Ham Sandwich

 The New York Times published a piece earlier this week documenting the almost surgical precision with which the Trump administration has fired Black officials in senior positions and replaced them overwhelmingly with white men. 

Could this pattern of discriminatory hiring and promotion be a mere coincidence? I would find that more plausible if the Pentagon right now wasn't run by a man who belongs to a church whose pastor has stated in the past that Black people were better off under slavery. 

The existence of real-life, actual, unironic racism on the American Evangelical Right is not exactly a new thing, of course. Bob Jones was still banning interracial dating as late as the 1980s—due to their official theological position that Black Americans are subject to the "curse of Ham." 

And an account of the rise of the Religious Right reprinted recently in Politico argues plausibly that it was opposition to racial integration in schools which—far more than abortion—actually proved the animating cause of the first generation of modern evangelical conservatives. 

But—it's been a while since we had someone with a Cabinet-level position who openly subscribed to this same theology. Yet, it appears that this is Pete Hegseth's actual worldview. 

As James Russell Lowell once mocked this belief system in the 19th century, in The Biglow Papers: 

"For it is well known that a superintending Providence made a kind of sandwich of Ham and his descendants, to be devoured by the Caucasian race."

Hegseth appears to regard his own Black officers—with decades of honorable service—as sandwich meat of the same variety, for his own delectation. 

(But give him credit—anti-Black racism is probably lower on his list of priorities. Don't even get him started on women...)

Of course, this attack on Black employees is a threat not only to their rights—but to the entire workforce. If the federal government—hitherto regarded as a "model employer" when it comes to racial integration—turns segregationist; then what other labor laws can it see fit to disregard? 

Indeed, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that the same Trump administration that wants to disregard Civil Rights laws for Black employees also wants to throw out civil service and for-cause removal protections for all federal employees, regardless of race. 

So it's not just Black employees who should be concerned right now—but everyone with a government job. A threat to one is a threat to all. 

As James Russell Lowell wrote in the same work—all the way back in the mid–19th century—in a prescient plea for interracial solidarity among workers: 

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman

      Hev one glory an' one shame,

    Ev'y thin' thet 's done inhuman

      Injers all on 'em the same.