If You Have Brown Skin . . .

by

Perspectives

Special to United Methodist Insight | Jan. 20, 2025

Yeah, half the nation was happy on inauguration day. The rest of us shared some levels of horror and even terror.

My biggest concern: anyone with brown skin will, by the end of the day, formally lived in a police state. As in, “show your papers.”

This “let’s get rid of the ‘illegals’” is code for “If you have brown skin, we’re coming after you.”

Absolutely, we’ve got an immigration problem. We always have had—it’s the nature of the kind of nation we were from the founding when the desperate and persecuted have flocked to our shoes (unless, of course, they were Jewish under Hitler—our national shame).

Sometimes, the baddies make it through. I’m all for proper justice for anyone who violates our laws and hurts others. But these plans will inevitably hurt the innocent.

According to the NPR summary, Trump’s plans include “deploying the U.S. military and National Guard to the southern border, and ending automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who don't have legal status.”

Think about it: members of the National Guard and the US Military are going to snatch and grab as many brown-skinned folks as possible. These people, with no training in immigration law, many of whom know zero Spanish, will be empowered to put people in a modern-day iteration of concentration camps in an effort to cleanse the US of such genetic pollution.

How will they know who to round up and send off? They’ll need to examine citizenship papers. People who happen to fit the brown-skinned demographic have automatically become second-class citizens. No such demands to “show your papers” will be made of white-skinned folks, even though most of our criminals fit that demographic.

Have you ever wondered how many of this nation’s multiple mass shooters are brown-skinned? Check out the graphic below. They are predominately white.

Oh, by the way, most of them are men.

We might do a better job of getting rid of violent criminals by rounding up all the white men. But wait!!! It’s the white men who WANT to round up the brown-skinned folks! Hmmmm . . . is there something else afoot here? Is it possible that the US elected a convicted felon to the highest office in the land, and that felon (the First FOTUS) happens to have racist tendencies and happens to surround himself with white nationalists? Stephen Miller, anyone?

Yeah, I’ve been accused of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” by uttering such words. So be it. But this gets deeply personal to me. I’m nice and lily-white and utterly safe, but I treasure my beloved daughter-in-law and two grandchildren with Latino heritage. Sure, they are entirely “legal” but . . . they are vulnerable. They’ll need to carry their papers. I do not.

I also like to eat fresh vegetables, many of which are harvested by those very “illegals” that the First FOTUS is now going to order to be rounded up and deported. And that’s only the beginning of the problem here.

Yeah, I’m not a happy camper. And never forget, this nation's voters did indeed elect a sexual predator and are cheering him on.

The Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference (now Horizon Texas Conference) of The United Methodist Church. She is an author and columnist, and blos at Christy Thomas: Pondering Life, Old Age, and a Crazy World