Somali Lives Matter

Trump's attacks on people of color have a long and ugly history

In the mid-1980s, Bernhard Goetz was surrounded by some young men on a subway in New York. Goetz, who apparently had been mugged before, took out a gun and shot the young men, all of whom were Black. After firing the first shots, he would later reportedly say to one of the men something along the lines of, “You don’t look so bad. Here, have another.”

The Goetz case was a complicated one in that many New Yorkers of all races and ethnicities could relate to feeling at times a bit concerned about their safety on the subway.

There was no doubt that Goetz felt threatened, which may have been partly why he was acquitted of the most serious charges, though he was sent to jail for carrying an unlicensed firearm.

A few years later, when I was working at the New York City Parks Department, a friend of mine, Samson Mulugeta, who was editing the Daily Plant, the Parks newsletter, and I talked about the Goetz case and other cases around that time that involved race. I can recall discussing with Samson some of the hate crimes that occurred in New York, such as those in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, where gangs of white kids surrounded a few African American men and killed one, Yusuf Hawkins, in the latter case, while in the former beating a Black man and chasing another, Michael Griffith, to his death on the Belt Parkway.

Samson was from Ethiopia, and he and I had many thoughtful discussions about race and civil rights.

For instance, Samson suggested to me that there would very well have been a different public and prosecutorial reaction, had the races of the parties in the Goetz case been reversed, had Goetz been African American and had the alleged muggers on the subway been white.

Samson was right.

It was indeed likely that fewer New Yorkers at the time would have had sympathy for a Black subway gunman or vigilante.

In the wake of the George Floyd murder in June 2020, I wrote about these issues in a piece for Thrive Global, “Learning about Racial Injustice as a Young Man in the 1980s.”

Five and one-half years later, we have a chief executive of our country who is castigating Somali-Americans as “garbage” and who is saying that Somalia “stinks” as a country.

Somalia, like Ethiopia, is located in the Horn of Africa, which is where all of us as homo sapiens originated.

The Somalis, who are primarily Muslim, hail from ancient tribes of people, who have a vibrant culture and who have benefited our country by, among other things, starting businesses, particularly in Minnesota, where they have a large community.

In coming from the Horn of Africa, the Somalis, many of whom fled a civil war in their country, trace back to a part of the world that was at one time known as Abyssinia.

The Queen of Sheba, who was from the area that would now include parts of Somalia as well as Ethiopia, married King Solomon, the son of King David.

There are Somalis, like Ethiopians, who probably descend from Solomon and Sheba.

And long, long before that, all of us, as I say, began as a species in the Horn of Africa, the original continent.

Yes, despite what the racists think, the science is pretty clear that we homo sapiens indeed hail from Africa, East Africa, in the region around Somalia and Ethiopia.

As I wrote for Thrive Global in 2020, Black Lives Matter, and they always have.

It is also true that all of us, other than Native Americans, originally came from somewhere else before we settled in this country.

That includes our disgraced chief executive, who took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in the late 1980s in which he called for the death penalty for five young men who were accused of raping a jogger in Central Park.

Years later, after serving time in jail, the five young men, all people of color, were exonerated.

DNA evidence proved their innocence, showed that they had not committed the crimes.

Trump, of course, never apologized.

We all know that the solipsist in chief lies, cheats and steals.

We all know that he is a racist and a bully, who bashes any group of people who have been marginalized, but he tends to save his cruelest words for people of color. And he bashes people of color, Blacks, Latinos, Muslims and others, in the most foul and bestial language, just as he did years ago when he fomented racial tension with his calls for the death penalty and his hateful rhetoric in which he described the Central Park Five as a “wolf pack.”

Trump’s language is not only hateful and demeaning, in which he degrades human beings as other than human; his language also reeks of the greatest hypocrisy because Trump is the one who preys, like a wolf, upon vulnerable people.

And while there has been some fraud that has taken place in Minnesota, fraud that has involved some Somali-Americans, it is Trump, whose whole business model focuses on enriching his coffers through corruption, theft and lack of empathy.

It is Trump, who has committed fraud against all of us, who has taken away SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps, and health care from millions of Americans.

It is Trump, who was convicted of 34 felonies in New York, where he paid off Stormy Daniels, with whom he had an affair, and thereby manipulated an election.

And it is Trump, who has never repented for his racism going back even before the Central Park Five case to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when his family company, which he served as a high ranking executive under his father, settled out of court on civil rights violations for the racist coding at its real estate properties.

Of course, Trump has more than a few mini-me’s, who mimic him in denying American citizens and non-citizens due process, to which we are all afforded by the Constitution.

In an eerie echo of Bernhard Goetz, who fired an additional shot after shooting several young men on a subway, Pete Hegseth, when asked how to handle the two survivors of a strike on their boat in the Caribbean, reportedly indicated that those two survivors should be killed.

The secretary of defense used slightly different language from the language of Goetz, but Hegseth’s intent seems far more sinister.

Hegseth did not say simply, “You don’t look so bad. Here, have another.”

According to a story that the Washington Post first broke, Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody.”

Today, Admiral Frank Bradley reportedly told members of Congress that he never received such an order to “kill everybody” from Hegseth.

This comes after Hegseth’s comments about a so-called “fog of war,” to explain the circumstances around which the two survivors of the initial attack were later killed.

While he may have invoked that phrase of plausible deniability, which is as dehumanizing as it is hackneyed, the truth is not shrouded in any fog at all.

And the truth is that neither the solipsist in chief nor Hegseth has shown the leadership of President Harry Truman, who famously said that the “buck stops here.”

It seems possible that Trump and Hegseth did not want survivors to testify against the extra-judicial killings that were ordered on people of color traveling on boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific.

As we know, these killings against people, who were denied due process and who were no threat at that point to our nation, could amount to war crimes or murder.

Like Trump, Hegseth is a faux tough guy, who preens when he does pull-ups and does them “badly,” as Congressman Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger, said earlier this year on CNN.

Clearly, Hegseth’s tough guy posturing aims to please the fauxest of faux tough guys, the solipsist in chief.

In a speech to military brass a few months ago, Hegseth denigrated servicemen with beards as “beardos.”

Hegseth may not have used a racist term on that occasion, but he, like Trump, was undoubtedly singling out men of color, whose facial hair, in many cases, cannot be shaved without a great deal of pain.

That, of course, was in keeping with Hegseth’s policy of firing Black military leaders, such as retired Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., who had been Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and trying to erase civil rights icons like Jackie Robinson as well as Harvey Milk and others from military history.

Trump and his mini-me’s might benefit from a history lesson and a lesson in empathy.

As I wrote earlier, we all hail from the Horn of Africa, the original continent, a point I made in my 2020 Thrive Global piece, “Learning about Racial Injustice as a Young Man in the 1980s.”

This is another way of saying that Somali Lives, like Black Lives and all lives, matter.

They always have, and they always will.

We should remember that, and we should remember that with love.