Trump’s Laptop Ban Is Racist Bullshit
A tactic as old as Jim Crow
It’s a method of repression as old as America. If the constitution bars you from removing a group you hate, then ban something closely associated with that group.
And so we have the laptop ban. The latest incarnation of Pres. Donald Trump’s campaign to bring “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” as he put it during his campaign.
On March 21, 2017, the Department of Homeland Security announced a ban on large electronic devices in the cabins of airplanes entering the United States from certain Middle Eastern and African countries.
Passengers may still bring large electronics — such as laptops, tablets and big cellphones — but they have to check them before the flight. The department gave affected airlines 96 hours to comply.
This ban only affects non-stop flights on nine airlines coming from 10 different airports. The ban doesn’t cover flights leaving America for those foreign countries, just the other way around.
The laptop ban — and its obvious hypocrisy — reveals Trump’s immigration bans for what they are. Racist bullshit meant to stoke tensions between the United States and the Middle East.
It’s telling that the laptop ban comes on the heels of the Trump administration’s two failed attempts to pass more sweeping travel bans. Third time’s the charm — and it seems to be working. The official line from DHS is typically milquetoast.
“Evaluated intelligence indicates that terrorist groups continue to target commercial aviation and are aggressively pursuing innovative methods to undertake their attacks, to include smuggling explosive devices in various consumer items,” the department stated.
If DHS and the White House really worry about explosives in electronics possibly coming from the Middle East, then they’d push for a harder ban on the objects. Instead, they opted for a half-measure that inconveniences travelers and puts their devices in storage rather than the cabin. It’s worth noting that an explosive device need not be in the cabin to bring down a plane.
No, this ban is about disrupting travel from an area of the world Trump and his chief strategist Steve Bannon have ideological beef with. This is about shutting down cultural and economic exchange with an area of the world Bannon wants to wage a war on. It’s about putting America “first.”
It’s a classic tactic. The laptop ban comes just 10 days after federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland blocked Trump’s second attempt to shut down travel from Muslim countries. The White House realized it wouldn’t be able to pass such sweeping measures, so it resorted to an old standby —hassling travelers from the region with bureaucratic bullshit.
The two classic examples of this tactic from America’s past are the South’s Jim Crow laws and almost every bit of anti-drug legislation ever passed. After the Civil War, Reconstruction faltered. Faced with a suddenly free black populace, the South’s leaders enacted regulations aimed at permanently disenfranchising blacks.
Southern leaders couldn’t commit genocide or forcibly remove all black people from the South. At least, not legally. But they could make damn sure that the former slaves would be second-class citizens as long as they stayed in the South.
So it was that white Southerners kept black people from voting in the South for years by enforcing literacy tests, collecting poll taxes and barring former prisoners from ever casting a ballot.
America’s drug laws are also part of this racist legacy. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” Henry Anslinger, pot-prohibitionist extraordinaire and America’s original drug-cop, said back in the 1930s.
“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers,” Anslinger added. “Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
Again, Anslinger and his ilk couldn’t legally commit genocide, so they banned a substance they associated with another race to make that race’s life as shitty as possible.
In the late 1800s, San Francisco passed the Pigtail Ordinance. The law said that new prisoners would have to cut their hair within an inch of their scalp. This primarily affected the Han Chinese men, who wore long pigtails called “queues.”
The rationale? The city’s white majority wrongly believed that Chinese men committed minor crimes in order to take advantage of free room and board in city jails, so it created a reason for Han Chinese to avoid jail.
Wisconsin’s Bennett Law of 1889 required teachers to use English in all public and private schools. Which sounds fine until you learn that German and Norwegian private schools were common across the state and, under the new law, were suddenly illegal. Wisconsin repealed the law just two years later.
When we don’t like someone in America, we legislate their way of life. Trump is using the specter of terrorism — and his claim that U.S. forces discovered new intelligence during Trump’s disastrous Yemen raid — to justify this newest restriction.
Don’t believe it for a second. This is an old tactic. It was wrong a hundred years ago and it’s still wrong today.
Stay defiant.
Writing is hard. Money is short. Support this reporter. Follow DEFIANT on Facebook and Twitter.
