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Boy, that one’s a mystery, isn’t it? The short answer is, I don’t know. I doubt if his parents even know. There is a certain kind of person, if you look into their eyes, all you see is a dark hole. That’s Stephen Miller. His eyes don’t betray anything about him, because there is nothing to betray.
He comes from a family that was saved by immigration to the United States from certain destruction in what is now Belarus but then was part of the Russian empire. And yet now he is the single most virulent xenophobe in an inherently xenophobic administration. He hates immigrants, and he very probably does not even know why.
What I’m going to do tonight is try to illustrate what that hate is, and how it comes from exactly nothing.
When I lived in the deep South in the 1980’s, I had someone over to my house who was a friend of a friend, who bought him along when I invited him for dinner. The man was from Mississippi. I was living in New Orleans.
During dinner, he made a few racist comments. Ordinarily, I would have thrown him out of my house for talking the way he did, but in deference to my friend, I abstained from that extreme solution and decided instead to take the opportunity to interrogate him about his racism.
I lived in the French Quarter, and after dinner, we went outside and sat on the balcony to drink coffee and have an after-dinner drink. I decided not to waste any time, and started right in, asking him why he had used the N-word to refer to Black people every time he spoke of them. He seemed a little shocked. It occurred to me that he had never been asked that question before. He said something like, I don’t know, I just do.
I asked him if he knew the word was offensive to Black people, and to others as well, including me. He allowed as how he understood that. Doesn’t that give you pause, I asked him. I’ve got freedom of speech, like anybody else, he replied.
With that, I decided to ask him if he thought Black people were inferior. He did. I asked him why. He answered that it was obvious to anyone who paid attention. I asked him if he thought Black people should not have the right to vote. He answered that they shouldn’t.
I wasn’t going to argue the Civil Rights laws and the Voting Rights Act with him, so I pressed on. I wanted to know where his racism came from, so I asked him if he had ever had a conversation with a Black person the way we had spoken with each other earlier at the dinner table. No, he hadn’t. I asked him if he had ever had a Black person over to his house as a guest. The answer again was, no. I asked him if he had gone to school with Black people when he was young. No, he went to an all-white “academy.” I asked him if there had been Black people in the university he attended. He said yes, but he didn’t have anything to do with them.
I asked if any Black person at his college, or in the town where he lived, had ever done anything to offend him personally. He said something like, being there, and chuckled. I asked if he had gone to Black restaurants in the town where he lived – I was thinking specifically of a steakhouse owned by a Black woman that was famous throughout southern Mississippi. He said he had gone there, and the steaks were good. I asked if it offended him to eat at a restaurant owned by Black people where Blacks were eating at nearby tables. He said no, long as they keep to themselves.
I asked if he had ever been the victim of a crime committed by a Black person, such as a mugging. No, he hadn’t been mugged, but everybody knew they stole money taking welfare, and that was out tax dollars. I pointed out that the number of Whites and Blacks on welfare in Mississippi was almost exactly proportional to their numbers in the state’s population. He said everybody knew that welfare was started for Black people – he used the N-word – and without them, there wouldn’t be any welfare. I didn’t argue the history of public assistance with him, realizing that his answer reflected political rhetoric on the Right, especially in the deep South.
Realizing that I had reached the end of my search for specific reasons for his racism, I shifted my approach and came right out and just asked him where it came from. He looked at me as if I had asked him whether gravity was real, if the planets circled the sun. It’s just the way things are, he said.
I hadn’t gotten into it with him about either the scientific or moral lies of white supremacy, thinking that would lead into a rabbit hole useless to argue. In fact, I hadn’t argued with him at all. I was looking for a reason behind his racism and had found nothing. He didn’t come right out and say that he was “raised that way,” but clearly that had contributed to his beliefs, if not been at the root of them.
Even that would not have been a real answer. You can be heavily influenced as a child and having reached adulthood decide to go against your upbringing. I knew people whose racism was essentially erased by their experiences in the Army. For several of them, it was the first time in their lives they had personally come to know a Black person.
There isn’t any answer to the source of racism. I suspect the same is true about Stephen Miller’s xenophobia. It has no root in his family history. It doesn’t come from having grown up in Santa Monica, California. There is no evidence that someone from an immigrant background kept him from being admitted to a prestigious university. In short, Miller seems not to have suffered any damage personally from immigration in general or from an immigrant specifically.
He has made a career out of being anti-immigration, and the way he has overseen the Department of Homeland Security and its ICE policies seems to reflect a sadistic streak in him. But though psychology could help explain certain behaviors in a person, it’s not enough with Stephen Miller, and it’s not enough with deeply entrenched racism.
I do believe that people are not “born this way” when it comes to beliefs that fly in the face of logic and come from the dark corners of prejudice. Bigotry is learned and can also be inherited, but Stephen Miller seems not to have inherited his intolerance. Every time he opens his mouth, it is obvious that he enjoys it. Hatred has that effect on some people. For reasons we will perhaps never understand, it’s like a drug. Hate feels good to them. I suspect that like addiction, they can never get enough of it. Stephen Miller is such a person. He’ll go to his grave hating people who are seeking the same thing his ancestors sought and found here in this country: life itself and the freedom to live it.
Read more reporting from David 
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