He laughed at the Louie Gohmert line about all those dark skinned immigrants massing on the borders poised to flood across and take our jobs and to rape white women.
"Of course, if they raped women of color, he'd have no problem with that," Soldati observed.
But all this made me think.
I talk to people living in Lawrence, Mass every week, a town which is densely populated with immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Middle East, South Asia. One Black man told me he was leaving Methuen because the Hispanics have ruined his neighborhood, playing loud music, speaking Spanish.
I can think of no better depiction of resentment against immigrants than the 1989 Spike Lee movie, "Do the Right Thing," in which three Black men sit across from a Korean owned grocery and contemplate why the Koreans seem to have been successful so quickly, while they, Black men who have lived in the United States so much longer, have not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUbvT6YKPzk
That's where the resentment comes from. Not from anything the immigrants have done but from the disappointment which wells up from a sense of failure.
One of the men speaks with a Caribbean accent and he laments that Korean grocer has been off the boat no longer than three years and already has a thriving business, while he, who has been in the States for a decade has failed to acquire any wealth.
Watch that clip and you can see it all there. So many of the Trump crowd have that same sense of rage, and it must come from a sense of humiliation--that they have not done better, and the unspoken suspicion they cannot admit to themselves derives from their own sense that they have not done better because of their own failure to advance themselves.
It is a question they must see in the eyes of their wives: Mr. Kim across the street, he buys his wife a new car. We can barely meet the rent. What's wrong with you? And that man has to ask himself, "What's wrong with me?"
MAGA.
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