19
Quentin Williams
On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump proposed that he “knows words” and has “the best words” (Trump 2017a). In early January 2018, he used these “best words” to denigrate immigrants from Haiti and African countries. Following a bipartisan proposal by Democratic Senator Dick Durbin that would protect thousands of young immigrants from deportation and include 1.6 billion dollars for Trump’s border wall, Trump convened a meeting in the Oval Office to discuss immigration policy. Durbin, speaking later to reporters, recounted Trump’s lament: the US is accepting immigrants from “shithole” countries in Africa. Trump also railed against immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Haiti who leave their countries as a result of natural disasters. In particular, Trump fumed that Haitians require temporary protected status, shooting down Durbin’s proposal: “We don’t need more Haitians. Put me down for wanting more Europeans to come to this country,” he added. “Why don’t we get more people from Norway?” (Kirby 2018).
In the aftermath of his comments, the outrage from beyond the shores of the US came hard and fast: condemnation from the UN, the Holy See, Uganda, Botswana, the African Union (AU), and the President of El Salvador. US Embassy officials were summoned by far-flung governments to explain Trump’s “shithole” remark. Across social media platforms, Trump’s comments were condemned as racist.
But Trump himself denied Durbin’s account of his words, while aides and supporters soon came to his defense. Unsurprisingly, others present in the Oval Office denied Trump used “vulgar language,” but neither could they confirm whether he said the word at all. This is a familiar strategy that we have come to expect from supporters of the US president and the GOP (Grand Old Party). Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, for instance, told a Senate Judiciary Committee: “I did not hear that word [shithole] used,” going on to say, “The conversation was very impassioned. I don’t dispute that the president was using tough language. Others in the room were also using tough language.” Though she could not recall him saying “shithole,” she said, he may have used the word “shithouse” (Kim 2018). Baffled by this response? Well, so were others.
The world has long recognized that Trump frequently uses his “best words” to mis-manage his language. He gives incoherent speeches and drifts off mid-tweet, typing non-words such as the now-infamous “covfefe” (Andrews 2017). He coins neologisms such as “bigly” (ignoring the rules of degrees of comparison) and mispronounces basic terms, such as “yuge” (huge). He pointlessly repeats words and phrases (“many, many”), and blunders the names of political groups (“Nazzies” instead of Nazis). But for citizens from Haiti, Africa, the Global South, or indeed anyone not from the Aryan race, Trump’s “shithole” utterance was the latest in a long list of racial profanity and insults. It confirmed to us that Donald Trump has lost control of his “best words.”
In this chapter, I start by analyzing some of the ideological and linguistic mechanisms by which Trump divulges his racism. I draw on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1968) to suggest that with his “shithole” language, Trump attempts to frame the Global South as a site of degeneracy, dirt, and matter out of place; essentially, as a form of pollution. In so doing, he encourages paranoid xenophobia of an historically familiar sort. I also analyze some of Trump’s attempts to deflect charges of racism, drawing on a theoretical framework by sociologist Edward Bonilla-Silva (2002, 2006), who described several discursive strategies Whites tend to use to defend what he terms “color-blind racism.” In the final section, I document how media and institutions in Southern Africa responded to Trump’s racist language as they employed discursive strategies of parody, critique, and egalitarianism to encourage non-racialism. By “non-racialism” I do not mean “color-blindness,” in the sense that White speakers often proclaim “I don’t see color” or “I don’t believe in race” as a way to deny the legacy and history of racism. Non-racialism is acutely aware of racial inequities, past and present. As a term taken up by the Civil Rights Movement and in the Brown versus Board of Education decision, it is a specific brand of anti-racism that denotes a utopic society – a not-yet future; a future society without racists. In their rejoinders to Donald Trump, these non-racialist advocates attempt to compensate for his verbal injuries while recognizing the equality and dignity of people throughout the world.
19.1Trump, Race, and “Pollution”
Trump is surely one of the “whitest” presidents the nation has ever seen, aggressively embodying the qualities of White privilege, nativism, and bigotry (Coates 2017: 341). But his prejudices did not appear suddenly; in fact, they began decades before his political ascendancy, when he was first embroiled in racist discourses with regards to housing practices and an array of public partisan issues. Early in his career in real estate, for instance, he made a concerted effort not to rent apartments to Black and Puerto Rican tenants – a pattern so egregious that in 1973, the Civil Rights Division filed a lawsuit against Trump and his father Fred Trump (Gerstein 2017). He made racist remarks about the Central Park five, a group of young black and brown men unjustly charged with raping and assaulting a white woman in 1989. Trump took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for their execution, telling Larry King, “Maybe hate is what we need” (Segura 2016). Even after the five were exonerated by DNA evidence and compensated by the city of New York, Trump never walked back his comments (Cobb 2019). More recently, he led the Birtherism crusade against President Barack Obama, insisting that Obama was born outside of the United States and thus an illegitimate leader – an unfounded rumor that has given traction to the White supremacist right for years. Since taking office, Trump’s list of bigoted policy maneuvers and statements has grown too long to list. But all of this furnishes the clear ideological backdrop for Trump’s use of the word “shithole.” At one level, the word marks a loss of control, constituting a shocking verbal boundary violation for the person in the highest American political office. But at another level it is no accidental slip; rather, it is a coherent expression of Trump’s systematic discrimination against minorities and vulnerable people.
The word also draws on a widespread discursive pattern that uses the imagery of pollution to subordinate social groups. Anthropologists have treated pollution as a socially important concept since the 1966 publication of Mary Douglas’ book Purity and Danger. Douglas opened her argument by exploring those social moments when the profane invades the sacred. Religious institutions have historically tried to govern and control these boundaries, protecting the sacred from the profane by drawing discursive and ritualistic lines between purity and its negative twin, impurity. Breaches of the sacred tend to be construed as matter out of place; “dirty” in a deep sense that goes beyond mere physical grime. But in the secular world, too, the things we consider polluted or “dirty” are, Douglas argues, “a by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting appropriate elements” (Douglas 1966: 34–35). One of Douglas’ fundamental insights, then, was that any given notion of pollution or dirtiness emerges from an attempt to establish social order. Imagery of dirt or pollution denotes the “violation” of “a system of values” (Douglas 1968: 338), a challenge to a dominant (or preferred) social scheme.
Across many societies, then, notions of pollution are used to uphold not only religious orders, but also secular bigotry. Discourse about pollution has historically saturated White ideas about racial difference, for instance, furnishing a quasi-natural rationalization of brutal hierarchical orders such as slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, in which those with power have a vested interest in keeping others down. Trump’s Oval Office allusion to “shithole” nations drew on this historically venerable conceptual structure. When he added he wanted more “people from Norway,” it is surely not an accident that his preferred demographic hails from one of the northernmost and whitest societies he could imagine, setting up a racial and geographic foil, as well as an economic one. The Norwegians, in his schema, are pristine and privileged and therefore desirable as immigrants; those from “shithole” nations in the Global South represent a dangerous and almost sub-human population. Never mind that the privilege of Europe and struggles of the Global South are products of colonialism, capitalism, and American foreign policy. For Trump, the differences simply exist as a binary opposition: pure versus impure.
A further insight from Mary Douglas is that imagined pollution is often considered metaphysically contaminating, a stigma that often drives strong, censorious reactions. The prospect of danger or defilement is just what Trump plays on as he hypes his base’s anxiety about immigration. His discourse stokes the fear: those entering from Middle Eastern nations are potentially dangerous terrorists; Latinx immigrants from Mexico are “rapists,” “criminals,” and “animals” (see Santa Ana et al., this volume); and those from sub-Saharan Africa (and other points southern) bring the contamination of the toilets they supposedly come from. Yet in spite of his sweeping, irrational distortions, Trump denies that he is a racist.
19.2Denial, Equivocation, and Projection: Trump’s “Color-Blind” Racism
In this section, I use a micro-linguistic approach to examine some of Trump’s other discourse about race, drawing primarily on the framework of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2002, 2006). Bonilla-Silva has drawn attention to how White Americans in recent decades have tended to play down the significance of race as a way of distancing themselves from racism, yet still manage to convey racialized opinions. These problematic “color-blind” strategies often attempt to explain racial inequality in terms of other differences. While Bonilla-Silva enumerates several stylistic verbal features associated with color-blind racism, I focus on three in particular: denial, equivocation, and racist projection. I then draw briefly on a theoretical framework developed by linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill (2008) to analyze a complement to these; namely, Trump’s apparent indifference to audiences from Africa.
An exceedingly common rhetorical gambit among Whites in the post-civil rights era, says Bonilla-Silva, is pronouncements such as “I’m not a racist,” which often appear as “discursive buffers” just before or after statements that might indeed be interpreted as racist (2006: 57). Trump used this stylistic move in the wake of his “shithole” remark. When confronted by a press pool with the reports from the Oval Office, Trump immediately contradicted his critics: “No. No. I am not racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed. That I can tell you” (Brito 2018). He further expounded on Twitter: “Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said ‘take them out.’ Made up by Dems. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings – unfortunately, no trust!” (Donald Trump on Twitter, January 12, 2018). Denial of racism has a long pattern in Trump’s discourse. The Washington Post compiled a list of six times since 2015 that he explicitly denied being racist or bigoted (Scott 2018). He told Barbara Walters he was “probably the least [bigoted] person you’ve ever met,” and parroted himself to CNN’s Don Lemon, saying: “I am the least racist person that you have ever met” (ibid.). When asked in 2016 by a New York Post reporter whether his remarks on Mexicans and Muslims reflected racism, Trump replied, “I am not a racist; in fact, I’m the least racist person you’ve ever encountered” (ibid.). The iterations go on. With his serial denials, Trump is clearly invested in what Bonilla-Silva calls the “anything but race” explanation for his recurrent denigration of people of color.
A second common discursive strategy in color-blind racism is equivocation: “Stating racial views without opening yourself to the charge of racism [by] apparently taking all sides on an issue” (Bonilla-Silva 2002: 50). Some speakers, for instance, use the formulation, “Yes and no, but …” to imply they don’t wish to take sides, while simultaneously taking an underlying stand on a controversial racial subject. Trump used precisely this style in his infamous remarks after the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017. The rally had been marked by conflict between White supremacist organizers and protesters, with one protester dying after being brutally rammed by a supremacist’s car. Trump’s statement afterward was famously equivocal; as journalists pressed him to condemn the actions and ideologies of the rally participants, he said: “I watched [the videos] very closely – much more closely than you people watched it. And you have – you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent” (Trump 2017b). Later in the same press conference, he added, “You had some very bad people in that [Neo-Nazi] group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides” (Holan 2019). The “very fine people, on both sides” remark was widely perceived by his critics as a failure to unequivocally condemn the murderous bigotry of Nazis, and hence as tacit approval of their White nationalism.
A third rhetorical technique of color-blind racism, says Bonilla-Silva, is racial projection, in which a speaker reverses the charge of racism to pin it on a person of color and avoid responsibility themselves. Trump is only too happy to deny that he himself is racist, but quick to lob the charge at others. Consider the following exchange from a November 2018 White House news conference, in which Trump exchanges words with Haitian-American journalist Yamiche Alcindor (PBS NewsHour 2018; video excerpt starts at the beginning).1
Alcindor:hi Mr. President Yamiche Alcindor with PBS NewsHourum, on the campaign trail you called yourself a nationalist some people saw that as emboldening White nationalists now people are [also saying that the Pres-]
Trump: [I don’t know why you would say that] that’s such a ra:cist question-
Alcindor:there’s some people that say [that]=
Trump: [no]
Alcindor:=now the Republican party is seen as supporting White nationalists [because of your rhetoric-]
Trump:[oh I don’t believe that] I don’t believe it=
Alcindor:=what do you make of that
Trump:I don’t believe that I don’t believe – I dunno, why do I have my highest poll numbers EVER with African Americans why do I have among the highest poll numbers WITH African Americans I mean why do I have my highest poll numbers- that’s such a RACIST questionhonestly? I mean I know you have it written down and you’re going to tell me- let me you- that’s a racist (.) question.
Alcindor:um, Mr. President I’m gonna ask=
Trump:=I love that- you know what the word is? I love our country (.) I doyou call – you have nationalists, you have globalists. I also love the world and I don’t mind helping the world but we have to straighten out our country first we have a lot of problems
Alcindor:and mis-=
Trump:=excuse mebut to say thatwhat you said is so insulting to me.it’s a very terrible thing that you said-
Trump not only denies that he is a nationalist (which, in this context, is code for “White nationalist”), but also projects racism onto Alcindor herself. Even though Alcindor seeks clarity on Trump’s self-ascription and its implications, furthermore, Trump suggests that she look at his rising poll numbers among African Americans, as if such a thing would furnish evidence of his lack of racism. (For the record, Trump garnered 8 percent of the African American vote in the 2016 election; there’s been almost nowhere to go but up.) Claiming that “I love the world and I don’t mind helping the world” may even be Trump’s way of implying he embraces people of all races, including those locales numerically dominated by non-Whites. When he adds, “We have to straighten out our country first,” his justification is intended to sound responsible rather than racist – taking us back to the “anything but race” strategy of color-blind racism.
But this putatively world-loving man has some difficulty with his geography, and the difficulty can be traced to his racial attitudes. Take, for example, what some have cheekily referred to as “Nambia-gate.” In Southern Africa, we all saw it and we replayed it; Trump twice said “Nambia” and not “Namibia” when he addressed leaders from Africa during a lunch he hosted in New York on September 20, 2017. “I’m greatly honored to host this lunch,” Trump opened, “To be joined the Leaders of Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Nambia, Nigeria, Senegal, Uganda, and South Africa” (The Washington Post 2017). About three minutes later, he added: “Nambia’s health system is increasingly self-sufficient.” Jane Hill (2008) has written about a related dynamic in Anglo-American mispronunciations of Spanish. According to Hill, Whites in the USA often engage in a “mock” variety of Spanish, which sometimes involves hyperanglicization and clumsy spelling or pronunciation. Street and subdivision names in Arizona, for instance, are often distorted from the original Spanish, reflecting a disregard for the language’s integrity and, Hill argues, the dignity of the people who speak it as well. Trump’s “Nambia” gaffe seems to reflect, at minimum, his ignorance (assuming the gaffe was not conscious) and his disregard for the importance of African nations. For him to have made the error twice before a largely African live audience suggests an insulting level of indifference.
19.3Non-Racial Linguistic Clap-Backs: Southern African Media and Institutions Respond
Southern African media and institutions have responded with both mockery and objection to Trump’s defilement and disrespect, attempting to reclaim a sense of dignity while insinuating that if anyone in these exchanges is a polluter, it’s Trump himself. Sometimes, parody is a useful strategy for getting these concepts across. Not long after Trump’s “Nambia” blunder, for instance, a Namibian based tourism group, Gondwana Collection, created a video entitled “Trump – ‘S**thole Countries’ – shithole statement by NAMIBIA” (words that are immediately followed by two poop emojis; EES 2018). The video opens with images of the American flag, Statue of Liberty, and American tourists, before panning across numerous images of Namibia’s beautiful landmarks, landscapes, and wildlife. In a parodic version of Trump’s voice, the narrator voices over:
Good morning Trump America [sic]. If ever you wanted to leave your so beautiful and perfect country, and come to real shithole country in Africa, we would like to invite you to come to shithole Namibia. One of the best shithole countries out there. No really, we actually have a beautiful underground lake that even looks just like a shithole – Lake Oshikoto. Actually, Namibia is such a shithole country that we converted about forty-two percent of it into various conservation areas where wild shithole animals can roam freely. Not only is our country a shithole place, even our elephants are highly qualified to dump large amounts of shit everywhere ((here, the image briefly changes over to an animated clay lump of shit with Trumpish hair, eyebrows, and pursed open mouth at a lectern, before returning to beautiful landscapes)) in our wide-open shithole country. Our desert is such a shithole of a place, believe me, that there hasn’t been any proper rain in the last couple of million years, which makes it the oldest shithole desert in the world. But thanks to you not caring about global warming, this could soon end. And we can get lots of rain, while the rest of the shithole countries out there burn or freeze off completely. It is really tough out here, but shithole Nambia has over 300 days of sunshine and our lodges are situated in such a way that one has the perfect view over this beautiful shithole, even while taking a shit. So, you’re more than welcome to visit Africa’s number one shithole country, known to your president as ((camera cuts to the actual video of Trump’s address, and his own voice)) “Nambia.”
(EES 2018)
The parodied voice mocks Trump’s racist language as part of an elaborate comedic payback. “Trump” sounds absurd as the pristine scenes from Namibia glaringly contradict Trump’s charge that African nations are polluting. The tables are turned, too, as the word “shithole” is ironically used to refer to stunningly beautiful (instead of ugly) places, reasserting that Namibia (and one could even extrapolate this to Africa writ large) is a place that matters rather than being matter out of place. There’s just one moment in the video that keys a subterranean message about the meaning of the word “shit”; namely, that moment when a clay Trump-as-lump-of-shit appears. Trump himself, it seems, is the real polluter, by virtue of his offensive words, rather than his race, and his absurd “Nambia” pronunciation furnishes the final punchline of the piece. The video won acclaim from within and outside of Namibia, with dozens of comments applauding its message. Its non-racialized images of Namibia help recuperate a dignified image of the country, hard won over the decades since colonialism.
Political figures and journalists, too, came to the defense of Africa’s pride and importance. When news first broke about Trump’s “shithole” insult, the media in Southern Africa first under-reported the event, but the relevance of the story intensified, and in the growing outrage, a diplomatic crisis began to brew. South African scholars David Monyane and Bhaso Ndzendze (2018) penned an opinion piece for The Independent Online (IOL) news that described Trump’s shithole comments as “a new low: one which will leave a number of ambassadors with a lot of cleaning-up to do.” They go on: “For President Trump to label Africa, along with other developing regions, as ‘shitholes,’ is to betray a glaring ignorance of Africa and its overwhelming importance to America’s strategic objectives, global soft power and economic partner[ships].” This piece accomplishes two things. First, it foregrounds the recognition fundamental to non-racial frameworks, reasserting Africa’s economic and political importance by way of such words as “strategic,” “global power,” and “partner.” Second, it implies (like the parodic video from Namibia) that Trump himself is the polluting one. After all, his verbal diarrhea has left others holding the mop.
Around the same time, there was a flurry of diplomatic movement against Trump’s words coming out of South Africa and beyond. South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) government “demarched” the US embassy representative – in other words, took a formal political step to address diplomatic relations – and demanded an explanation for Trump’s “shithole” remark. ANC spokesperson Clayson Monyela affirmed the maneuver, underscoring that relations between the USA and South Africa should “be based on mutual respect and understanding” (News24 Wire 2018). Meanwhile, ANC deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte slammed Trump’s comments, saying that although African countries have their problems, “We would not deign to make comments as derogatory about any country facing difficulties” (Gerber 2018). A representative from the official opposition party in South Africa, the Democratic Alliance (DA), tweeted that Trump’s comments had been “abhorrent,” and that he holds “a patronizing view of Africa and promotes a racist agenda. Africa/US relations will take strain from this, with a leader who has failed to reconcile humanity. The hatred of Obama’s roots now extends to an entire continent” (Byran 2018). Meanwhile, the AU released a stern press statement expressing “infuriation, disappointment, and outrage” (ibid.). Taking the moral high ground, the AU suggested Trump’s administration had indulged in a “huge misunderstanding of the African continent and its people.” His remark, they added, was a “dishonor” to the supposedly defining American values of diversity and human dignity. Though the institution still values the “strategic partnership” of the US, it demanded “an apology to not only to the Africans but to all people of African descent around the globe” (African Union Commission 2018).
In all of these responses, we note several verbal strategies that attempt to reclaim the pride of Africa. Some try to level the playing field by cutting Trump down to size, decrying his racism, and pointing out the ignorance implicit in his “huge misunderstanding.” Several boomerang the charge of being polluting right back at him, though again, notice that Trump is framed as polluting not on grounds of race, but on grounds that his dirty, messy insult constitutes matter- (or word-)-out-of-place. This maneuver establishes African politicians, intellectuals, and professionals as qualified to put things to rights and indeed to purify in the wake of a contaminating American president. Other strategies we have just seen emphasize the importance of inclusiveness, underscoring the utopian ideals of mutual respect and equality. And all demand recognition of Africa’s strategic, global importance, recovering it from the margins Trump relegated it to. Finally, it’s worth noting that all of these rejoinders are coded in a high form of English, reaffirming the authors’ globally salient intellectual credentials and status. If Trump attempts to frame sub-Saharan African nations as polluted and contaminating, this language restores their dignity and indeed their importance, enhancing the agency and role of Africa on a global stage.
19.4Conclusion
Since candidate Trump was first introduced to the media, his “best words” have augmented global discourses of racism, to the point of normalizing them for some. From the Philippines to Brazil, Trumpian racist language has given strongman politicians carte blanche to spread the dirt of social division, nativism, protectionism, White supremacy, and ethnonationalism. Trump’s daily archive of racist exhortations on Twitter and television require that we suggest a global language strategy in response. The strategies we see above from Southern Africa furnish one example of how to challenge the spread of Trumpian racist language. First, we need to recognize and call out the ideology and strategy implicit in even seemingly throwaway profanity like Trump’s “shithole.” Such language is not only messy but also strategic and historically archaic, stoking deep anxieties about pollution and whipping up fear against immigrants. Second, we need to recognize Trump’s strategies of denial as part of a wider pattern of White deflection and naïve color-blindness, as Bonilla-Silva reminds us, rather than taking anything at face value. Finally, Southern African institutions have offered us a couple of maneuvers: parodic and/or dignified responses. Parody comes from a place of agency, and it’s particularly good for showing up hypocrisy. And the dignified responses shown by so many in South Africa provide reminders the Global South is of strategic importance, deflecting the racist temptation to key people as racially “other,” as nothing, as invisible, and as insignificant. Calls to repair through apology assert that such desecrations will not stand unremarked on, while reminders of equality reach toward the utopia of a non-racist world. As unfinished as racial equality is in South Africa, its approach to Trump’s racist language at least teaches us this: Non-racial language might be just the right anti-pollutant to Trump’s “best words.”
Note
1.Transcription conventions most relevant to the analysis in this chapter include the use of CAPITALS to indicate talk spoken with special emphasis. A left bracket ([) marks the onset, and a right bracket (]) marks the offset of overlapping talk. Numbers in parentheses – for example, (1.2) – note the length of silences in seconds, while a single period in parentheses (.) indicates a micropause of less than 0.1 seconds. A dash (-) marks the cut-off of the current sound. An equal sign (=) indicates “latching,” where talk starts up in especially close temporal proximity to the end of the previous talk. Punctuation symbols are used to mark intonation changes rather than as grammatical symbols: a period indicates a falling contour; a question mark, a rising contour; and a comma, a falling-rising contour, as might be found in the midst of a list. Each line of text (without a hard return) indicates talk spoken within a single breath group.
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