Haunted by Racism

South Carolina Republican Lindsay Graham is one of the most influential U.S. senators. May he recognize today that racism has for decades contaminated the immigration debate. It should be considered a milestone in the history of a nation reluctant to recognize its own defects in the mirror, and that more than a few times has denied its minorities equal opportunity based on their ethnic origin, religion or the color of their skin.

The recognition of this very sin in a nation that has blessed the equality of men since its Declaration of Independence should be cause for reflection. It should encourage an intention to make amends in order to combat the toxic racism that has for generations eaten away the soul of the United States.

In a country that gave birth to political correctness, to keep the spirit of racism at bay, the broadsided attacks from those who continue to unite around the supremacist doctrine of the conservative white man are and will continue to be an unavoidable part of a democracy that every day aspires to perfection while shutting up the impulses of its inner demons.

Meanwhile, the conservative white man will continue to give free rein to its fears and obsessions by the hand of those who have become their most notable students — some of them members of a selective club made up of “coconut gringos” — dark on the outside, white on the inside, who day after day confuse politics with their personal ambitions on Capitol Hill.

Some of them even dream about going down in history as the immigrants’ redeemers, as they who have looked after them for decades with the promise of salvation, with the intention of bringing them to the heaven of citizens’ equality. Of course, provided that they agree to confess their many crimes and sins against that democracy that has put up with them as second-class citizens and modern-day slaves: They have erected their buildings, beautified their parks and gardens, cared for the children of white men and women and served them at their tables.

The fact that today the possibility of granting citizenship to millions of undocumented people has become the currency of immigration debate should be cause for reflection. That the Republicans’ political calculation has become the final hope for those on their way to becoming the most influential minority in this country is something that incites sarcasm and outrage.

For those who fight every day with futility to not succumb to the cynicism of the political class in Washington, the “lesser evil theory” — the idea of temporary or conditional citizenship — gives way as the only way to put an end to the nightmare of deportations and the distress of illegality.

Ironically, what is presented as the only way to take millions of immigrants out of this clandestine purgatory is at the same time the only way to rescue the Republican Party from its imminent descent into insignificance and extremist frenzy, which exists through the fault of those racists who are today represented by senators such as Lindsey Graham.

In a nutshell, the negative to granting automatic citizenship to immigrants, accompanied by the repeated demand to invert exorbitant numbers in order to attempt to seal the border with Mexico, will be the Republicans’ only way out of this extreme end into which they have cornered themselves.

And who from the center is going to throw them their lifeline? None other than the Democrats and President Barack Obama. Yes, the same Obama who several days ago acknowledged in an interview with The New Yorker that there are still people (in the U.S.) who don’t like him because he’s a black president.

Who would say that? By the whim of history, it could be said that Barack Obama today is the antithesis of other presidents who preceded him, such as Harry Truman. Despite being a Democrat, Harry Truman’s racist demons continuously followed him. Born into a family of farmers in Kansas, Truman wrote the following in a letter dated 1911: “I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.”

Ironically, Truman would be one of the presidents who made civil rights one of the priorities of his administration. But according to summaries by various historians, he never stopped his racial epithets.

Since then, the old spirit of racism apparently continues to follow the same road shared by the conservative white man and those minorities who are the new majority in the United States. And those contradictions present the best and also the worst of its democracy.