is also on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and Threads. To support his work, become a paid subscriber or donate via Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App.