By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

LAST week, US political leaders attending a meeting on immigration with US President Donald Trump were shocked that he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and most of Africa as ‘shitholes’ 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 indicates 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 US President Barack 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 re-packaging 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 departure 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 it was necessary to elevate Obama after the disaster of the ‘War on Terror’.
First an Obama was necessary in an environment where the opposition to imperialism once made the mistake of accepting its provisional 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!
But the White House 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 theory of pan-African unity assumed real flesh and voice in the form of a transatlantic African movement and value system which exposed the Anglo-Saxon powers as not only the originators but also the financiers of the white supremacist apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.
This emerging transatlantic 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 a potential anti-intervention pan-Latino movement, just as much as he had galvanised a potential transatlantic anti-apartheid pan-African movement.
These potential resistance movements against white supremacy and imperialism had to be calmed down and 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 anti-imperialist movements 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 were the first US presidential candidates to prioritise the black vote and the Latino vote and to use 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 ‘post-racial’ internal politics which has also been used to promote ‘post-nationalist politics’ abroad, especially in Africa.
The myth of ‘post-racial politics’ means 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.
If Africans cheered Carter and Clinton for being black inside, white liberals should also cheer Obama for being a whiteman inside.
That is 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!
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.
This anxiety on the part of white supremacists and imperialists meant that a white-sponsored Nelson Mandela project in South Africa preceded the equally white-sponsored Obama project in North America.
It was recognised that the crudest, simplest grievance which united all ‘the people of colour’ of South Africa was segregation and discrimination.
Therefore the construction of an integrated administration with a ‘black’ majority under President Mandela would be a great step toward the demobilisation of the united anti-apartheid movement and the ultimate isolation of the African hardliners against imperialism and white supremacy.
The white empire and its press quickly reframed Mandela as a ‘post-nationalist’ leader and icon, just as it also later attempted to present Obama as a post-racial US President.
But leading an integrated administration in South Africa would not be enough to enable the white neo-liberals to appropriate and transform the African nationalist icon, Mandela, as a white neo-liberal icon.
The expropriated African icon had to be placed on an un-African platform and to be made ‘global’.
Mandela had to be offered a Nobel Peace Prize, side-by-side with his tormentor F.W. De Klerk, just as, later, Obama too had to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize before fitting into George Bush’s military shoes and continuing to deploy brute force abroad.
In other words, the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama was for his acceptance of the mission to calm and demobilise two related movements of ‘the people of colour’ which threatened the empire; that is the pan-American Latino-Chicano movement against US imperialist aggression in Latin America and the transatlantic and pan-African anti-apartheid movement. Obama achieved these two feats simply by agreeing to play the role of ‘post racial President of Colour in the White House’.
Obama therefore deserved a Nobel Peace Prize from the empire.
But before and during the 2016 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 immigration.
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 Donald 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 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 contamination by 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.
Even the idea of ‘draining the swamp’ had racial connotations since for Trump it was the Obama legacy which left a swamp in Washington DC.