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Since the beginning Donald Trump has been very straight-forward about his hatred of people of color in general and immigrants in particular. Back in June of 2015, while announcing his run for the presidency, he had said without any evidence whatsoever:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. […] They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.
Over the last nine years, his hateful rhetoric has become more extreme, more violent, and in some cases more detached from reality. During this most recent campaign alone he has said that immigrants are “not human” and they are “poisoning the blood” of our country.
Donald spread the vicious lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating people’s pets at the presidential debate in front of a viewing audience of almost 70 million people. With no pushback from his followers or Republican elected officials, it shouldn’t surprise us that we would end up at the point where Donald is completely comfortable channeling his inner eugenicist.
In an interview with Hugh Hewitt, he lied that Vice President Kamala Harris is “allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.”
The New York Times ran a story about Donald’s fascist statements and this was the headline: “In Remarks about Migrants, Donald Trump Invoked Long-Held Fascination with Genes and Genetics,” as if his interest were merely academic and not the deeply held beliefs of a man who, at this point, we can inarguably say is a fascist.
For at least 200 hundred years, biological determinism—the idea that all science is objective (it is not) and that differences between groups are fixed and inherited (they are not)—has been the basis for some of the most influential and racist theories about racial differences. To hear it peddled by a candidate for the presidency in 2024 shows us what happens when we fail to learn from our history—specifically, in this case, from the role played by various pseudo-sciences in pushing the myth of white supremacy since the 19th century.
Social Darwinism, which was very popular in America, was the inane theory that co-opted Darwin’s theory of evolution in an effort to demonstrate that the racial and social hierarchies were determined by “survival of the fittest.” It was also used to justify the atrocities of genocide and slavery. Poverty and failure to succeed were seen as proof that those at the bottom deserved to be there. Wealth, on the other hand, was seen as an indicator of innate superiority, which explains why magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were proponents of Social Darwinism.
The project of scientific racism became more sophisticated with the development of the intelligence quotient, or IQ, test which was originally designed by Frenchman Alfred Binet in 1904 to help evaluate children with special learning needs. The test itself was not inherently racist because Binet understood that children develop at varying rates, and that human intelligence is diverse.
Then H. H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist, recognized that Binet’s test has the potential to prove “scientifically” the superiority of the white race, and introduced it to America, which went completely against Binet’s intentions for the test’s use.
We don’t know the extent to which IQ is heritable, but we do know that intelligence can’t be reduced to a single number. Yet, that’s exactly what American IQ tests set out to do, designed, as they were to be heavily biased toward white culture and white experience. They also purposefully made no allowances for differences in environmental factors like socioeconomic status, education, family background, language proficiency, nutrition, or health.
What people like Goddard and Carl Brigham, who developed the SAT, failed (or refused) to realize was that whether intelligence is largely heritable or not, it is malleable. Brigham was so convinced otherwise that he stated unequivocally that IQ tests “had proven beyond any scientific doubt that, like the American Negroes, the Italians and the Jews were genetically ineducable. It would be a waste of good money even to attempt to try to give these born morons and imbeciles a good Anglo-Saxon education.”
Goddard’s and Brigham’s tests, which were neither reliable nor valid, not surprisingly, fulfilled the expectations of their designers—that whites were intellectually superior to all other races and belonged squarely at the top of the hierarchy while Blacks, “proven” to be intellectually limited and uneducable by the inherently racist instrument, were at the bottom.
Many American proponents of IQ testing also, not coincidentally, were staunch eugenicists—they believed in the practice of selective breeding of people in the superior races and the targeted sterilization of those in so-called undesirable groups. In early twentieth-century America, these groups included Blacks, immigrants, the poor, the disabled, and the intellectually limited (or, to use the technical terms of the day, “morons,” “idiots,” and “imbeciles”).
While English eugenics focused on breeding for positive traits, American eugenics—whose proponents included Alexander Graham Bell and President Woodrow Wilson—was more focused on removing negative traits by removing undesirables. To that end, more than thirty
states enacted sterilization laws after the turn of the twentieth century.
By the time the Constitution was written, white supremacy was already woven into the DNA of the British colonies and their white inhabitants. Despite the soaring rhetoric Thomas Jefferson used to write the Declaration of Independence, he believed whites were intellectually superior to Blacks.
The conditions of white supremacy were codified in the Constitution, as was the notion, enshrined in James Madison’s appalling “three-fifths compromise,” that only three-fifths of the population of enslaved Blacks would be counted for the purposes of taxation and representation in the House.
The English abolitionist Thomas Day noted the hypocrisy when he wrote in 1776, “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
The American eugenics movement was influential throughout the world in the years before World War II. Hitler specifically made reference to California’s eugenics program under which, between 1909 and 1979, at least twenty thousand people were forcibly sterilized. The American South, effectively a closed fascist state, with its extensive and comprehensive laws governing segregation, miscegenation, and its coordinated violence against Blacks, including lynching, that effectively deprived the right to vote, led the world in race-based legislation.
For Nazis, with their own ambitious goals for racial purity, the accomplishments of the American South in this regard were the gold standard. When German lawyers met in 1934 to draft legislation that would become the basis for the Nuremberg Laws, the South’s total success in depriving Blacks of their rights was a major topic of conversation.
Apparently, we’re all supposed to pretend that every horrific thing Donald Trump says and does is baked in so none of it makes a difference. I refuse to concede that point, but what then about his Republican enablers who pretend they never heard him call immigrants “vermin?” What about the governors who wag their fingers at him when he spreads dangerous disinformation or when he terrorizes an entire American community by targeting the legal immigrants who live there, but are still support him? Do we let them off the hook, too?
It is a horrifying irony that Donald, one of the most damaged, weak, and inferior people who has ever walked the planet, promotes the inferiority of non-whites. But he’s, after all, merely a symptom of a disease that, thanks to the opportunism of the Republican Party and the fascists, white supremacist, and Christian nationalists they represent, continues to metastasize.
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