By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THE Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) and the war veterans did well to join the rest of the progressive world in condemning the May 25 open murder of George Floyd by police in the Powderhorn Community of Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.
That day was Africa Day and Floyd was an African-American.
Post mortem reports by both the official public coroner and a private coroner hired by Floyd’s family have confirmed homicide.
Interpretations of Floyd’s murder and the nation-wide protests that followed will vary.
But for Africans and all progressive people who care about human life and justice, the main lesson from this incident is that the human rights doctrine does not protect human life.
It remains one doctrine competing with other doctrines. In any society, it is culture and social practices grounded in human values which we can count on to prioritise, protect and celebrate life.
The US pushes the doctrine of human rights as a function of its domination of global propaganda.
This fact alone means that, as Africans, we might be confused as to how we should interpret Floyd’s murder.
For instance, similar injustices to Floyd’s murder continued to happen even during former US President Barack Obama’s two terms, even though Obama did all he could to put into practice his liberal doctrine or theory of US society as ‘post-racial’.
The big difference now is that the current US President Donald Trump has added open racist provocations to the continuing acts of racial discrimination and racial injustice, to the extent of refusing to apologise in situations where Obama would readily apologise.
But over-stressing the differences between Obama, other Presidents and Trump would lead us to miss the historical continuity of the deep-seated culture and social practices which I have mentioned.
Trump’s understanding of, and relationship with, that deep-seated culture and its social practices are clearly different from Obama’s.
In the middle of January 2018, US political leaders attending a meeting on immigration with Trump were shocked that he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and most of Africa as “sh**holes” and demanded that immigrants from these countries be barred from entering the US while those already in the US should be taken out.
The intensity of the controversy arising from those remarks indicated deep divisions within US ruling class ranks on tactics rather than on substance.
For strategic reasons, a significant group within the US ruling class decided after the disastrous fall-out from the Iraq invasion that the US and its allies needed to distance themselves from the global image of the West associated with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
This meant reducing conventional white supremacy and racist aggression to a sub-text and elevating neo-liberal notions of pluralism, integration, globalisation, tolerance and human rights as the surface text of Western relations with the world as well as national ruling class relations with so-called racial minorities and ‘people of colour’.
Readers may remember that both former US President Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced as Presidential candidates that, if elected, they would scale down on former President George W. Bush’s ‘shock-and-awe’ and ‘war-on-terror’ approach but, instead, put the accent on ‘soft power’ which they also called ‘smart power’.
This ‘soft power’ and ‘smart power’ approach was inaugurated by Obama as the official imperialist policy of the US and its allies.
Obama’s speeches in Cairo, Egypt and Moscow, Russia, when he went there on official visits, adhered to that strategy.
This repackaging of imperialism was developed by key US institutions during the Bush era. In 2004, the US Department of Defence published the Report of the Defence Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication which advised a retreat from the images of ‘shock-and-awe’ as well as ‘war-on-terror’ in order to adopt a less menacing image of engagement in the ‘war of ideas’.
The task force reported that:
“Political leaders need to determine whether a military budget 400 times greater than a strategic communication budget is adequate to US national security strategy and to a global war on terrorism viewed as a struggle about ideas… But like the Cold War frame, the terrorism frame marginalises other significant issues and problems… To succeed, we must understand the United States is engaged in a generational and global struggle about ideas, not a war between the West and Islam. It is more than a war against the tactic of terrorism. The United States finds itself in the strategically awkward — and potentially dangerous — situation of being the longstanding prop and alliance partner of … authoritarian regimes … Therefore, in stark contrast to the Cold War, the United States today is not seeking to contain a threatening [communist] state/empire, but rather seeking to convert a broad movement … to accept the value structure of Western modernity, an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a War of Terrorism.”
So in order to understand Trump’s ‘Trumpkins’ movement as a backlash against the neo-liberal text of the Obama years, it is necessary to show why Obama was elevated after the disaster of the ‘War on Terror’ and why racial injustices continued without being encouraged by the US President the way they are being encouraged now.
First, an Obama was necessary in an environment where the opposition to imperialism once made the mistake of accepting its definition as ‘people of colour’ whose key grievance was that they were not integrated into white society.
So the white empire replied to the call for integrating people of colour by promoting Andrew Young, Bayard Rustin, Condoleezza Rice, Susan Rice, Jendayi Fraser, James McGee, Charles Ray, Colin Powell and other ‘people of colour’; and, of course, by placing Barack Obama and Michelle Obama in the White House!
In terms of the symbolism of white supremacy, this elevation was a monumental achievement for the coalition behind Obama.
But the White House remained, and remains, white and very close to White Hall.
That is what ‘Trumpkins’ are bringing to the fore again.
Second, during the Civil Rights Movement and the global anti-apartheid movement, the doctrine of pan-African unity assumed real flesh and voice in the form of a trans-Atlantic African movement and value system which exposed the Anglo-Saxon powers as not only the originators but also the financiers of the white settler-regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.
This emerging trans-Atlantic movement and value system scandalised the Anglo-Saxon powers and almost destroyed the myth of the Free World and Western civilisation in the eyes of the South and the East.
Third, the late US President Ronald Reagan’s imperialist strategies and pretexts of pretending to suppress communism in Latin America in order to keep Soviet influence out of the hemisphere became not only unsustainable and embarrassing; they also threatened to provoke a continent-wide Latino backlash, since demographers had already projected that the Hispanic population in the US itself would reach 48 million by 2015.
So a white gringo president waging wars of terror in Latin America under the guise of fighting the Soviets became not only a liability but also a joke, especially when the Soviet Union itself collapsed between 1986 and 1991:
In other words, a white conservative president of the US openly displaying the symbols and mannerisms of white supremacy in Latin America would galvanise an anti-intervention pan-Latino movement, just as much as he had galvanised a trans-Atlantic anti-apartheid pan-African movement.
These resistance movements against white supremacy and imperialism had to be calmed down or dismantled.
One was pan-American and made mostly of Latinos and Chicanos; the other was pan-African and driven by opposition to apartheid.
Given the potential of these linkages of the people of colour, there was need for new strategies and means to calm the situation.
One strategy was to promote ‘leaders of colour’ whom I have already listed.
The other was to groom new presidential aspirants who were white on the outside but really ‘black’ inside.
These were James Early Carter (Jimmy Carter) and William Clinton (Bill Clinton).
Carter and Clinton prioritised the black vote and the Latino vote and used that sensibility to project a friendly face to all the ‘peoples of colour’ in the rest of the world.
They laid the ground for the myth of a ‘post-racial’ internal politics which has also been used to promote the myth of ‘post-nationalist politics’ abroad, and especially in Africa.
The myth of ‘post-racial politics’ meant that Carter and Clinton would claim to be white outside but really black inside; while Obama later could also be African outside and white inside as a basis for a broad coalition.
If Africans cheered Carter and Clinton for being black inside, white liberals should also cheer Obama for being a white man inside.
That was the new logic.
Obama was ideal for that purpose because he would look like an Arab in the Middle East, an African-American in the US, a Latino in Latin America, light-skin African in Africa and even an Indonesian or Indian of mixed extraction in Asia.
Trump has reacted to that picture with his demand to limit immigration to blue-eyed blondes from Norway!
The racist sub-text is now in the open again!
After 1994, apartheid, as an open text, relocated to the North Atlantic where it originated. Trump has welcomed that relocation of apartheid back to the US.
Fourth, there was fear in imperialist circles that the African liberation movements of Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa once they all achieved independence and became governments, might coalesce into a revolutionary sub-continental super-state providing against imperialism and capitalism in Africa an example far more formidable and more dangerous than that of Cuba in Latin America.
Such a super state might also help Russia and China to extend their economic influence in a region once dominated by Western interests.
Therefore, before and during the 2016 US presidential elections campaign, part of the US ruling class began to associate the continuing relative economic decline of the US economy with the African-American President Obama and with the fast dilution of the white racial composition of the US population through ‘Third World’ immigration and high birth rates among the immigrants.
This slur was a disturbing sub-text of US politics throughout Obama’s first campaign as presidential candidate and it became more and more disturbing until it re-emerged as the surface text during the race between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.
Trump and his ‘Trumpkins’ forced the racist sub-text of US politics and society to become the main surface text again in 2016.
“A subtext means symbolic and underlying (covert) communication which allows prominent messages that have become controversial (or even taboo) to eventually reach public eyes and ears. It allows politicians and other actors who must act in ‘politically correct’ ways in public to be shown, to be revealed, nevertheless, as in fact thinking, feeling and often actually acting in the exact opposite way from what is supposed to be ‘correct’.”
For Trump and his ‘Trumpkins’, the liberal ideas of racial tolerance, integration, justice, civil rights and reconciliation present an unacceptable straight-jacket which limits his power to act as absolute ruler and which has contributed to the decline of the US superpower and its economy in the face of China, India, Russia and the collection of states calling itself the BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Throughout his election campaign and after his inauguration, Trump has been trying to make it obvious that what he really meant by ‘making America great again’ is in fact ‘making America a great white nation again’. This implies cleansing the White House and the US presidency of any lingering reminders of Barack and Michelle Obama, but it cannot be said in those words.
The very first issue Trump took with Obama was that Obama was a foreigner who should be required to produce his birth certificate in public. Obama in fact did just that.
But producing a birth certificate was not the issue: The real issue was race.
Trump himself is a descendant of recent German immigrants. He has therefore created, in his practice, a hierarchy of superior versus inferior immigrants to the US.