You know what’s really scary about “Send her back”?
A confirmation of the unspoken right-wing belief that non-whites are inherently not American or are at best only conditionally American — a privilege that can be instantly revoked when your patriotism is in doubt.
And apparently speaking up against the government met the removal criteria. No matter how long you have lived in this country, no matter how hard you have worked or how much you have contributed and no matter where you were born.
A hidden doctrine has finally been brought to the broad daylight by the occupier of the White House and confirmed by his chanting supporters in a campaign rally. However, it’s nothing new or novel.
This administration’s policies in the past two years of reducing legal immigration quota, enforcing zero tolerance policy at the border, broadsiding Chinese-born scientists as spies, etc, are the implementations of this doctrine with real-world consequences affecting tens of thousands of people, if not more.
So what’s the doctrine? 1) Only white people are real Americans. 2) People who speak up against the government are unpatriotic. 3) Unpatriotic, non-white people don’t deserve to live in this country.
Do you see the parallel here with another country and another time?
Yes, Hitler’s antebellum Germany.
READ: Colorado Sun opinion columnists.
Trump’s aspiration of becoming the dictator of an all-white America is strikingly similar to Hitler’s aspiration of being the führer of an Aryan nation. They even deployed similar methods. They sought to achieve their goals by spreading lies, fueling hatred, casting the undesired population as unpatriotic, labeling them as criminals and treating them as sub-humans.
A few people have cautioned me about speaking up because it may play into his re-election plan. Well, I’ll counter that everybody has the duty to speak up and speak up loudly. Why?
We face a danger that we haven’t faced as a nation for a long while. Not speaking up would be complicit. And I truly believe that his view is un-American and he will lose big if he runs 2020 as a referendum on race.
If anything, the past few days revealed the extent of the danger we face and the imperative to remove him from the White House and start to repair and heal the nation, ??? nation.
Ning Mosberger-Tang is a photographer based in Boulder. She is an immigrant from China and a naturalized U.S. citizen.