TEARS IN THE AMERICAN SOCIAL FABRIC
Many inside and outside the United States believe that the United States has a longstanding, historically rooted, and fundamental problem: racism. From the early stages of the colonial period, the institution of chattel slavery became a central basis of the southern economy, securing labor to maintain the plantation-based production. Slavery and the subsequent legal discrimination against African Americans were perceived by many outsiders as inconsistent with the United States’ discourse of freedom. Today, in the eyes of many foreign observers, African Americans and other minorities have been mistreated and denied full access to the American democratic system. Overseas observers are often aware of the fact that even after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s many forms of intolerance and discrimination persisted.
Many thinkers and writers from around the world have examined the US racial history. Alexis de Tocqueville saw slavery an uneconomic, abhorrent system “contradicted both Christian belief and tradition and the political philosophy of the rights of man.”62 More than a century later, Octavio Paz averred that the racial question was one of the “great contradictions that tears [the US] apart.”63 The radical Egyptian writer Syyid Qutub declared that the United States “treat their colored people with despicable arrogance and distinguish barbarity.”64 The Swedish writer and scholar Sven Delblanc wrote in 1969, after spending a year in Berkeley, that he “encountered a country with an ingrained tradition of racial oppression and racism.” He wrote, “I ask myself if the US will ever learn to live with the truth, the whole truth, about its history?” He characterized American freedom as a myth and concluded “violence and oppression were endemic in American society.”65
The issue of race has been a major factor in shaping stereotypes about the United States since the nineteenth century. As de Chantal explains in this volume, the degeneracy thesis popularized in France in 1768 argued that in the United States, “all natural forms, whether vegetal or animal, or human, had degenerated to the point of having shrunken appearance.” These biological prejudices disappear in the early nineteenth century, but other negative perceptions emerged in France, such as the stereotype of “the crass materialism of vain and greedy Americans.” Often, stereotypes have been based on some particular event or US policy decision, and they have varied from country to country. In general terms, however, Americans are often portrayed as materialistic, uneducated, vulgar, violent, exploitative, barbaric, childish, and racist.
Intellectuals were not the only ones aware of American racial issues. As Adam Quinn has asserted, Hollywood and the media in general have popularized many images of American racial division.66 In light of this, it is not surprising that Obama’s 2008 campaign for the presidency was followed with significant interest worldwide. In Brazil, Obama was met with a sort of racial empathy from a country with large black and mixed-race populations.67 In England as in other countries, people wondered if “Americans would finally send an African-American to the White House?” Adam Quinn noted, “when Obama’s victory was confirmed, the British press embraced the moment with all gusto, pouring emphasis onto the racial significance of the occasion.”68 In general, the French media saw Obama’s candidacy and his subsequent election with great sympathy, creating a sort of “Obamamania” in the country. France saw in Obama’s election something they did not have: the proper integration and representation of minorities.69
Labels and stereotypes can lie dormant for a long time until a particular event awakens them. The United States was considered violent and racist during the Iraq War and the administration of George W. Bush, and inclusive and tolerant after Obama’s election. Today, the growing perception of the United States as an intolerant society often goes hand in hand with judgment about the United States’ hypocrisy. The United States is frequently perceived as critical of injustice in other countries but unaware of its own. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has expressed this with clarity: “Ultraconservatives in the United States demand that, the Berlin Wall having fallen, a new wall now been constructed between the United States and Mexico.”70
The 2016 presidential election and the first year and a half of the Trump administration have made these issues central. Critical views of the United States have been reinforced by Trump’s statements during the campaign and his time in office. His claim that “a Mexican-American judge shouldn’t hear a case involving him because of the judge’s Hispanic background”; his description of life in black communities as “an unending hellscape of crime and poverty” and implication that “Muslim terrorists were potential immigrants”71; and his suggestion that in Charlottesville, Virginia, racist and neo-Nazi protesters and their opponents were on similar moral footing—have provoked severe criticism around the world.
At the beginning of 2016, former president of Peru Alan García referred to the need “to speak firmly against anti-Latin American racism of Donald Trump” (Vidarte). The center-left Mexican politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador asserted that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto needed to “file a complaint at the United Nations against US government and against Donald Trump for human rights violations and racial discrimination.”72 Markus Feldenkirchen condemned the United States’ treatment of the Nativeamericans and African Americans, and argued that the United States has never formally apologized and “instead, many patterns of institutionalized racism still exist.”73 German Justice Minister Heiko Maas observed recently that “it’s insufferable the way Trump is trying to whitewash the right-wing violence of the thugs in Charlottesville…. No one should be allowed to trivialize anti-Semitism and racism by neo-Nazis.”74 The conservative British Magazine The Economist published on its mid-August 2017 cover an image of Trump using a KKK hood as a megaphone. The Prime Minister of England, Theresa May, criticized Trump’s comment that “I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who opposed them. I think it is important for all those in a position of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them.”75 The Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, called Trump out for not openly condemning the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, and for his “soft and vague position” after the event. The report cites Andrew Cuomo and other US politicians declaring that there were not many sides in the incident. Even Ivanka Trump tweeted that “there should be no place in a society for racism, white supremacy and neoNazi.”76 Finally, an editorial in Le Monde called President Trump’s behavior “erratic and unpredictable,” and an “unprecedented transgression.” By “establishing an equivalency between the anti-racist movement and the extreme right,” the daily declared, “the president rides on the evil demons of white American who elected him.” Le Monde suggested that Trump was creating an “irreparable rupture between the president of the United States and the fundamental values he is supposed to incarnate and defend.”77
Closely related to the issue of race is Trump’s anti-immigrant
