The United States already has candidates: a woman daughter of immigrants, Kamala Harris, with a kaleidoscopic identity and a singular biography that reflects the aspirations of the majority, and, of course, Donald Trump, with his nativist narrative centered on the almost metaphysical obsession of the current far right, the fear of white extinction. Harris’s is a counterpoint story that defends the porosity of borders to maintain a common world. Trump’s is waving the scarecrow of the breaking down of all borders (gender, ethnicity or nation) to histrionically explain the supposed decadence and chaos of the West. It is no coincidence that Kamala Harris’s nomination coincides with the recent outbreak in the United Kingdom, those racist riots falsely channeled in the form of panic about immigration from Elon Musk’s propaganda platform. Or with the episode experienced in Spain following the Mocejón crime and the attempt to relate it to migrants. Precisely because of the predominance of these frameworks that link immigration with chaos or crime, the political circus mounted this summer to relocate minors in a country that has welcomed more than 200,000 Ukrainian refugees without “controversy, sectarian exploitation or scandal” is less understood, as Soledad Gallego-Díaz pointed out, adding that this image only favored the far right. Because?
Racist discourse on immigration is at the heart of the far-right’s battles. It represents the subterfuge of that story that JD Vance tells in his Hillbilly, a rural elegy and who bought so many of those desperate white workers who boosted Trump in 2016. The key, he tells us Richard Seymour in New Left Review, It is in the idea of whiteness, a qualifier that is placed alongside worker because, rather than exploited, it is sold that “they have been denied the appropriate moral recognition as white members of the nation by elites too enthusiastic about extending recognition to minorities.” In reality, adds Seymour, fear of the end of ethnic status is deliberately instilled in order to recover the lost “wages of whiteness.”
That is why Michelle Obama was mocking Trump who claimed that immigrants will also steal “black jobs.” Someone should warn him, Michelle said, that the job he himself is so desperately seeking to recover could also be one of them. The Democratic convention has not sold a political program, but a narrative, the one Michelle Obama wove together when she spoke of Harris as “the embodiment of the stories about America that we tell ourselves.” Kamala’s story is that of “the majority of Americans trying to build a better life.” It doesn’t matter what you look like or where you come from, who you love or pray to or how much money you have: “everyone deserves the opportunity to build a decent life.” This is how, from singularity, the majority is challenged while offering powerful arguments against anti-immigrant rhetoric, the same that Harris does not need to explain because she herself embodies it. As Michelle said, no one has the monopoly on what it means to be American. That is why, says writer Colum McCann, In the face of a motley, declining West worried about the decline of the white majority and demographic change, in the face of crude defensive ethnonationalism, the very presidential nomination of someone like Kamala Harris is proof of how wonderfully complex our world has become.
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