Yesterday, in a roundtable at the White House discussing “sanctuary city laws,” a California sheriff lamented the fact that her state’s law forbids her from reporting suspected gang members to ICE. Included in President Trump’s response were two sentences that have been getting a lot of press:
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”
It’s a shocking statement and one educators might be tempted to ignore. It’s the end of the year, and attention spans are short. Some schools are already into final exams, and across the country educators are preparing students for graduation, looking ahead to summer and even to next year. It’s unwelcome, the intrusion into classrooms and curricula. It would be much easier to just focus on the kids and on making classrooms into protected spaces where students can feel safe.
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”
But it’s not sustainable. Classrooms can’t be hermetically sealed. The language and the vitriol behind it slip under the doors like smoke. If we can’t protect them from the rhetoric, the best way to help students is to encourage them to use the skills we’re already teaching them, to talk explicitly about context and how it shapes our understanding.
The Trump Effect
In this report, Teaching Tolerance surveyed approximately 2,000 teachers. The results indicated that the 2016 presidential campaign had a profoundly negative impact on schoolchildren across the country, producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom.
Educators in almost every discipline teach students to use context as a tool for interpretation. Without context, any individual statement can be dismissed as an exaggeration, a misunderstanding or a joke. And when we teach about characterization in literature class, or Westward Expansion in U.S. history or even the ways that Algebraic theory has real-world implications, we’re teaching students how to recognize context.
The context of the meeting in which this statement was made is certainly important. Defenders of the remark have argued that the President wasn’t referring to all undocumented immigrants, but instead to members of the violent gang MS-13. (It’s not entirely clear this is the case.) But the meeting isn’t the only context worth considering.
We should also encourage students to look at the broader context, which includes his previous arguments about—and policies regulating—immigration into the United States, as well as the ways in which dehumanizing language has historically been used by those in power.
We need to push students to use this skill in the real world, as well, to recognize that context doesn’t end at the close of an utterance. Were this a story, you could encourage students to refer back to the beginning. The context would include the speech the president gave when he announced his candidacy, when he made his now-infamous assertion: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. ... They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”
And we need to show students that the context doesn’t end with the president himself: Just as Algebraic theory has real-world effects, so too does rhetoric reflect and shape policy. The president said these things in the United States in the 21st century, when the Department of Homeland Security is blurring the lines between people who have committed violent crimes and “ICE fugitives,” whose only crime is illegal border crossing. When Immigrations and Customs Enforcement deports soldiers and students. When the U.S. policy is to separate mothers from their children, holding children on military bases with the vague assurance that, someday, “The children will be taken care of—put into foster care or wherever.”
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”
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Finally, we need to push students to look at historical context. We can’t understand the significance of the president’s remarks without understanding the ways in which dehumanization has historically been employed as a political tool. We can’t divorce the president’s sentences from the sweep of American history and the use of dehumanization to justify inhuman policy, from the descriptions of Native peoples as “savages” to the three-fifths clause and other language that enshrined slavery in the U.S. Constitution. And though we might prefer to look away, we must also face the ways these techniques have been used internationally in the 20th century, from the equating of Jewish people with rats throughout the Holocaust to the labeling of Tutsis as cockroaches in the Rwandan genocide.
“These aren’t people. These are animals.”
Every day, in classrooms across the United States, students are learning the skills they need to recognize bigotry and to push back against it. Let’s encourage them to put those skills to use. If we can’t keep our students safe from the smoke, let’s show them how to fight the fire.
Delacroix is an associate editor for Teaching Tolerance.
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