For those of us who advocate discretion and compassion when dealing with families with an undocumented member, the emphasis on “enforcing the law” rings hollow. \u00a0<\/p>\n
In this “country of laws”, there will always be a law to enforce. \u00a0Yet historically our laws have often been a way to codify some form of white supremacist dogma.<\/a><\/p>\n Donald Trump has long\u00a0channeled the white supremacy of staunch supporter U.S. Representative Steve King. In his racial slurs against Hispanics, Trump sees only bad hombres<\/em> \u2013drug dealers and rapists. <\/span><\/p>\n In his opposition to\u00a0the DREAM Act, King falsely stated<\/strong>\u00a0in 2013 that:<\/span><\/p>\n For everyone who\u2019s a valedictorian, there\u2019s another hundred out there who weigh a hundred and thirty pounds\u2014and they\u2019ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they\u2019re hauling seventy-five pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In March, 2017, he communicated both his anti-immigrant stance and his advocacy of white superiority (which he calls “Western Civilization”) in a tweet, stating:<\/p>\n We can\u2019t restore our civilization with somebody else\u2019s babies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n To the Iowan Representative, it is painful to ascribe any value whatsoever to a non-white, whether black or brown. <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n In 2016, when Charles P. Pierce, a writer for\u00a0Esquire magazine, expressed hope that the Republican Party might cease being the party of “old white people”, King was offended. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis whole \u2018old white people\u2019 business does get a little tired, Charlie. I\u2019d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other [non-white] categories of people<\/strong> that you are talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, wasn\u2019t finished:<\/p>\n …than Western civilization itself that\u2019s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That\u2019s all of Western civilization.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n So, according to Iowa Representative King, Christianity is a white European contribution which created Western civilization.<\/b><\/p>\n However, an ancient\u00a0Greek Empire\u00a0gave the first century a nearly universal language.\u00a0Then an\u00a0Imperial Rome built roads to access much of the known world. And\u00a0it was the Jewish Paul (born in Cilicia –modern day Turkey) who would carry the message of Jesus of Nazareth — a Middle Eastern Jewish Rabbi —\u00a0throughout the known world, using Roman Roads and the Greek Language!<\/p>\n For Rep. King, it is only\u00a0people who look like him who are the truly civilized and truly Christian \u2013 those European white people who have made the only significant contributions to civilization . Definitely not people who looked like Paul or Jesus or even the Ethiopian (Acts, chapter 8) who carried Jesus\u2019 message back to North Africa.<\/p>\n To Steve King, “the footprint of civilization” is clearly from a white Christian foot.<\/p>\n April Ryan<\/strong>, American journalist serving as White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks<\/strong>, wasn\u2019t having it. A descendant of forced laborers who were kidnapped and enslaved to then be bought by the good Christian white folk, journalist Ryan inquired, \u201cWhat about Africans? What about Asians?”<\/p>\n Indeed!<\/p>\n In her recently published\u00a0At Mama\u2019s Knee:<\/i>\u00a0Mothers and Race in Black and White,\u00a0<\/span><\/em>veteran journalist Ryan recalled:<\/p>\n My mother wanted me to live in a world of equality, yet understand the realities of the present day. The reality is that we are Black. She offered historical notes about what our Blackness has encountered, but she also offered pride in our contributions, the contributions that so many Black people have given to the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n When we were in the car, she would remind us that Garrett Morgan, an African American inventor, is credited with creating the traffic light . . . and the gas mask.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n She also told us about Charles Drew who helped shape our current blood donation system, and George Washington Carver and his agricultural advance with the peanut.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n She and my father worked hard to give me and my brother a life that was more diverse and afforded more opportunities than what they were afforded. However, she also wanted her children to be mindful and aware of who we are.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n My mother spoke of race with the facts, and it always came straight from the heart.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n An unapologetic advocate of white supremacy, Representative King clearly was speaking from his\u00a0heart,<\/em> a heart\u00a0unfortunately misinformed by an ignorance about race and Christianity that is truly appalling.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those of us who advocate discretion and compassion when dealing with families with an undocumented member, the emphasis on “enforcing the law” rings hollow. \u00a0<\/p>\n In this “country of law”, there will always be a law to enforce. \u00a0<\/p>\n Yet \u00a0historically our laws have often been a way to codify some form of white supremacist dogma, as evidenced by the immigration hardliners such as Representative Steve King.<\/p>\n Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4045,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-frontpage","category-immigration","category-race-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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