By Percy Hintzen
Percy C. Hintzen is a native of Guyana. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and, until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
On November 5th, half of American voters elected Donald Trump to be their president. His victory was secured by support from immigrants with origins in the Global South. These included Blacks and Asian/ Indians from the Caribbean. In Florida, where I reside, support for Trump by Afro-West Indian immigrants was much higher than their counterparts in the rest of the country. This was even more so the case for Indo-West Indians, the majority of whom voted for the Republican ticket. Cuban Americans throughout the country voted overwhelmingly for Trump. Latinos, the majority of whom are either recent immigrants or have immigrant roots, voted in significant numbers for Trump. These included a majority of Latino men and a near majority of Latina women. Immigrant support for Trump occurred despite a MAGA (Make America Great Again) campaign characterized by extreme forms of xenophobia directed particularly against immigrants from the Global South who were described as “poisoning the blood” of America. Proposals for their mass deportation were central features of the campaign. Revocation of birthright citizenship for their American-born children and for “denaturalization” of those who became citizens subsequent to their migration were to begin on “day one” of the Trump presidency. Even before the campaign began, elected Trump-supporting politicians had begun to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, making them illegal in both the public and private sectors. These policies have been essential to the successes of immigrants from the global south.
A central feature of Trump’s campaign was advocacy for a white fundamentalist Christian nation. His “America First” proposals for disengagement from and dissolution of U.S. foreign obligations come with devastating consequences for the home countries of these immigrants, which he described as “shitholes.” As was patently obvious at the recent Cop29 Climate Summit, the impact of Trump’s attempts to dismantle and undermine global efforts aimed at curtailing and meliorating climate change and pollution, begun in his first term in office, would be particularly devastating to countries of the global south that suffer most from their effects. This is forcing many to migrate. His policy proposals for tariffs regimes will be enormously destructive to their economies. So will his plans to curtail and suspend programs of development aid. The majority of immigrants and their children and grandchildren retain strong ties to their countries of origin. They send remittances to support extended families who remain in their home countries. Many have dual citizenship and vote in elections in their home countries. They advocate and petition to influence U.S. policies that affect their countries of origin. The question to be raised, then, is why would these immigrants vote for Trump in large enough numbers to guarantee his victory? Why would they cast their lot with the majority of white Americans, a significant minority of whom are members of organized white supremacist, Ku Klux Klan, and nazi organizations? In their vote for Trump, a majority of whites appear sympathetic to the neo-fascist ideology espoused by members of these groups. Why would immigrants from the Global South support a presidential candidate whose declared goal is to punish and destroy the countries of origin to which they are deeply tied?
Since migrating to the United States, I have been troubled by a deeper and even more profound question. What explains the overwhelming desire for people from the Global South to migrate to a country only to become objects of white American racial and xenophobic hostility and rejection? The normal and seemingly logical explanation is that they are seeking refuge from the violence, instability and insecurity as products of the political, economic, and social crises in their countries of origin. But these are mere manifestations of a deeper reality. They assume a non-violent, stable, security that most immigrants do not enjoy in the United States. In fact, most are denied the “good life” promised by the myth of the American Dream. Many live squalid lives as an underclass in segregated rural and urban ghettoes. Those who manage to acquire the material trappings of success and the soi disant prestige of professional accomplishment and position still suffer from the American reality of white supremacy and xenophobia, from the country’s pervasive violence, and from its racialized surveillance. They live lives consumed by fear and rejection underscored and confirmed in the support that Trump and his agenda received from the white American majority. But they, like myself, were aware of this even before they made their decision to migrate. The answer to this seeming anomaly, I believe, rests in an indisputable fact —- we are still colonized!
Trumpism comes with a familiar nostalgia for the immigrant from the Global South. It represents a reversion to the form of colonial governance by the merchant plantocracy in the Caribbean, the birthplace of the modern world. The ruling elite of capitalist oligarchs have jettisoned their group of governing plutocrats who have always exercised authority in support of their interests. They used legalisms and constitutionalities and the practices and processes of the American political apparatus to exercise their power and control directly. Billionaires will become trillionaires in oligarchical control of their institutions of global governance.
The victory of Donald Trump ushers in this consequential transition to a capitalist oligarchy. It is nothing new to those of us who have analyzed the relationship between political institutions of the governing elite and the economic power of the ruling capitalist class. But many of us have bought into the trap of liberal representative democracy and its myth of government by “the will of the people”.
The fact is that colonialism has never ceased to exist. The world has never relinquished its colonial form, despite the radical challenges posed by Marxism and by localized forms of resistance, everywhere. The United States has never been troubled by these challenges and has never responded to them in fundamental ways, like the rest of the world. It has retained, almost intact, all the forms and features of what Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe has termed colonial commandment.
Over time, it has managed to transform itself into the world’s dominant power to become the primary agent of a transition to a globalized form of colonialism. Its power is preserved, sustained, and maintained through forms of violence (physical, social, cultural, economic, political) that have become even more pervasive, lethal and effective by technical advances in the social and physical sciences developed in American universities and research institutions. Trumpism is the culmination of this new colonial order. It retains colonialism’s foundational features of white supremacy, misogyny (contempt/hatred of women), and heteropatriarchy (the belief in a society centered in a male dominated heterosexual family).
Immigration from the Global South to the United States represents a shift in colonial affinities. It is driven by the imperative of physical, social, cultural, economic and political proximity to the colonizer as a condition of survival. The American form of colonialism is a familiar one to us, as immigrants from the Global South. We are propelled by a particular nostalgia for the socio-political order of late colonialism. Location in the colonial center of global power and accumulation enhances our utility for the new globalized reality of racial capitalism. It is the reality of our subjecthood. It defines who we are and our place in the world. It is the reality that we have chosen for ourselves and to which we have consented. It is the world that we have bought into, that we desire, and with which we have been familiar since the consolidation of colonial conquest.
Trumpism is the form of governance that existed before the crises of post-independence. What Tanzanian scholar and novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has described as the “colonization of the mind” has blinded us to the fact that these crises are products of American global domination, from which we choose to flee for sanctuary in the United States. Trump’s proposed criminalization of us and threats of arbitrary deportation are not new. Both are pervasive features of the old colonial order and of American history. They are part and parcel of colonialism’s racialized global and territorial segregation. Our colonial subjection is impaled with the racial hatred that sustains white commitment to the colonial order. We bring to America our commitment to a world where the sole beneficiaries of the new colonial order will be the barons of capitalism and their willing overseers, some even from among ourselves.
This is no different from colonialism’s oligarchy of the white male planter and merchant. So, we are untroubled by the colonial implications of Trump’s victory. We strive to position ourselves to ameliorate its effects, just like we did under the colonial regimes of Europe. We know nothing will change in fundamental ways, either domestically or internationally. The wars of conquest and control will proceed apace. Campaigns of deliberate starvation, destruction of physical infrastructure, denial of the fundamentals of human life, collective punishment of entire populations, the targeting of women and children – all this will proceed apace. Climate change, global warming, and pollution from which many of us have fled will continue to intensify. These are mere passing fancies. So will species extinction. We are inured to all of this because we have seen worse in our countries of origin. Whole populations have been wiped out because of colonial conquests. We have endured persistent famines, global epidemics, and immiseration. We fashion survival strategies to try our best to manage, and even avoid, lives that, in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, are “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” This is the lot of most of us. But we still manage to muddle through. So why worry? We get succor from living the promise of the American Dream vicariously through the lives of powerful white men whom we worship, revere, support, and admire. We fight against each other in service of their interests. This is notwithstanding their representations of us as pet eating garbage from shithole countries poisoning the purity of white blood.
Meanwhile, the governors of the Global South bend over backwards to accommodate our colonial exploitation and the expropriation and destruction of the resources of our countries. And, in our colonized haven, we fight among ourselves as Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Middle-Easterners, Muslims, etc., to stake our claim, as model minorities, to being the most “ideal Americans.”