Racism as General Proposition
By 
Sometimes I feel like the GOP base (and by extension its elected officialdom) is racist on the general principle that some kind of racism is a positive good, rather than racist as a artifact of specific cultural or biological beliefs:
Last year, several U.S. states—most publicly, Florida—passed laws that severely restrict Chinese nationals’ ability to buy property. More than a dozen states are debating similar laws that target individuals from China and, in some cases, other countries such as Iran and Syria. Proponents of these laws have argued that this legislation is a way to fight China’s threat to the United States. As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis put it at a Republican presidential primary debate in December, “I banned China from buying land in the state of Florida.”
The wave of legislation harks back to the days when the United States embraced widespread legal discrimination against East Asian people. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 banned all immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States for a decade; the alien land laws, a series of 19th- and 20th-century laws, limited land ownership in more than a dozen U.S. states by immigrants from certain countries—primarily China and Japan. The acts’ proponents claimed that the laws would protect white workers from competition, but the real motivation was racism. Essentially, lawmakers used discrimination to manufacture a geopolitical threat.
Yet while the new laws evoke the anti-Asian racism of a century ago, lawmakers are looking to another era for legal justification: the post-9/11 security apparatus. The so-called war on terror made national security concerns an easy way to fold bigotry into public policy. Over the past two decades, Washington has discriminated against Muslims under the guise of security, culminating in then-President Donald Trump’s 2017 travel ban that targeted Muslim-majority countries for what his administration claimed was the “security and welfare of the United States.”
The modern Trumpist GOP can effortlessly pivot from anti-Black racism to anti-Latino racism to anti-Asian racism and, crucially, can somehow manage to be inclusive of each specific target of racial animus while directing its attention towards another group. Trumpers want to include Blacks in anti-Asian racism, and include Asians in anti-Latino racism, and include Latinos in anti-Black racism, the proposition being that Racism as a general civilizational outlook is a positive good, and that as such the identity of the targets doesn’t matter overmuch. Given the inroads that Trumpers seem be making especially in the Latino community, it’s all quite disconcerting. I should hasten to add that the position of the Asian-American community (I use that omnibus term because Trumpers aren’t going to bother separating out Japanese, Filipino, or Korean communities from their Chinese targets) could grow very precarious very quickly, especially as Asian-Americans are so heavily represented in demographics that Trumpers hate (West Coast, urban, college educated).