Eating Dogs and Other Immigrant Slurs
Mom never learned to speak Italian even though her parents, immigrants from Italy in the early 20th Century, knew little English. As a child in north Philadelphia she experienced vicious taunts against Italians for her darker look, her parents’ accents, the family culture. She felt ashamed and tried to distance herself from her heritage. When she married an Irish fella during World War II, both families considered it a scandal… a “mixed marriage” with enough prejudice and hurt to go around. Irish immigrants, too, suffered vicious stereotyping — portrayed as drunks, thugs, violent semi-humans. And Catholics… the ugly stereotypes about Catholic ethnic immigrants fueled violence and hatred for generations.
(Photo left: My mother and her mom outside Uncle Al’s barber shop in the 1920’s in Philadelphia)
When Donald Trump went on a rant full of falsehoods and utterly despicable comments about Haitian immigrants in Ohio “eating dogs, eating cats, eating pets” during last week’s presidential debate, he was not merely riffing on something that just popped into his head. Nor was he simply repeating an outright lie that he heard on some television station. In fact he was assuming the centuries-old mantle of the Know Nothings, the nativist political movement from the early 19th Century comprised of Christian (not Catholic) whites who exerted rabid hatred against immigrants who were entering the United States in large numbers — from Europe. These immigrants were also white Christians (but largely Catholic, a distinctive difference), but the stereotypes denouncing them were ripped right out of the slave-holding playbook — they were stereotyped in language and images that demeaned and diminished immigrants as lesser beings, semi-human, unworthy of respect, dangerous creatures who needed to be controlled if not eradicated. (The cartoon image below, right, shows a typical Irish caricature in the 19th century — drunk, violent, distorted features.) Note that Asian immigrants, too, were long accused of eating dogs and other completely false tropes. Demeaning immigrants is, sadly, an old American story.
The Black population of America, of course, knew all about this hatred against “the other” — slavery might have been abolished with Emancipation in 1865 but the stereotypes, contempt, vicious hatred of Black persons continued unabated — and the whites who perpetrated the ugly racial stereotypes used those same ideas against the ethnic whites who were — not necessarily “pouring across the border” but entering largely through Ellis Island. Italians, Irish, Poles, Slovaks — the white Christian Know Nothings portrayed white ethnic immigrants as akin to the Black persons who were so feared and reviled.
And so the struggle for mastery of the American soul continues even today on the subject of race and ethnicity and ownership of this great nation. What is so hypocritical in the current moment, however, is the fact that we all know the ugly history; most of our families experienced some form of the rampant discrimination against immigrants in the 19th and 20th Centuries. And yet too many Americans — Irish, Italian, Polish, German, Catholic — have embraced the stereotypes and racism against immigrants that once plagued our own families. Too many Americans who are just a generation or two away from the poverty and sorrow of the immigrant experience now tolerate the terrible offenses against human dignity hurled against other people, sins committed against the moral values we should be proclaiming as a supposedly advanced nation proclaiming “liberty and justice for all.” Except you, the Haitians, the Hondurans, the Mexicans, the Ethiopians, the Salvadoreans… the “others.”
It’s certainly obvious that the greatest hatred against immigrants today extends mostly toward immigrants of color — Hispanic and Black immigrants from Mexico, central America, the Caribbean, Haiti, Africa. Immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes and great violence in their native countries. We don’t hear much about white immigrants coming across the northern border or arriving through JFK or LAX.
Where is our moral outrage? When a candidate for president of the United States stands up at the debate podium and spews so much venom, why do we still tolerate the rhetoric? Why do we look away, slightly embarrassed, maybe chuckling because it’s so weirdly ridiculous.
It’s not ridiculous or funny or excusable. It’s not nuts. It’s outrageous in a way that should have all of us on our feet demanding an end to the blatant racist assaults on human dignity.
Yes, immigration policy is a mess, and has been. Yes, let’s have the debate about the best way to solve the immigration crisis! But nothing gets solved through the repeated, deliberate and horrific trashing of people who came to this country seeking a better life, just as my grandparents did, and probably yours, too.
It’s time for all of us to put our collective foot down to say, “Stop! Stop the trash talk, the disparagement of other people, the vicious stereotyping and lies about immigrants!” The anti-immigrant rhetoric is a scandal to this nation and the world.
We can and must do better, America.
