Trump and Vance are normalizing racist tropes
“You know, people in that Chinese restaurant serve cat meat.”
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard this slur and urban legend. I have, of course, been accused of eating dogs and asked if my parents cooked cats in our Chinese restaurant. For most of my life, my only remedy was to ignore, or shrug, or accept it as another racist trope to mock immigrant families and to make us look, feel and live as perpetual foreigners. It was usually not worth starting a fight over. But the stakes have changed.
“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in. They are eating the cats. They are eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what is happening in our country and it is a shame.” That was our former president in front of 67 million people on Tuesday night. A former president, talking about eating cats. He and his sidekick J.D. have legitimized this hateful and racist trope in our policy debate. They are justifying and elevating these lies and in the minds of many, making it true.
Others then take these lies and run with them. This week, I saw a social media post from a Connecticut politician. Someone commented: “I have a few friends in Ohio, and they said that they are killing and eating geese ducks and cats (I) said so far they are leaving the dogs alone.” The politician replied with a laughing emoji, “Need to bring in some Asians for that.” During COVID, my young son was regularly asked whether we eat bats. He was accused of helping to start the pandemic because they claimed “Chinese people eat bats.” No doubt we were carriers of the Kung Flu or China Virus, too.
Isn’t this a joke? No. It’s not funny, even as a joke. But they are not joking. ABC News moderator David Muir tried to fact-check the former president and pour water on his red hot racism. The former president was having none of it. Truth is not helpful when you are trying to spin hate. J.D. Vance is also deadly serious, and in fact, he started this whole deranged attack. “Keep the cat memes flowing,” he says. Think J.D.’s wife and his Indian in-laws have been asked whether they eat big beetles and monkey brains? He might want to watch “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” It won’t be so funny when they ask his children.
These are not sticks and stones, but these words do break bones. The former president and his running mate, and all who like, retweet, rinse, and repeat this hateful tale do profound damage and violence to all of us. These corrosive lies accumulate in the stomach and settle into an anti-immigrant bile that boils inside the most hateful until they act. Hate that turns into violence does not metastasize alone. These words justify action against people who “do not belong here” — the migrants, invaders who are “destroying” our country, who “pollute” and “replace” the blood of our nation. For the disaffected and angry, it is a short walk from here to where they pick up a gun and slaughter six AsianAmerican women in a spa in Atlanta. Or they shout “get out of my country” before firing on two Indian men at a bar in Olathe, Kan. Or when they massacre 20 shoppers in an El Paso Walmart to stop “the Hispanic invasion.”
It is easier to hate and hurt people if you see them as less than human. Someone who steals, slaughters and eats pets? A monster. No need to treat such barbarians with humanity or civility, or to even acknowledge their basic human and civil rights. That is how policies for the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans citizens on U.S. soil get executed. Policies that separate children from their parents. Policies that deny millions of young people the chance to work legally and become citizens in the only country they have known. Policies to deny “birthright” citizenship to kids like me born in Hartford, Conn., to immigrant parents.
This is not about polarization. It’s not about red and blue. This is how our leaders show us, teach us, and compel us to hate each other. To turn on each other. This is not debate. This is not disagreement. And it sure as hell is not democracy. This is how the former president and his allies turn Americans and human beings — people like us — into objects of scorn, rejection and hatred. Or worse.