The words repeat. The thoughts repeatedly ring to the same theme. Detention of citizens and good people whose only crime is looking different from our President. The theme expands. No longer does his ICE agents hassle and detain individuals from Central and South America and Mexico (which is apart of North America with the U.S. and Canada), they expanded their hunt to Afghans and Iranians who have sought refuge from persecution and death in their home countries. It now includes a cleaning of the American story by eliminating unpatriotic elements “found” in places such as Manzamar, CA, where White Americans incarcerated thousands of Japanese-American citizens during the Second World War. The current administration is attempting to create a White, Christian nation, which has never existed in the long history of the North American continent.
I return to the primary purpose of this blog. To promote my book, “For a Dignity Deserved,” which I wrote for my two African American grandsons. It continues from the blog entitled “The Exploitation of the Middle Class.” So, I begin where I left off with the question about government subsidies.
I was teaching a collegiate class in business. It had an overarching theme regarding the distribution of wealth in America. African American and Hispanic Americans comprised about 75 percent of the class; the remaining 25 percent were European American and students from overseas. Each semester, I asked them to write down the percentage of African Americans receiving government subsidies. 
Without fail, each time, the students wrote down a figure greater than 50 percent. They were shocked when I told them that European Americans comprise the largest group. More than 40 percent of European Americans receive government subsidies. They were followed by Hispanic Americans (26 percent) and African Americans (23 percent), according to an Urban Institute study of 59 million individuals. In other words, a slim of racism coats government assistance in the minds of most Americans. Take that a step further. If African Americans are receiving the most government assistance and if there is fraud in the system, then African Americans are defrauding the system. It’s a non-sequitur. That doesn’t matter. It’s the same as European Americans fearing African American criminals. I have seen and heard this attitude among many European American acquaintances. It’s bullshit. Most violent crimes are committed by people within the same ethnic group.
“Of the 6,570 reported race-related crimes, 3,434 were anti-Black or African American. These crimes were higher than all other 2022 race/ethnicity/ancestry hate crimes combined,” according to USAFacts. So, I struggle to understand. Is racism born of ignorance or of hatred? Or does ignorance, aided by anger, generate racism?
Ignorance sustains racism, fear, and anxiety, and the lack of truth or fact feeds ignorance. If you don’t know, really know, many African Americans, their essence becomes a blank sheet upon which you or a group like the KKK or Proud Boys can attribute anything.[1] It’s something we humans do. We generalize based on a perception that we believe is accurate but has no basis in reality. I like to think of it as a perverted extension of first impressions.
Throughout his career, Trump has passed around dollops of lies, fantasy, and truthful hyperbole. In 2024 and 2025, he fed Americans globs of lies and exaggeration. The day before his inauguration, the wizard of dupery said, “We will stop illegal immigration once and for all. We will not be invaded. We will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered. We will be a free and proud nation once again and that will take place tomorrow at 12 o’clock [the time of his inauguration].”
His globs oozed into the ears of Americans, swelling the cavities of imagination with fears of illegal immigrants streaming into the U.S. from South and Latin America. Images of the Hunds invading, taking jobs, robbing the middle class of government services, murdering good Americans, taking their women, and to top it off, they do it all while speaking a foreign language. They are not invading. Nor are they overrunning anything unless you count those border communities, which state and federal officials have not provided with the funding to deal with the influx. They have conquered nothing. Most are hiding from ICE agents. Most are more law-abiding than those who invaded the Capital on January 6, 2020.[2]
If he wants to make America safe again, he may reconsider pardoning 1500 rioters responsible for what sometimes has been labeled an insurrection. Or he could round up Texans, based on a recent National Institute of Justice (NIJ)study. “Undocumented immigrants [in Texas] had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime and violent felony crime compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens [in Texas] had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types,” reported the NIJ.
Many of these “invaders,” armed with the clothes on their backs, traversed 1800 miles of the most dangerous terrain in the Americas. They risked their lives, they were raped, they were robbed, and their children were abused. They continued for one reason: their futures and those of their children. Except for the language they speak, they’re no different from the Irish squished into ships sailing to America. They, too, were escaping repression, violence, and starvation. They landed in America, willing to work menial jobs for substandard wages. They lived in squalor in America’s major cities, New York, Boston, Baltimore, Bridgeport, and others. They were beaten by mobs and the police. They were denigrated by the “native-born.” And like the immigrants today, they armed themselves with one weapon, the eternal weapon of many people, the hope that the American Dream was real.
That’s the aspirational story of most Americans. Rather than tugging the commonality thread, the Wizard of Blob erases empathy by coyishly implying a fantastical threat. [3] English and Dutch descendants, the native-born, used similar techniques against the Irish, and migrants from states devastated by the Civil War did the same with the Chinese immigrants recruited to build the transcontinental railroads. In each case, fear was manipulated to accomplish a goal born from fear, ignorance, and selfishness.
As with much American history, there’s more than a touch of irony. “Native-born” Americans have manipulated the perception of African Americans with far more mortal consequences. The twisted perception, more a virus, infected all types of Americans, including “native-born” and immigrants, each repressing a people whose forefathers were native-born long before the forefathers of enslavers and Jim Crow enforcers left Europe.
[1] There are another 33 such groups in the United States alone, according to Wikipedia.
[2] Some 1500 convicted individuals received a President pardon. Trump called these rioters and trespassers patriots.
[3] This is precisely what the Wizard of Oz does in the movie The Wizard of Oz: He sends a foursome to a foreign land to kill the wicked witch. When they return having achieved their quest, he cannot grant their wishes because he doesn’t have the power. Each character always had their desired abilities. The wizard based on the perception of power..
For a Dignity Deserved 