President Donald Trump and senior members of the Trump administration have recently mischaracterized basic points of American racial history. While Trump supporters defend these remarks as innocent, these “missteps” show a willful ignorance about American white supremacy aimed at generating a post-racial ideology of success and a complacency about our challenges connected to the legacy of slavery.
In comments to his department, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson compared the experience of slaves in the Transatlantic Slave Trade with the experience of willing migrants to to the United States. According to the Washington Post, Carson said:
"That's what America is about. A land of dreams and opportunity. There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” said Carson, speaking extemporaneously as he paced the room with a microphone. “But they, too, had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land."
In comparing slaves to immigrants, Carson equated the two as dreamers, but conveniently ignored the Transatlantic Slave Trade’s subordination of the enslaved. Yet, as the Post reported, attendees to Secretary Carson’s remarks did not believe he was making any untoward comments. Carson himself denied any intention of denying the realities of slavery. And in defense of the comparison between slavery and immigration, Eugene Volokh went so far as to quote a number of legal scholars as having compared chattel slavery and voluntary immigration. Conservative critics have even called those objecting to Carson’s comments “hypocritical” and argued that President Obama made a similar comparison.
But this mischaracterizing doesn’t stop with Secretary Carson. Earlier this year, President Trump commented that Frederick Douglass was someone “who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more,” implying that he wasn’t acquainted with the nineteenth century anti-slavery icon. And Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos called Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) “pioneers” of “school choice” while ignoring the fact that HBCUs were created because segregation forbad black students from attending white colleges and universities. Like Carson, DeVos’s comments have been pilloried and defended as innocent misstatements.
The defenses of “lack of evil intent” and “hey look, liberals (or academics) do it too” completely miss the point. These comments by Trump, DeVos, and Carson, read against the rhetoric and agenda of the administration, come off as tone-deaf about the history of the striving for racial equality and equal opportunity in the United States.