The art of forgetting

Perhaps impressed by Robert Frost’s famous line, “Good fences make good neighbours”, President Donald Trump set out to build a wall on the southern border of the United States and subsequently push back all the ‘criminals’, ‘rapists’ and ‘drug smugglers’ into Mexico. No doubt, a large number of Latinos (Spanish-speaking people of countries south of the USA) are living illegally and many were deported by the Obama administration. Yet, there is the other side of the story, too. Trump’s action raises a moot question: what will he do to millions of Blacks who were ‘illegally’ taken to the land of new opportunities? This practice continued for 246 years till slavery was abolished in 1865 after a bloody civil war and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Does Trump plan to return these African-Americans to their original homes with full dignity, compensation and public apology for the horrible crimes that white slave traders committed? Surely, it is not possible to return them to Africa as the US has been their home for generations.

Whether they had arrived legally or illegally, the history of Blacks, Latinos, and, later, the Chinese, should be read in proper perspective. In the pre-mechanised age when there was big demand for physical labour, millions of African slaves were forcibly taken. This practice continued till 1865, that is 89 years after the creation of the United States.

Manpower was required to clear forests, farming and plantation work, construction of roads and bridges, and, in later years, to lay railway tracks, construct dams and mine work. They were used as cannon fodder in battles against the “Red” Indians. These slaves would be drugged, their wives and daughters raped, and both men and women flogged by their masters for defying them. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great novel ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, published in 1852, and Alex Haley’s masterpiece, ‘Roots: The Saga of an American Family’ exemplify the real rapists, criminals and drug lords.

The abolition of slavery at the height of Industrial Revolution provided an opportunity to cheap Latin American and even Chinese labourers to migrate to the US. This was preceded by the snatching of California, New Mexico and some other Mexican areas by the US in 1848––and even before. In fact, the foundation of transforming the United States into a world power was laid by this very workforce in the pre-mechanised years of the 19th and early 20th century. The freed slave soldiers––180,000 in number––volunteered to fight for Lincoln’s Union forces and ensured victory against the Confederates, the pro-slavery southern states, wanted to secede from the US. Trump, who wishes to make “America great again” should know that the United States may have got dismembered 150 years ago, had the African-Americans soldiers and sailors not fought on the side of Lincoln.

Be it two World Wars, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and in the various recent military expeditions, the contributions of African-American and Latino solders cannot be ignored. When the flow of Blacks from Africa into the US virtually stopped after abolition of slavery and migration of labourers from China had gradually receded, the workforce from the neighbouring Latin American countries continued to stream in. Unlike Blacks and Chinese, Latinos somewhat resemble the Americans and thus easily intermingled. That is why there is still much larger scope of illegal migration into the US. The problem with low-paid illegal migrants is that they are making America their homes in the post-modern era of automation and computerisation when the nature of job requirements has undergone a sea change. As a Hindi song goes: “Matlab nikal gaya to pahchante nahin”––a sort of use-and-throw policy––the new American administration is treating them as unworthy elements and heaping abuses on them. The Indians––mostly in white-collared jobs––who mostly migrated after the US became a global power, need to understand American history. But Trump will have to understand that his campaign against outsiders may cost the US economy.

(The author is a senior journalist based in Patna)