Opinion

Bimpe Archer: Donald Trump's racist comments all too familiar to people of colour

Bimpe Archer
Bimpe Archer Bimpe Archer

HERE’S the thing, peeps – you don’t need me to tell you that telling a fellow citizen who happens to be a different colour from you to go home is racist.

Unless they’re boring you at a party and you literally mean `return to the address where you live’, which let’s face it we’ve ALL wanted to say. (Side note: But if you actually have you’re just plain rude and need to check yo’ self)

There cannot be anyone reading this column who cannot see that when Donald Trump told four progressive Democratic congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” he was being a racist (insert of choice epithet here).

Surely.

And yet, I can’t imagine that there is a person of colour who hasn’t heard that while going about their day-to-day lives, minding their own business in the country where they were born.

It certainly won’t have been every day, but very randomness of the outbursts is what makes them so jarring – a stealth attack, if you will.

The entire concept is the absolute apex of white privilege – the idea that the only people who `belong’ in this land are white, whatever their own immigration journey, which in Trump’s case was a fairly recent move by grandparents from Germany and in four of his five children’s a parental relocation from Czechoslovakia and Slovenia.

Of course, as far right extremism moves mainstream, white skin is not proving a protection for those with the temerity to speak with a `foreign’ accent, or, heaven forefend, in another language.

But the `right’ accent, one that is exactly the same as the person telling you to go home, won’t stop a person of colour being metaphorically banished to their `homeland’.

The notion of that homeland is another aspect of white privilege. Those “totally broken and crime-infested places” so fondly conjured up by racists for the purposes of banishing people that don’t look like them.

Because the only reason you are here, in their country, is because `your own’ is a hellhole which you have fled. Obvs. For you to then have the audacity to not stay silently in the lowly place you should be grateful to have is unforgivable.

No matter that your ties to the country you call home have their origins in the same complex tangle of economic, romantic and emotional connections as every other person sharing the lump of rock igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock.

No matter that you may never have been to the country of that part of your family that gifted you the extra level of protection from sun damage, and that that country is one to be proud of – it just doesn’t happen to be yours.

No matter that many of the people telling you to go home have artificially stained their own skin a darker shade than yours.

Bit more melanin? Go back home.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that humans need other humans to hate. If it’s not skin colour it’s religion. If it’s not religion it is denomination within a religion. Or the next county over, supporters of that `other’ football team.

There seems to be a sizeable proportion of humanity that can only define itself by not being what other people are. That are threatened by the possibility that we are not all the same.

They are prisoners of that mentality, so scared of the thought that there is another way to look, to be, to feel, to think, that their only response is to banish it. And if it won’t go quietly, then to obliterate it.

So obviously there’s no one reading this who is a racist. And while we’re at it, let’s assume there is no one reading this who is a bigot either.

Because then it would be really awful to be you. We all deserve to be happier and more at peace with ourselves than that.