Trump and Xi Play the Race Card?

The U.S.A. under Donald Trump is devolving into becoming modernity’s global symbol of racial and ethnic oppression, with China in close contention for its economic foothold in Africa and flagrant maltreatment of African emigres and expatriates in China’s provinces. Thus, something of a 21st Century cyber cold war of brutal images of racial strife emanating from within both nations have flooded social media platforms.

While stories surface globally of the expulsion of many African nationals from China’s densely populated urban regions, mostly peaceful protests of Blacks and their many allies and supporters of freedom march along America’s vast boulevards. Here in America masses of Black, mostly poor lower wage earners and service workers, suffer the ravishes of higher morbidity rates due to Covid-19, underscoring failed economic and progressive social policies, including inadequate health and child care, the prevalence of “food deserts” in many Black lower-income communities, and soaring unemployment.

As the global pandemic has eroded numerous jobs in America, masses of Black and poor Americans are now in uncertain peril. Contributing to nutritional deficits in the US are stagnant wages and greater susceptibility to chronic illness and disease.

Likewise, China’s booming African juggernaut economy is being built on the backs of underinsured, underpaid, over worked Black bodies. Some African news outlets report abysmal treatment of African laborers in Chinese subsidized infrastructure projects now being developed on the continent. Heightened labor tensions, minimal or no labor laws regulating child labor compounded by poor workers’ conditions have all been cited. Against this backdrop, underemployed low-wage Black hires desperately eke out a livelihood within China’s growing industrial African enterprises.

In the US, cascading images across cable news and social media show America’s great cities as poised for a long, hot summer – a season that could be gripped in the jaws of protest, with threat of being undermined by violent neo-Nazi White supremacists and anti-fascist anarchists. As Trump, America’s tone-deaf President seeks reelection by pandering to White fear and threatening Marshall Law, China’s “keen-eyed” expansionist Premier takes stock of America’s most vulnerable underbelly – its intractable race issue. China strategically plots a path aimed at becoming the world’s economic superpower and the country to supplant the US as the world’s undisputed moral authority. Truth be told, neither America nor China gets a pass on the issue of embedded racism. Both have a ways to go. D.Day Media 6.2.20