It was a haunting twilight illuminating enormous mountain peaks as my partner Todd and I drove on Interstate 80 from Evanston, Wyo., back toward Utah last month. We were finishing a long day of exploring the east-west Uinta mountain range, then entering the expansive land and sky of Wyoming’s southwest corner on a dirt road with a ghost town and a partial rainbow over rows of distant windmills.
The light was fading fast as we wound our way home with a railroad to our right built up on a ridge with one of the longest trail of train cars either of us had ever seen. I watched the cars stream through carrying the building and selling blocks of Americanism just as they had done since the Transcontinental Railroad opened through this stretch in 1869, finally allowing coast-to-coast commerce and, thus, the nation’s growth. Eventually the Union Pacific Railroad funded the building of the Aspen Tunnel through the daunting mountains near Evanston over 13 years, finally opening in 1902 making the route that extended train travel from Iowa all the way to San Francisco faster and less treacherous.
Along with mining jobs and food service, Chinese immigrants made up 80% to 90% of the laborers the railroad companies hired to cut that momentous railroad through those gorgeous mountains. Many of those immigrants had fled to this nation to escape poverty and devastating conflict and violence back home. They were willing to do dangerous manual labor many white Americans would not do, and they worked for low pay amid terrible conditions with the high risk of injury or death. They even went on strike in 1867 demanding more pay, and back east of Evanston a white mob later massacred 28 Chinese coal miners in Rock Springs in 1885 and burned the local Chinatown.
Without Chinese immigrants, the transcontinental railroad might not have happened. “Chinese labor proved to be Central Pacific’s salvation,” Richard White wrote in his 2011 book “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.”
But that didn’t stop white Americans—especially those calling themselves “Native Americans” if they descended from European settlers in the “new world” before 1775—from turning on Chinese immigrants. Thirteen years after the Transcontinental Railroad opened, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, legislation that was renewed and expanded until its final repeal in 1943 after China joined the Allies in World War 2. Measures tacked over the decades after 1882 ungratefully barred Chinese people in the U.S. from access to basic bail bonds and other government services.
Early xenophobes had many names for the Chinese whom they considered the “lowest and vilest of the human race”—at least until another group became the bigots’ target of the day. White Americans, newspaper editors and leaders called hard-working Chinese people “coolies,” “barbarians,” “heathens,” “paupers” and “rat-eaters.”
The Chinese immigrants already here, though, after the exclusion act were certainly still invited to do the back-breaking work white Americans didn’t want to do and for as little pay as possible while taking continual abuse from racists. It was an early version of a dark U.S. habit that continues today as the current presidential campaign cycle brings into full relief.
Remembering ‘San Domingo’
Donald Trump’s and J.D. Vance’s racist attacks on Haitian immigrants who are helping revitalize the economy in Springfield, Ohio, certainly increased their laughing-stock quotient and Internet memes—the racist attacks have brought bomb threats to local schools and are devastating the community there.
But Trump’s and surrogates’ mob attack on Haitians is only the latest episode in a deep and horrifying history of American bigotry toward immigrants who have long fled war, mistreatment and religious intolerance back home, just as many ancestors of people reading this did. Personally, my Quaker ancestors—an entire family with their kids—were jailed in England for their faith choices, and I can’t even track my Scottish ancestors easily possibly because they ended up in prison camps here or stowed away to escape English brutality. Todd descends from the Anabaptist (Mennonite) Stauffers who were run out of Switzerland or even hurled out of a castle to their death for the heresy of believing that only true believers should be baptized.
But many white immigrants, even those abused back home, acted in different ways once they got here. They became the oppressors they fled, whether by trying to lock their escape hatches behind them with racist excuses, brutalizing actual Native Americans or even my own Quaker people using Black slave labor to rebuild their lives and create wealth. Donald Trump himself descends from Scots and Germans—the latter a group many of the white American, um, originalists looked down on until they over time welcomed them into the circle of supposedly superior whiteness—which requires the disparagement of other peoples to maintain that myth of superiority.
Trump’s own grandfather fled Germany in 1885 to dodge the draft there—and his now-infamous grandson has often lied about his heritage, even in his own books, maintaining that he was actually Swedish, thus positioning himself as a descendant of mythical Nordic superiority. Trump’s cousin says father Trump had originally requested the ruse.
None of this complicated ancestral truth matters to those pushing “America First” and “Make America Great Again” racism—Trump didn’t come up with either of those phrases—in order to build their personal capital and stature on the backs of other people. And they don’t care who they hurt to do it. The immigrant-bashing cycle has repeated over and over again through our history, often led by educated and wealthy people who gain power through disparagement and then use it to appeal to poorer people grasping at excuses to not feel like they’re the bottom of the barrel.
The ugly, ugly words about eating pets Trump and Vance are using now to harm legal Haitian immigrants, including those who fled worsening poverty and violence back home since the 2021 assassination of their president and several devastating natural disasters, are just a way to light the same old fires of hatred and fear. It harkens back to the 19th century when wealthy Americans called Chinese people “rat-eaters” and even to my childhood here in Mississippi when I heard constantly that Asian people ate dogs and Catholics performed human sacrifices.
In a bit of racist lagniappe, the anti-Haitian furphy also serves as a play for votes from white southerners these vote-seekers believe, rightly or wrongly, were taught over generations that the South had to fight the Civil War, you know, to supposedly stave off a repeat of the 1804 massacre of white colonists after the Haiti Revolution overthrew the French colonizers. Never mind that French revolutionaries back home had done the same to their overthrown rulers and aristocracy during the decade before, as memorialized in the recent summer Olympics in Paris. The Haitian victors, in turn, established the first former slave-founded nation after centuries of Spanish and French rule and enslavement.
Neo-Confederates who defend Confederate Heritage Month and deny that the South fought the Civil War over slavery will still use that 1804-era excuse to sow fears about dangerous Black people to scare the white people who cling to the past with their Confederate man caves and perpetually re-enact Civil War battles, just as the original Ku Klux Klan embraced scare tactics to keep Black people from voting and white teachers from educating Black children back during Reconstruction.
In a 1927 speech, the son of Stephen D. Lee—a plantation owner, former Confederate leader, high-level “Lost Cause” propagandist and first president of my alma mater, Mississippi State University—talked about his dad bringing him to their Noxubee County plantation gate to watch “the long procession of the Ku Klux Klan riding past, mysterious, silent and white.” Blewett Harrison Lee told the audience that his dad had joined the KKK “patrols” to prevent “reenactments upon the prairies of Mississippi of the terrible deeds done during the race insurrection on the island of San Domingo.”
Generations of southerners knew and know exactly what that mention of “San Domingo” evokes. I will never believe that the choice of immigrants to pick on this past week was not intentional considering Trump’s strength among Confederacy apologists in the American South.
‘Replacement: ‘A Voting Right Question’
Of course, now-felon Donald Trump launched his original presidential campaign by accusing his most commonly disparaged group—people from south of our border—of “bringing drugs, crime and rapists” to the U.S. Then he soon shared neo-Nazi lies about Black crime here. As if we haven’t had plenty of white-skinned criminals living among us in the U.S. since our founding, including the bloody First Mississippi Plan to violently end Reconstruction and its Black voting and legal rights. All this prevaricating may be Trump projection, of course: We all know that a judge ruled that he, in fact, raped E. Jean Carroll.
The revival of the Replacement Theory (now with “Great” in front of it and pushed by the likes of Tucker Carlson to adult audiences and Andrew Tate to teenage boys, not to mention being embraced by Trump’s constant campaign companion Laura Loomer), is a recycled trope to froth up fear of one or another migrant group. Simply put, the theory at its most sanitized portends that today’s Democrats are trying to “replace” white voters with immigrants in order to hasten the supposed deterioration of the nation that white people becoming a minority in the U.S. (predicted by 2045) will surely bring.
But Replacement Theory roots and beliefs are even darker than that.
In the mid-1990s, in the midst of the mythical superpredator freakout about Black boys supposedly born to be violent criminals, neo-Nazi David Lane, the founder of terrorist organization The Order and author of the racist “Fourteen Words” manifesto, popularized the “white genocide theory.” The scare tactic is a kissing cousin of original Replacement Theory rhetoric that dates back to slavery times and still inspires mass shootings in the modern era. In fact, In April 1996, sniper Larry Shoemake of South Jackson set up in an abandoned PoFolks restaurant to kill Black people shopping at the Ellis Isle Shopping Center just 7.9 miles from where I sit writing on my screen porch. His inspirations were both Hitler, of course, and William Pierce’s “Turner Diaries,” a racist bible that calls for a race war to prevent replacement of superior white people.
Replacement Theory has long meshed up anti-semitism with hatred of select immigrants and Black people. David Lane’s influential storyline was steeped in pseudo race “science” about white people being born superior with higher IQs, yadda, yadda, and held that Jews, especially, were behind a sweeping conspiracy to replace white folk in countries like the U.S. with mass immigration and forced assimilation. Oh, and all them bad immigrants would likely kill us whites, you know, like those Haitians did the French back in 1804. This still-more-popular-than-most-realize theory says that race-mixing, LGBTQ+ rights, interracial marriage and “open borders” all contribute to the plan. They want you to be afraid of everything, people.
But seriously, though, be afraid enough to stop this backward journey. Be afraid for Black and Brown Americans that politicians are disparaging so easily. Be afraid when they go on and on about the supposed dangers of inclusion, diversity and equity, and be afraid for the hard-working Haitians in Vance’s adopted state of Ohio who are keeping their children home from school due to disgusting racist propaganda designed to scare white Americans with replacement inferiority B.S.
In fact, Vance himself has openly embraced the Replacement Theory conspiracy trope. In his 2022 campaign for Senate in Ohio, he claimed that Democrats are trying to “transform the electorate” by not climbing fully on board the anti-immigration train. He then warned on FOX News of a migrant “invasion,” saying that Democrats were planning to bring in “a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
On the surface and when not in their safe spaces like FOX, though, racial propagandists always will deny being racist as Tucker Carlson did on his show in April 2021 when he publicized his replacement theory: “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson proclaimed on Fox News Primetime as he played the victim. “If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
But don’t dare point out the racism of that blatant statement. “I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it,” the now former FOX News anchor insisted. “Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no. This is a voting right question.”
It’s really not. It’s plain old garden-variety, barely hooded, attack-the-hands-that-help-you racism.
Shades of the Know Nothing Party
Ultimately, real American history—the kind the weirdo replacement fusspots want banned and anti-DEI’d out of reach just as Nazi students banned books across Germany under the watchful eye of Joseph Goebbels—teaches us exactly what is unfolding now even on debate stages and again threatening the fiber of our democracy and actual freedom. We need to understand anti-immigration policies that shifting-over-time political parties have weaponized against Americans all the way back to the well-to-do Know Nothing Party of so-called Native (cough) Americans running on platforms defaming immigrants and, then, Catholics, including Irish and German.
Know-nothing nativist fervor was sure on display on that debate stage this week in Pennsylvania as one aging grandchild of an 1885 immigrant disparaged a fellow American child of 20th-century immigrants with darker skin and kept trying to twist every damn question into fearmongering about immigrants.
Be clear: The Chinese Exclusion Act was not the only horrifying legislation targeting specific groups who had invested blood, sweat and tears into our country—laws pushed by campaigns soaked with racist epithets. A long spate of anti-immigrant lobbying used the kinds of animalistic language that would later influence Adolf Hitler’s labeling of Jewish and Romani people, LGBTQ+ people and others as animalistic “untermenschen” as he marched toward the mass extermination that followed his mass deportations to camps. The monster dictator appropriated the term meaning “subhuman” from Harvard man and Klansman T. Lothrop Stoddard’s book branding “undesirable” U.S. immigrants including Jews and Italians and, of course, Black people as “undermen” destroying civilization.
We hear strains of Stoddard’s sick theory every day in our nation now, including each time a white person in a country stained by white terrorism whines incessantly about Black and Brown crime or spews bile at another immigrant group seeking better and safer lives for themselves and their families.
Racist U.S. immigration laws and their intentional use to supposedly “better human stock” really gained steam after three Harvard University graduates started the Immigration Restriction League in 1894 with blueblood Massachusetts statesman Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. soon joining as its public spokesman. The successful laws, which would ultimately block many Jews, including children, trying to flee Nazi Germany, were fast and furious (see timeline), but two in the early 20th century were especially pivotal.
The Immigration Act of 1917 was a sweeping law known as the “Asiatic Barred Zone Act” that built on the Chinese Exclusion Act and the reinforcing Geary Act of 1892 to prevent anyone from the Middle East to Southeast Asia—which bill crafters called “the Orient” then—from entering the U.S. even if being persecuted, with rare exceptions. The stated goal was a nod to the eugenics craze sweeping the nation, blocking “undesirables,” “imbeciles,” “feeble-minded,” “idiots,” and “persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” “epileptics” and anyone who had had “one or more attacks of insanity” or suffered from alcoholism or tuberculosis. The Barred Zone Act used epithets for the poor such as “vagrants,” “paupers” and “professional beggars.”
Newspapers of the time were gleeful about blocking “dusky Asiatics” and “Hindu hordes”; other epithets for South Asians have included “dothead,” “cow piss drinker” and “cow worshippers.” Experts say the sweeping bill, which included a English-language literacy test for anyone over 16 targeting certain Europeans, had much in common with Trump’s 2017 Muslim ban.
But that law wasn’t enough to support the racist fervor that swept the U.S. in the 1920s, uniting white progressive and conservative Americans with racism and drawing favor from newspaper editorial pages across the nation.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was the racist coup de grace and the culmination of decades of racist and eugenic propaganda across the U.S. It set a national quota and specific quotas on countries of origin based on U.S. population in the 1890s. The effort was a way to block most immigration from countries seen as undesirable, aside from the so-called superior bloodlines believed to come from Northern and Western Europe. The worst effects were felt in southern and eastern European countries including Italy and Poland, both considered inferior origins then before whiteness would later expand its base and, thus, numbers.
The use of “whiteness,” by the way, shifts what groups it invites in and isn’t about our skin tone. It means believing being “white” is “the standard by which all other groups are compared,” as the Smithsonian Museum of African American History & Culture explains the term. It is not the same as being white. The difference in definition matters. That is, I can’t help (and don’t mind) being white, but I refuse to be part of the scourge of whiteness that assumes superiority. It is a choice.
Put simply, those who need a false sense of white superiority to feel relevant and in charge need to maintain numbers to exercise racist power over others—a mythological pursuit that was in plain view at the presidential debate this week.
This nation of mostly immigrants has a long, long history of abusing, using up and spitting out other immigrants who did the hard work of building the United States, not to mention abhorrent treatment of true Native Americans. The targeted group du jour may shift over time, but the xenophobic rhetoric is nearly always the same: They’re taking our jobs, polluting our bloodlines, threatening our safety and using up our resources. And immigrants’ contributions to the American way are nearly always stuffed down a memory hole, including the taxes they also add to the public coffers and willingness to do the jobs other Americans don’t want.
In a tweet as I wrote this essay, fellow Mississippian and Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore called out the Trump mob’s worsening attack on Ohio Haitians. “The cruelty to and lying about Haitian immigrant families is satanic to the core,” he wrote. “Children are terrified and God is mocked. The time for repentance is now.”
It is far past time to replace this white American legacy of bigotry, racism and xenophobia. This disease hurts us all, weakens our nation, threatens democracy, and obliterates any claim of morality or basic human decency. And it probably sends the people who engage in it straight to hell.
Read Donna Ladd’s unfolding series of Democracy essays here.
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Note: A caption above, now corrected, originally identified Donald Trump’s father as his grandfather.
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