After years of brutal wars, racism thrives. Proof lies in these elected politicians
In 1928, my father immigrated to America from what would soon become the most savage nation on earth. That country mobilized and struck first in World War I, with a death toll of 20 million. Germany struck again in 1939 by launching World War II, which resulted in 80 million deaths.
My dad, August Hammer, had been too young for the first war. At age 25, with incredible luck, he sailed from Hamburg to New York just five years before Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. He was an immigrant, as was the grandfather of ex-president Donald Trump.
But I don’t recall anybody ever saying of German immigrants — as Trump said of Mexicans — “These aren’t people, these are animals. ...They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Actually, the United States conquered Mexico in the Mexican-American War, 1846-48, after which we forced them to sign over most of the land now included in five western states. Furious that Mexico had banned slavery, leaders of the Old South were hot to carve more U.S. slave states out of that territory and thus refresh their already almost century-long control of Congress. Then they started the Civil War and lost it too quickly to get that done.
So Mexicans are animals, and we “white guys” are not?
I embraced my own animal character during World War II. I was a 9-year-old white kid, idiotically ignoring my own ancestry while making fun of the neighbor Vahldick boy. I chanted: “Herman, Herman, the big fat German!” Correctly, we Americans hated the overseas Germans then but not the ones living next door. Not that I hated Herman (who wasn’t even overweight), I just couldn’t resist the ugly rhyme.
As a young reporter for the Star in 1960, I called down from our newspaper library an envelope of fragile, yellowed clippings focused on Kansas City’s Mafia underworld. One from the 1930s quoted a hapless Italian American expressing hurt that, because of those criminals, so much hate was focused on all his own people.
“Please don’t discriminate against our race,” he said.
As if Italian Americans were a separate race. If so, are Mexicans — many part Spanish and part Native American — a separate race? What of the other countless shades of humanity stretching from our West Indies to the East Indies and onward around the world?
We have been worse in the past, but even now some Americans are so race-obsessed that Kansans empowered Kris Kobach by electing him secretary of state. We gave him — alone among such state officials in that office — the power to prosecute fraudulent voters. In his war against immigrants he fought to remove 20,000 registered voters from the rolls.
Yet after all his ranting about immigrants swarming the polls, he won only a pathetic nine voter fraud convictions. Most were of people who didn’t realize they were wrong: older folks who voted in two places where they owned property, and a college student who sent an absentee ballot to her home state and later voted in Kansas — both votes going to Donald Trump. Despite all that, we Kansans like Kobach so much that in November we freshly elected him our state attorney general.
On the wall of her home my younger daughter, in an ironic gesture, hung the image of a blue-eyed, pale-haired Jesus knocking at a door, symbolically at our hearts. Pictures of blue-eyed Jesus are popular on the web. So this olive-skinned, Jewish religious leader was just another white guy? Even Nordic? From Sweden, maybe?
Somehow here I am again, back to Jesus in a political discussion. Because Jesus was intensely political in urging contending peoples to be decent to one another, to love one another. Regardless — as we like to say here in America — of race, creed or color.
Contact the columnist at hammerc12@gmail.com.
