There is No Such Thing as a Shithole

Did you hear? Donald Trump said something recently that Barack Obama would not have said. Are you outraged yet? In typical not-Obama fashion, Donald Trump said something very stupid and very mean. He said the countries of Haiti, El Salvador, and Africa are shitholes. And we don’t want people from shitholes; we want them from Norway.

Mainstream media and Democratic politicians duly exploded. Senator Dick Durbin described the comments as “hate-filled, vile and racist.” The New York Times’ Roxanne Gay was so appalled at this “painful and uncomfortable moment” that she forewent the opportunity “to turn this into a teaching moment to justify the existence of millions of Haitian or African or El Salvadoran people.” Ms. Gay’s colleague, David Leonhardt, immediately produced — from his breast pocket, where he keeps it at all times — “the definitive list” of racist things Trump has said. As though some people weren’t already aware that New York Times writers generally think Trump is racist. Senator Corey Booker was so angered by Trump’s comments that, at a Senate hearing with Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, he managed to hold back his righteous tears long enough to say: “the commander in chief, in an Oval Office meeting, referring to people from African countries and Haitians with the most violent, vulgar language…When ignorance and bigotry is allied with power, it is a dangerous force in our country. Your silence and your amnesia is complicity.” This should be useful to remember as Senator Booker runs for president next year: not only did he think Trump’s “shithole” comment was “violent” somehow, he also called a woman racist just for not remembering it.

I don’t want to defend what Trump said. I’ve already expressed that I found it ignorant and vicious, and I’m not happy that our President is so gratuitously offensive. But the fact that these comments were treated so hysterically negatively by so many in the media and political leadership suggests an evolution in public morality. Meanness of any kind is now politically incorrect, at least when directed at the oppressed. That’s the import of everyone calling the comments (and commenter) racist: it is intended to provoke a political reaction. Anyone who breaks this hierarchical golden rule — by saying mean things — will now face dramatized censure from all the good people of the land. Obviously, I don’t intend to say anything as mean as what Trump said, but it still seems prudent to understand some of the ideological consequences of this political enforcement of Progressive Rectitude. On the way to understanding how not to be mean, I’ve asked three questions: (1) Can being mean actually hurt people? (2) Is it possible for any place to be a shithole? (3) Is it possible to prefer immigration from one country over another?

Was anyone actually hurt by these comments, rather than merely offended? Many people seem to think so. CNN’s Don Lemon reminded his white viewers that “people of color warned you” about Trump, implying that something happened which a heeded warning could have prevented. Even if he means that we were warned that Trump, as President, would say ignorant and mean things, that just begs the question by generalizing it — what is the harm in a president who says these things routinely? It’s certainly offensive. And I empathize — I am somewhat routinely offended by casual and malicious disparagements of my homeland.

In the 2016 Rose Bowl between Stanford and the University of Iowa, the wealthy and elite students of the Stanford marching band used their halftime performance to act out a skit in which an Iowa farmer uses the Farmers Only dating app to begin a (presumably verbally-affirmed consensual) sexual relationship with a cow. Since there are a lot of farms in Iowa, it’s very funny to suggest that Iowans have sex with their cows (even if California leads the nation in dairy production, and produces more beef than Iowa). At the time, it seemed like a vicious and unprovoked attack on one of the country’s most affordable state schools and one of its best states. I still remember the national outcry afterward — “Iowans have a right to exist!” President Obama practically screamed. Actually, no one outside of Iowa cared when this happened. And even though I didn’t like it, it would never have occurred to me that it was a political issue. Like Trump’s insult to Haiti, Stanford’s insult to Iowa was offensive, I thought, but otherwise harmless.

But I guess I was wrong. Even though Trump didn’t practice for weeks with one hundred other people to produce a choreographed Hamilton-esque takedown of Haiti’s distinctive history and culture, what he said was vaguely xenophobic. And I should have understood that xenophobia, in all its forms and on every occasion, is a grave harm in itself. Unlike profanely denigrating a region of your own country — which is all in good fun — profanely denigrating a region outside of your own country is a profound sin. Xenophobic attitudes stand for the proposition that people in other countries have no right to exist. So it isn’t sufficient to argue that Norway is a nicer place to live than Haiti; one must reject the entire idea that there might be differences between any two countries which might be expressed callously or negatively.

Which is to say, more broadly, that no place can be a shithole. There’s no other conclusion to draw from the popular reaction. While some people have attempted to refute the substance of Trump’s insult — by saying, for example, that Haiti is actually very nice — even they ultimately join the rest of the commentariot in condemning Trump’s comments regardless of any truth value they may or may not have. No one has accused Trump of mis-identifying the world’s shitholes. And, tellingly, no one has accused Trump of poor tact (inappropriately saying what it might have been acceptable to think). Indeed, Trump said these things privately, and Democratic congresspeople publicized the comments. Which wouldn’t have happened unless Trump’s idea is also vile and racist, in addition to the voicing of it. So that answers my question: no place can be a shithole, and if you think any place is a shithole, you’re a racist.

But I’m still a little confused: is it vile and racist to think a place is a “shithole” because there is something wrong with the word “shithole”, or is it the feeling behind the word that is problematic? For instance, while I have once or twice described my old apartment in Albany as “a real shithole,” for the most part I keep the word “shithole” out of my verbal repertoire. So if the use of swear words is the problem, I’m fine. Not that I’m thrilled about this Neo-Victorian turn in our language, but I can at least moderate my behavior to reduce my profane language, as I have continuously tried to do since I was five years old and got in trouble for saying “balls” in front of my grandmother.

If, however, instead of the word, it is the thought behind “shithole” that is vile and racist, I’m not sure I even know how to conform my behavior. Maybe that’s because we aren’t talking about my behavior at all: at its simplest, “there are no shitholes” means “don’t have any thoughts about another place which, if they occurred to Donald Trump, might cause him to use the word ‘shithole.’” And with Trump’s limited vocabulary and remorseless rudeness, “shithole” might get a lot of play — he might say “shithole” whenever he has a negative attitude about anything. So it isn’t very obvious what particular attitude is problematic. “Shithole” is a metaphor, which might compare one of the more undesirable and unclean parts of the human body to a particular subject, in this case Haiti, in order to illuminate similar qualities in that subject. Am I not allowed to think Haiti is undesirable or unclean? If, for example, an employer offered to transfer me to their offices in either Haiti or Norway, would it be vile and racist to have a preference?

Maybe it’s fine for individuals to have such preferences, but the really vile part of Trump’s shithole comment was how he tied together the wealth, health, and state of government in these places with the desirability of the people living there as potential immigrants. And even though a kind of cultural affinity is relevant for choosing friends, romantic partners, employees, universities, and pets, Progressive Rectitude prohibits its consideration for immigration. There are, apparently, no grounds for preferring people who move here to have any particular backgrounds, education, language, wealth, health, family structure or traditions, or experience in any type of liberal or otherwise self-governing state. Literally anyone will make as good an addition to our society as anyone else — from Norway or Sudan, there is no way it could make any difference to a good person. Which answers my question — it is not possible, without being vile and racist, to prefer immigration from any particular place.

So now we know. Welcome to the era of Progressive Rectitude, where no one is ever mean to anyone else. Everyone, everywhere, is exactly the same, and the arc of history, bent justice-ward, will guide the undistinguished masses to the bliss of the liberal-democratic monoculture, where all religions are peaceful and egalitarian, everyone trusts experts, the cisheteropatriarchy is a distant memory and everyone lives happily among zir neighbors. Except in Iowa — that place is a shithole.