Micro-fascism, Miami style
It happened last week in Miami. The Miami Herald’s David Ovalle reported it this way:
“A Mount Sinai Medical Center anesthesiologist has been arrested and charged with a hate crime after police say she attacked a Hispanic man at a Hialeah Publix, vandalizing his car, calling him a racial slur and vowing to ‘get rid of every single one of you.’”
“Dr. Jennifer Susan Wright, 58, a white ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, has been charged with criminal mischief, tampering with a victim and battery with prejudice, a “hate crime” enhancement that upgraded the charge to a felony.
“She became enraged, police say, after the man asked her to maintain social distancing while in line at the supermarket.”
Wright’s was not the only racist micro-aggression in the city in the last year. The Miami Herald posted a 2020 video featuring an angry gun-wielding white man berating a black homeowner. Here is a link to both stories. See link below.
[https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article249401275.html#storylink=mainstage_card6]
The incident is a sign of a time when casual fascism has been virtually normalized after four years of the first overtly racist administration since the civil rights era. Former president Donald Trump, through words and deeds, gave people license to spew racial and ethnic prejudice since he came down from his hotel’s famous escalators and kicked off his campaign delivering an ugly broadside against Mexican immigrants and denounced “American carnage,” a transparent attempt to blame African Americans for urban violence.
The Wright incident is remarkable and ironic in several ways. The attack took place on January 20, the day Joseph Biden was sworn in as president, an event that must have upset Wright, a big Trump fan. Wright is a physician, but she acted more like a mentally disturbed person. It is uncommon for women to carry out assaults on male strangers through punching and kicking them in public settings. That conduct also violates a commonly cited norm of medical ethics: “first do no harm.” The attack took place in Hialeah, the city with the highest percentage of Cuban Americans in the United States. Cubans are the only major Latino group in the country that gave Donald Trump most of their votes.
“This is my country,” Wright said to the object of her wrath. Wright’s rant harkens back to rhetoric common four decades ago at the height of the English-only movement. One way to see the xenophobic crusade by the Trump administration is as a very loud, delayed echo of the backlash against immigration that began with the anti-bilingualism movement in Miami 1980.
Trump’s words and policies were Miami 1980 on a colossal national scale. The Trump administration created the environment that enabled and legitimated fascist aggressions on various scales, from various murderous rampages in Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, and El Paso to micro-aggressions in Miami and other cities across the nation.
