I am an avid watcher of Cable News Network (CNN) and a sedulous viewer of the Abby Phillip-hosted “NewsNight” current affairs program, so I had a “ringside view” of the entire clash that erupted between Sarah Huckabee-Sanders talk-alike, Shermichael “The Simpleton” Singleton and Ana Navarro, both of whom are card-carrying members of the Trump-chaperoned ruling US Republican Party – (See “CNN Cuts to Commercial After Ana Navarro and Black Conservative Clash Over Immigration and Slavery” EURweb 5/2/25).
However, predicated on her longstanding public policy positions on bread-and-butter matters relating to the wellbeing of Working-Class and Underclass Americans, Ms. Navarro appears more like a Bernie Sanders Republican or, very likely, a disaffected crossover Democrat who had been forced by circumstances to consort with diehard Republican Party machinists, if the latter word or descriptive could be aptly appropriated for the description of self-inflated and pathologically self-infatuated “Faux-Nativist” second- and third-generation Americans like President Donald John Trump and the remarkable mass of self-entitled “bona fide” Aryan-blooded Americans, the depth of whose citizenship is scarcely existent in the Antebellum or the Pre-Civil War Era of the America of the 1870s and later or well into the first half of the Twentieth Century.
Which is essentially and fundamentally why the Make America Great Again (MAGA) Crusaders would rather have the Slavo-Colonial Era of US History thoroughly and effectively erased from the public school curriculum and, for that matter, the entire collective memory of the American citizenry and our history books. There is, of course, a palpable level of Inferiority Complex on the part of and in the psyche of the MAGA Crusaders who tend to fearfully envisage Continental African Presence and seminal contribution to the foundation and the exponential and the phenomenal fabrication and the development of Contemporary American Civilization to be an unspeakable anathema and an indelible and a mortal threat and insufferable indictment against their hauteur and imperious sense of superiority and civic entitlement to the collective wealth of the vast imperial landscape and polity that is “These” United States of America.
And that is also conspicuously and inescapably why any public policy initiatives geared towards the official acknowledgment and the partial remediation of the prime and the veritable victims and the real and the Authentic Makers of American Civilization is implacably perceived to be a Grand Impediment to the patently bogus and the obscenely pontifical claims to Racial Supremacy by these MAGA Crusaders. Which is also why it was all too logical that the first and the prime target of the complete and the thorough eradication of the Continental African Foundation of Contemporary American Civilization has been the relentless assault on Affirmative Action Policy Initiatives, presently redesignated as the remediative policy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
You see, for the MAGA Crusaders, it is all a Zero-Sum-Game or an ineradicable regime and an inexorable process of Neo-Nazi Proscription of Non-European and Non-Aryan Peoples. Consequently, it goes without saying that the Ana Navarros, properly speaking, are at once inescapably and desperately caught between the metaphorical rock and a hard place. That was clearly and tragically what the “Titanic Clash” of the entitlement conflict that flared up recently between the Continental African-descended Mr. Singleton and the Latin American and the Nicaraguan-born Ms. Navarro was unarguably and incontrovertibly about.
The “Euro-Latino” Post-Slavery and MAGA-Era American citizen finds herself/himself literally caught up and uncomfortably wedged in-between a quite authentic African American claim to geopolitical and civic primacy or anteriority and entitlement, on the one hand, and the even more politically potent claims of the descendants of the erstwhile European Slavocrats and Plantocrats, the very architects of the statutory instruments of the seminal and the Model Constitutions of the Original Thirteen (13) Colonies of the Present-Day United States of America – viz., Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island – each and every one of which mandated the barbaric trade in African Humanity as the sole, surefire means of “taming” and “transforming” the wild forests and the “Pristine Jungles” of the New World into livable environments for the English and their immediately preceding Dutch settlers and colonists.
In the “Titanic Clash” that erupted on the Abby Phillip-hosted “NewNight” talking-heads program on CNN and was seen around the globe, in real time, Shermichael “The Simpleton” Singleton demonstrated his impeccable awareness of the seminal anteriority and the historical primacy of Continental African Presence in the United States of America, although the Republican Party Policy Analyst and Political Strategist made the egregious blunder and rather unpardonable error of seeming to cavalierly presume Postcolonial and Post-Slavery Latino Presence in the United States of America to be one that purely and exclusively entailed the predatory and the voracious search for the proverbial “Greener Pastures” or provender, in classical Shakespearean parlance. C
Consequently, Mr. Singleton’s downright seamy and cavalier morally grandstanding claim to the following effect: “If you come in illegally, you have to leave. Americans are tired of that. We don’t have unlimited resources. We have to care for our own people.” Now, the foregoing remarks are absolutely nothing short of both discombobulating and plain and downright farcical, if also because it clearly contradicts the civic stance of Mr. Singleton’s own prime benefactor and, some would even say, grand-paymaster, namely, Mr. Donald John Trump, and that of the “Replacement Theory Wing” of the MAGA Crusaders.”
Which is also why perhaps the most logical question that comes to mind is the following: If, indeed, African Americans are bona fide citizens of the United States of America, then, what accounts for the indescribably relentless assault on DEI programs by the present 2.0 regime? On the latter count, Mr. Singleton could not credibly feign his abject lack of serious awareness of the fact that for the Trump-commandeered MAGA Republicans, the historically corrective public policy initiative of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a strikingly unmistakable synonym for many an Afrocentric public policy initiative championed by the US Government, in particular, liberal and neoliberal Democratic Party-allied and sponsored governments.
But, of course, it is also an open secret that the overwhelming majority of DEI beneficiaries are not African Americans, male or female; neither are they Non-White Americans. Still, the Navarro-Singleton Clash was one that Yours Truly has been anticipating for quite a considerable while. And it is to the latter subject to which we turn the focus of our attention in the second and the final segment of our present conversation.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]
