Ain’t That America?

A lot of liberals want to say that what is happening with ICE and the return of imperialism and the use of government forces against protestors isn’t what America truly is.

I reject that–all of this is what America was founded on. It’s been awhile for most of it, I grant you. But Trumpism is nothing if not nostalgia and that includes nostalgia for when white men could do whatever they want to minorities, liberals, radicals, immigrants, and whoever dares stand up against the forces of white power.

I suspect I am going to have a lot of posts about this in coming weeks and months. But let me start with the first one.

ICE is taking its prisoners of the American ethnic cleansing campaign to Fort Snelling. That’s a military instillation in the Twin Cities. If you don’t know Minnesota history, you probably haven’t heard of it. But it has already played an enormously outsized role in American racial history.

For one, Fort Snelling is where Dred Scott was taken by his owner. There Scott labored in slavery for several years. His experiences there led to the famous case, when Roger Taney stated that Black people “had no rights the white man was bound to respect.” And let me tell you what, that’s the attitude of ICE today, even if it more than just Black people.

Second, Fort Snelling was he gathering site for the genocide of the Dakota War in 1862. This land, where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet, is considered sacred by the Dakota. So naturally, it is where the Army gathered up the Dakota during the Dakota War, hoping to kill several hundred of them. It turned out to be only 38, chosen in the end by Abraham Lincoln, the largest mass execution in American history. The actual executions took place in Mankato, but for the Dakota, this is a land poisoned by America. Fort Snelling is also where the Dakota and Ho-Chunk were rounded up in a concentration camp to forcibly remove them from the region after the war. Hundreds died there of the terrible conditions. These were almost all non-combatants, mostly women and children.

During World War II, Fort Snelling became a place where Japanese Americans–locked up in concentration camps based on nothing more than their race–could get out of the camps by agreeing to serve the military as Japanese translators and get training there.

ICE is just targeting anyone non-white and letting the chips fall where they may. As there are a lot of indigenous people in the Twin Cities, that means a lot of people have been targeted and harassed. A friend told me of a Dakota friend of hers whose sister was nearly arrested by ICE (the protestors drove ICE away), for example. She’s brown after all. Several Native people have been arrested by ICE in Minneapolis and sent to…..Fort Snelling.

So, yeah, when I see what ICE is doing right now, I think of it as very much what this nation was founded on. The United States is a nation built on slavery and genocide. This is the latest iteration of this violent race hate. I’m not making any political claims that pointing out the reality of American history is going to help, but I am saying that Trumpism is exposing the truth of this nation’s character.