Last week President Trump mined another nugget from the caverns of America’s racist past, when the White House launched its “Aliens” webpage. Amid UFO-themed art and typography, the page spouts the headline “They Walk Among Us,” then states:
Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. … President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.1
For centuries, America’s mythmakers – politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, and even so-called scientists – have manufactured racial and ethnic fear to generate law and policy. That fear-driven mythology continues to resonate with many white Americans – and with people of all colors all over the world.
White people have always been afraid of Black and brown people – indeed, such fear was what drove American colonial landowners to create the false story of race in the first place.2 Historically, white fear has manifested not only as violence, but also as grievance – backlash against gains for People of Color to prevent any loss of white wealth and power.
My own ancestors participated in this mythmaking process – my UDC second-great aunts, brainwashing children with “catechisms,” and my third-great grandfather Charley Russell, a slave trader turned racist poet, who called out the “negro-loving Scallawags.”3 But, for the most part, my ancestors were but small cogs in the fear-mongering machine. We need to talk about its designers and the pistons in its engine.
