HUMSS - Onookome Okome

Contemporary Racism and the Rest of Us

Recently, the 45^th President of the United States of America, Donald John Trump, gave a speech during which he said among other incendiary things, “Why are we allowing these people from shit-hole countries come here?”  Although not directly meant for the general public, this utterance, as always, questions Black presence in the US, more specifically recent Haitian migrants looking to make the good life in America, “the land of the free.” Describing people of African descent in this manner is common, uncensored. This is not unique to this President. Indeed, anti-Black sentiments have always been part of the linguistics map of the Americas for over 600 years. Perhaps, what is unique about President Trump’s declaration is the brazenness of the utterance of what has always been the dinner-table banter.  Not surprisingly, the descriptor, “shit-hole,” comes with associations that are political and cultural; political because it panders to presumed sense of white superiority, and cultural because it is taken from the playbook of this history of linguistic violence against people of African descent.

My plan for this presentation is to briefly investigate the cultural history of this linguistic violence by privileging personal and anecdotal evidence of its persistence in Canada. Prefacing iteration of this language register in the works of three major European authors allows me to show patterns in the use of linguistic violence against black bodies in historical  and political perspective. My hope is not only to track the continuity of this violence but also to provide practical evidence if its persistency in contemporary time.