GBTYC

Go Back To Your Country, They Said

A new HuffPost database explores the moral emergency of hate in the Trump era.

— Almost a year ago, Elvis Smith woke up to a doctor telling him a bullet had obliterated his right tibia, spraying fragments of the bone up and down the inside of his leg. Smith, 60, cried. All he’d done that morning was go to work laying concrete, like he’d done most of his life, when a white man with a gun showed up shouting, “Go back to Africa.” It didn’t even make sense. Smith is an American citizen, after all — not that it should matter. Later, the doctors put a metal rod where his bone used to be, fastening it to screws drilled into the sides of his knee. He’s a proud concrete mason — a union man who helped rebuild the World Trade Center after it was bombed in the ’90s — but it’s a job that requires being on your knees, and that hurts too much now. Smith is always hurting, and when it gets especially bad, his 14-year-old son knows to fetch a warm blanket from the dryer to wrap around his dad’s leg. All the leg’s any good for these days is walking really slow — like he did last month, up the Baltimore County courthouse steps, on his way to see the man who did this to him — and he swears that myth about metal implants being able to predict the weather is true. When his leg throbs with pain, Smith says, he knows before most anyone else that a storm’s close and that the sky’s about to open up with rain.

By Christopher Mathias Photography by Cheryl Diaz Meyer

Smith is among so many who have been told to go back where they came from. He was shot during a period of emboldened white nationalism that continues to this day. Throughout American history, expressions of hate have been punctuated with variations of the same sentiment: Go back to your country. Go back to Africa. Go back to China. Go back to Mexico. It’s a foundational white nationalist insult, meant to threaten a victim into believing that they don’t belong and that this is a country for white people. What makes the insult unique now is that it’s employed not only on the street corner, but on the presidential podium, giving it a new license. The U.S. does a bad job of tracking hate crimes, so in 2017, ProPublica launched Documenting Hate, a database of tips. It invited media partners from around the country to access the database. HuffPost was one of those partners, and almost immediately, we noticed just how pervasively the statement “go back” is hurled at victims. Since then, we've kept track of when and where perpetrators say it. HuffPost built a separate database to examine what “go back” means in the era of President Donald Trump. We collected 800 reports, occurring over the last four years, in which assailants communicated some variation of “go back” to their victims. We found over 300 accounts of these incidents in news articles; 16 in police reports obtained through public records requests; and the rest were tips sent to HuffPost and its media partners in the Documenting Hate project. HuffPost spoke with 80 victims and witnesses.

“To be truthful, I couldn't sleep,” Smith remembers of the long nights after the attack. “You know, I was never at ease with myself.” Every time he closed his eyes, he was back on that suburban block in Reisterstown, laying concrete down on a new driveway to earn a little extra cash before Christmas. Smith is muscular and handsome at 60, keeps his hair short, and hasn’t lost his Virgin Islands accent after all these years on the mainland. His work partner that day was Robert Peete, 48, a skinny former boxer from Baltimore with a penchant for telling it as it is. They were both hired for the job by Wendell Jones, an elder at Peete’s church. Work that day was a slog; it was rainy and cold, but by lunchtime, they were nearly done. That’s when the dog appeared. A pit bull, Smith remembers. Unleashed, it ran through the wet concrete, leaving paw prints in their day’s work. Smith looked around for an owner and spotted him nearby, standing shoeless and shirtless in the cold, with tattoos on his left arm. "You got to hold your dog, man!” Smith yelled at the white man, later identified in the police report as 24-year-old Brandon Troy Higgs, whose tattoos include a yellow identitarian lambda, a white nationalist symbol, not that Smith knew that at the time. Higgs collected his dog and exchanged some stern words with Smith before walking back into his house. But Smith and Peete say that minutes later, Higgs reemerged without his dog, this time wearing tennis shoes and a black hoodie, his hand clutching something in his pocket.

BALTIMORE COUNTY, Md.

Nov. 4, 2019

Graphic: Rebecca Zisser/HuffPost

Special Investigation

Just A Little Extra Cash Before Christmas

In suburban Maryland, a constellation of counties near Baltimore and D.C., Smith and Peete were not the only people of color over the last four years to experience the terror of being told to “go back,” according to HuffPost’s database. A black woman found her car egged and a letter by the front door. “Go back to Africa,” it said, next to a symbol for the Ku Klux Klan. “Next time it won’t be eggs on your car, blackie.” A white man hit a Muslim teen in the face, knocking his glasses to the ground. As the teen blindly searched for them, the man told him to get out of America. Another white man pointed a gun at a Hispanic man, threatening to kill him and his family. The man said he had voted for Trump, and now it was time for the Hispanic man to get out of this country. And in Columbia, Maryland, 39-year-old Anjali Sanghvi told HuffPost she was driving to pick up her kids from school when she stopped at a traffic light. It was a nice day, so she had her driver’s side window rolled down. Then she heard a voice. She looked to her left and saw two white men in the car beside her. The man in the passenger seat held up a gun. “I could shoot you right now and I'd get away with it,” he explained to Sanghvi, referencing Trump’s election victory three days earlier. “Go home, sand nigger,” he added. Then the light turned green and the two white men drove off. Looking back at the encounter, Sanghvi remembers the men as thieves. “It stole my sense of peace in this country,” she said. “It stole my sense of belonging.”

Robert Peete, left, and Elvis Smith in Baltimore

They Steal Our Sense Of Belonging

20% of the perpetrators invoked the name of President Trump or his campaign slogans.

Earlier this year, Trump told four Democratic representatives of color, all of whom are American, to “go back” to the countries where they came from. Days later, the president lashed out at one of those congresswomen during a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina. The crowd broke into a chant of “Send her back!” The president stood silently onstage and observed his handiwork. Telling people of color to “go back” has a long and cruel history in this country. In 1957, a horde of whites stood outside a recently integrated Arkansas school and yelled “Go back to Africa” at nine black teenagers, none of whom had likely ever been to Africa, and whose ancestors had likely been in the U.S. just as long, if not longer, than those of the white people screaming at them. Before that, in 1919, during a period of widespread xenophobia directed at immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, the sheriff’s office in Lake County, Illinois, erected signs along the roads that warned: “This is an American town. Don’t criticize our President or our Government. If you don’t like our country, go back to your own country. If you have no country, go to hell.”

A Long, Cruel History

White nationalists march in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017. Photo: Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

On Aug. 12, 2017, a thousand white nationalists invaded Charlottesville, Virgina, for the “Unite The Right” rally. The election of Trump had emboldened them. They marched with their faces uncovered, chanting “Blood and soil,” and at one point, after spotting a black woman walking down the street, chanted, “Go the fuck back to Africa.” Among those in the crowd were James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old neo-Nazi from Ohio who later that day would drive his car through a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. There was Taylor Wilson, a 26-year-old from Missouri arrested last year for trying to hijack an Amtrak train. There was James Reardon, 20, from Ohio, whom the feds arrested earlier this year for plotting to massacre Jewish people. On a white supremacist message board, Brandon Troy Higgs, a 24-year-old former Navy cryptologist from Maryland, said he would also be in Charlottesville. Leaked white supremacist chat logs from before the rally, full of racial slurs against black people, show the depths of Higgs’ hate. “Brb hookjng [sic] up my nigger mulcher to the truck,” he wrote in one chat group for people planning Unite the Right. “I decided I’m going to create my own group called Baltimore Animal Control and buy those dog patrol poles with the snare at the end and wrangle niggers with it,” he wrote. “Also want to leave bear traps in Baltimore city with buckets of KFC chicken.” He refers to Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who massacred black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, as “St. Roof.” And he implored his fellow fascists to read “Siege,” a neo-Nazi tome that calls for acts of white nationalist terror to hasten the beginning of a race war. In June 2017, Higgs posted a photo of himself in the chat groups holding a pit bull — perhaps the same dog that, one cold morning a few days before last Christmas, ran out of Higgs’ house in Reisterstown and stepped into wet concrete.

No Masks, No Hoods

Last month, Smith and Peete watched Higgs enter a crowded Baltimore County courtroom in handcuffs. Peete couldn’t sit. He was too agitated. He stood with his back against the courtroom wall, his eyes fixed on Higgs. After that day in December, Peete couldn’t work for months. A punch he landed on Higgs’ temple when he was trying to disarm him was so powerful that Peete tore the muscle in his own shoulder and fractured his finger, too. “But even if I could have worked, I probably wouldn't be able to because I was just exhausted, because I couldn't sleep,” he remembers. “I couldn't stop crying.” At night in bed, when Peete closed his eyes, he saw the barrel of the gun, Higgs’ finger going for the trigger. I’m gonna die, he thought to himself all over again. I’m gonna die. For a while, Peete says, he kept a knife in his pocket when walking around town, his hand on the handle. His grip tightened, he said, whenever he walked past a white person. In his neighborhood in West Baltimore there are very few white people, but one day, Peete was looking out his kitchen window when he saw a white man walking in the alley behind his house. Peete grabbed a gun, aimed it in the direction of the window, and waited. He’d read online that Higgs was involved with some actual Nazi groups. What if this white guy was one of Higgs’ buddies? “Because people kill witnesses, you understand what I'm saying?” Peete explained. But the white man never even looked up at Peete and walked out of sight. Smith sat in the courtroom, his hands clutched around the cane he sometimes uses to help him walk. The past 10 months had been hell. He can’t work anymore and is in the process of applying for disability benefits. There were nights early on when he had to drag himself across the floor to go to the bathroom. He says he called all the local news stations, but no one wanted to interview him. But even if he does talk to the press, who would understand? However well he described it, how would this white journalist ever get it? The pain and humiliation of it all. The terror. He tapped his cane against the courtroom floor. Across the aisle from Smith and Peete sat the friends and family of Higgs. They stayed mostly quiet, save for one young woman who stood up and yelled, “I love you, Brandon!” Higgs only spoke once, to say he understood he was waiving his right to a speedy trial. He wouldn’t be accepting the district attorney’s plea offer. The judge scheduled a trial date for January, and officers led Higgs away. Smith and Peete went out into the hallway with their families. They call each other brothers now. Both had built up their hopes for this day. For some kind of justice. And then it all lasted a few minutes, with a judge postponing the trial. Smith says that for now, he's just taking things day by day. He’s still having trouble sleeping, and isn’t looking forward to this winter, when the cold will make his leg hurt more than usual. Higgs told him to "Go back to Africa," whatever the hell that means. He lives in Maryland. He raised a family here. His life is here, however different it might be now. “This is a stain that's going to be on me for the rest of my life,” Smith said. “I will never have closure because, in my heart, I was out there working, doing the honest job. I was attacked, and I'm the one walking around with a limp.”

A Day In Court

Robert Peete near his home in Baltimore

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Smith and Peete recalled him saying. “This neighborhood is ours.” Higgs then walked up close to Smith and shoved a finger into his chest. “You black motherfuckers need to go back to Africa,” he said. "You monkey motherfucker.” Suddenly what seemed like a small dispute about an off-leash dog was something else entirely. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh yeah, he's one of them motherfuckers,’” Peete recalls. A tussle ensued and Peete remembers Higgs shoving a pistol into Smith’s chest. After some more tussling, all three men fell to the ground. Peete lifted his head from the grass to find himself staring down the barrel of the pistol. “He was about to blow my brains out, like right in that grass,” Peete recollects. He grabbed the barrel of the gun and shoved it into the ground. They wrestled some more, and at some point Higgs’s gun fired, shooting Smith in the leg. Smith, even while bleeding, managed to keep Higgs pinned to the ground. Eager to disarm Higgs, Peete climbed on top of him, and the boxer in Peete got to work. “I just gave him everything I got,” he recalls. Eventually, he got the gun away. Jones, who had hired the men for the job and who had been watching from a distance, called 911. When the cops showed up, Peete says they told him to calm down. “I almost died right here and you're telling me to calm down?” he remembers saying. They even put him in handcuffs, but as the facts became clear, eventually removed them. Smith, meanwhile, having lost a lot of blood, passed out. That thing about your life flashing before your eyes is true, he says. For him, it was his seven children, all of their faces fading into silhouettes, before everything went dark. A lawyer for Higgs didn’t respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. Higgs has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, assault, and committing hate crimes, among other charges.

“He was about to blow my brains out, like right in that grass.”

The incidents occurred in 49 states and Washington, D.C., and range in severity from murder and assault to vandalism and hate speech. Of the 800 “go back” incidents, three involved murder. They occurred in Olathe, Kansas; Portland, Oregon; and Indianapolis. All told, four people spent their final moments having heard their killer say some variation of “go back” or “get out.” Ninety-three of the incidents involve allegations of assault. Muslims were the most targeted religious group, with Islamophobia motivating 120 of the hate incidents. One hundred and fifteen of the perpetrators said "Go back to your country"; 117 chose "Go back to Mexico"; 59 selected "Go back to Africa"; 21 opted for "Go back to China"; and 19 said "Get out of my country." Of perpetrators whose race was known, 90% were white. Of perpetrators whose gender was known, 75% were men. And a staggering 20% of the perpetrators, while targeting their victims, invoked Trump’s name or his campaign slogans. The database represents a tiny fraction of the estimated hate crimes in this country, most of which go unreported. Still, the stories contained in the database are harrowing, and taken together, show an American moral emergency.

“There's a specific kind of nationalism that we're now seeing. It's the kind of nationalism that is at the core of fascism..."

One hundred years later, Jeannine Bell, a law professor at Indiana University who has studied hate crimes for the past 25 years, said she’s never before seen so many documented hate incidents in which the president’s name is invoked as a means of intimidation. “I don't know another example of precisely this phenomenon,” she told HuffPost. (Maybe, she cautioned, you’d find some similar cases in the 1830s, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a slave owner most famous for his ethnic cleansing campaigns against Native Americans. Trump, incidentally, keeps a portrait of Jackson in the Oval Office.) Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of the book “How Fascism Works,” said hate speech from public leaders, left unchecked, can become normalized. “And then violence occurs like five to six years later,” Stanley said. “Look at Myanmar, look at Rwanda, look at Nazi Germany. You have some years between the onset of the hate speech and the normalization of violence and mass violence.” Trump launched his campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans rapists. Later, he called for banning Muslims from entering the United States. Trump’s rhetoric and his policies have shown how the idea of "go back" informs the idea of "Make America Great Again." Mexicans and Muslims and refugees needed to go back. And America itself needed to “go back” — to a time when it was whiter and more Christian. “There's a specific kind of nationalism that we're now seeing,” said Stanley. “It's the kind of nationalism that is at the core of fascism, when the dominant group is meant to feel like this is their cultural space, their country, and there are these pure traditions which are being ruined and being placed in threat and grave peril.” Foreigners and immigrants and others, he continued, are being dehumanized and depicted as invaders, the enemies of our civilization. This softens them up as targets for both sanctioned state violence — the concentration camps at our border, the ICE raids, the forced separation of children from their parents — and the kind of unsanctioned street-level violence depicted in HuffPost’s database. In fascist movements, Stanley explained, “there's always a relationship between the rhetoric and the unofficial militia. That's what we're looking at right now.”

K. Sophie Will contributed reporting and data analysis.