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If The Migrants Were White

I have a feeling that if the migrants were white, things would be very different right now in America.

We’d never have heard anything about building a wall during the 2016 Presidential campaign.

It wouldn’t have become a Republican rally chant, a Conservative hashtag staple, a MAGA t-shirt favorite, a Donald Trump fixation.

Republicans wouldn’t be forever declaring a “national emergency” at our southern border.

There would be no talk of the lawless streams of bad people currently “overrunning” us.

Republican politicians wouldn’t be continually working to create connections between exhausted, desperate families—and drug dealers, rapists, and gun runners.

No one would be blasted with teargas or deported from hospital rooms or hounded at workplaces.

If the migrants were white, children wouldn’t have been taken from the arms of their parents and placed in cages like animals.

A single human being wouldn’t have been allowed to die from clear neglect, or there would have been universal white outrage and immediate alterations made.

People wouldn’t be denied healthcare and hygiene products and the most basic level of human decency.

If the migrants were white, Evangelical preachers wouldn’t be pounding their pulpits and leveraging their social media platforms in passionate support of an inhumanity that Jesus would be sickened by.

Our white neighbors wouldn’t be buying into nonsensical ghost stories about the advancing horde coming to take their jobs and rape their children and live off the Government.

Fox News wouldn’t be incessantly perpetuating fear and intentionally manipulating gullible people about the violence these opportunistic people are supposedly unleashing on us.

Other white people wouldn’t be experiencing elevated suspicion and bullying and contempt from strangers who might be related to these “malevolent border invaders.”

The Government wouldn’t be talking about “rounding up” thousands of these caucasian lawbreakers and weaponizing agencies in that service.

Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Sarah Sanders and Mike Huckabee would have been completely silent—other than to offer their assistance.

If the migrants were white, Donald Trump would have never said a single vile word, never generated one incendiary tweet, never uttered a lie-riddled stump speech, never given one damn about “defending America” from this apparently dangerous threat.

If the migrants were white, they would be treated like human beings by white Americans.
They wouldn’t be sanctimoniously lecturing scared, hungry, tired people to “do it the right way.”
There would be compassion and kindness.

There would be welcome and generosity.
There would be shades of gray to be seen.
There would be creativity in seeking solutions.
There would be no lazy stereotypes and racial slurs.
We’d be doing so much more with our resources and our time to address actual human rights atrocities and national emergencies.

If the migrants were white, Republicans would suddenly find vast resources—and working hearts.
The white Evangelical church would embrace its calling to care for the least of these—and recover its soul.
White America would less able to disguise the prejudice and racism it is still so afflicted with.

But the migrants are not white—which is why they will continue to be made into the convenient monsters by white leaders in power who want to distract from their own grievous malfeasance while stoking the irrational fears of suggestible white people.

They will continue to be painted as the enemies of a portion of Americans who cannot exist without having one to rail against.

They will continue to be the targets of a single, terrible, dangerous white lie that is hindering America’s greatness.

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