Thinking about @realDonaldTrump ‘s tweet about immigration. The politics of it all seem pretty straightforward. He is playing to his base and using Covid-19 as cover to dismantle our legal immigration system. 1/
But this kind of politics, especially in a moment like this one, adversely affects how we respond to the crisis. In effect, for those who listen to the president, such a politics narrows the sphere of moral concern and limits the scope of how we respond. 2/
Trump and his ilk are only concerned about those who matter to them. And that affects how we address the glaring inequalities that have been exposed by the virus. (We’ve seen in the past how our hatreds narrow our view of the good) 3/
Something more insidious is happening, though. What we are witnessing is “disaster xenophobia”—the horrors of Covid-19 are being used as justification to unleashed hatred and to justify an idea of whiteness rooted in policy that has the country by the throat. 4/
We have to attack this nonsense head on. We can’t let the disaster xenophobia wear the garment of a respectable position—especially in this moment when we desperately need to reach for a different way of being together. 5/
