Hours after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed nearly 100 executive orders, launching an all-out policy blitz to realize a nightmarish far-right vision. New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie noted Friday that the goal of the Make America Great Again movement is specifically to take us back to a time before Reconstruction, when the government had incredible power over the scope of your rights, when explicit discrimination had legal protection.
In a review of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts book “Dawn’s Early Light,” culture critic Tope Folarin explains how MAGA’s vision for Americanness is narrowly defined and intrinsically tied to White supremacy and the patriarchal doctrines of evangelical Christianity.
All who fall out of those bounds are inherently inferior, abnormal, and hostile; deserving of exclusion, abuse, and harm.
The new regime seeks to extend its power to interpreting and defining naturalness itself. What constitutes a natural gender identity, who can be considered a “natural citizen,” and what is the natural order of merit-based competition? This isn’t doomerism. It is part of our history. Allowing the government to designate who is the right or wrong sort is not without precedent. We’ve seen how such actions impact everyone, not just ethnic groups and political alliances that are first to go on the chopping block.
During the 1950s, the homophobic Lavender Scare within the government had people frantically reporting women whose jaws were too wide and men whose voices were too high on suspicion of being queer, and thus enemies of the state. During World War II, 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed in incarceration camps. Before the passage of the civil rights amendments, Black Americans were once made to swear on specially designated “Black bibles” in court. When the government is given permission to define and redefine who is good enough to enjoy civil liberties, it inevitably becomes a self-serving mechanism for rooting out all who oppose government overreach and abuses.
For some of us, perhaps more of us than you may think, the undesirable status is increasingly a question of “when” rather than “if.”
In the wake of a painful, frightening week, The Emancipator is giving space to those from targeted marginalized communities to examine how they are being impacted, what reverberations will be felt by the rest of the country, and how we can all resist.
Resistance starts with speaking the truth. In his incisive commentary, distinguished race scholar Victor Ray urges us to call the new segregationist movement by its name, civility be damned. Because when we allow anti-DEI policies to hide behind a race-neutral veneer, we are aiding in their scheme.
Birthright citizenship – one of the central pillars of what it means to be American – is also under threat. This week writer, Jeff Yang traces the right’s assault on the very thing that makes our nation exceptional, and warns about its larger and even more insidious implications for all who refuse to yield to a wannabe dictator.
Trump’s targeted attacks on the trans community continue. He has issued executive orders that essentially bar them from public life and seek to erase their very existence. Denny, who reports on the LGBTQ community, will examine in an upcoming story the devastating impact this has on the trans community, as well as the reverberations that will affect us all.
Amid the shock and awe, The Emancipator will continue to contextualize and frame the facts to keep you focused as we resist these attempts to destroy all that we hold dear.
In Solidarity,
Frankie Huang
Contributing Senior Editor
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