US Politics

In 2018, a colleague and I, together with a team of Greenlandic research assistants, conducted one of the most comprehensive surveys to date on public opinion in Greenland. We travelled to 13 randomly selected towns and settlements across the island nation, conducting in-person interviews with a representative sample of adult residents.

The survey explored a wide range of topics. We asked for views on climate change, economic matters – and the prospect of independence from Denmark. Until recently, this was the latest poll on what the people of Greenland thought about this issue.

Greenland, a former Danish colony, is currently an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. This political arrangement grants Greenland extensive self-rule, including control over most domestic affairs, as well as its own prime minister and parliament. However, Denmark retains authority over foreign policy, defence and monetary policy.

While our survey results were covered in Greenlandic and Danish media upon their release, they received scant international attention. This changed abruptly on January 15, when newly re-elected US president Donald Trump reposted an old news article about our results. The headline stated that two-thirds of Greenlandic citizens support independence.

Trump posting the 2018 poll in 2025.
Truth Social

Trump did not add a comment in the post but the insinuation was clear given his recent statements about annexing Greenland from Denmark: Greenlandic residents want independence from Denmark, and therefore, they might be open to other political or economic arrangements with the US.

“I think we’re going to have it,” Trump recently said after a phone call with the Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, who told him the land was “not for sale”. Trump has in the past spoken of somehow “purchasing” Greenland but has since moved on towards speaking in more assertive terms about taking control of the territory.

Back in 2018, when we conducted the survey, Trump had not yet revealed any plans to annex the island nation. It was a scenario we could hardly even have imagined and therefore did not ask our participants about. As such, regardless of how Trump framed them, the survey results in no way indicated that the population harboured a desire to join the US.

In fact, a recent survey conducted by Sermitsiaq (a Greenlandic newspaper) and Berlingske (a Danish newspaper) directly addressed this question and found that only 6% of respondents wanted Greenland to leave Denmark and instead become part of the US.

In the study I published based on the 2018 data collection, I reported that a majority of the Greenlandic population aspired to independence. Two-thirds of the participants thought that “Greenland should become an independent country at some point in the future”.

Opinions were more divergent regarding the timing of independence. When asked how they would vote in an independence referendum if it were held today, respondents who stated a preference were evenly split between “yes” and “no” to independence.

‘I think we’re going to have it’.
EPA

The Act on Greenland Self-Government, passed in 2009, grants the Greenlandic government the legal authority to unilaterally call a referendum on separating from the political union with Denmark. According to the law, “the decision regarding Greenland’s independence shall be taken by the people of Greenland”.

During the 15 years since its passage, the option to call a referendum has not been exercised. This is likely due to the potential economic consequences of leaving the union with Denmark.

Each year, Denmark sends a block grant that covers approximately half of Greenland’s budget. This supports a welfare system that is more extensive than what is available to most Americans. In addition, Denmark administers many costly public services, including national defence.

This backdrop presents a dilemma for many Greenlanders who aspire to independence, as they weigh welfare concerns against political sovereignty. This was also evident from my study, which revealed that economic considerations influence independence preferences.

For many Greenlanders, the island nation’s rich natural resources present a potential bridge between economic self-sufficiency and full sovereignty. Foreign investments and the associated tax revenues from resource extraction are seen as key to reducing economic dependence on Denmark. Presumably, these natural resources, which include rare earths and other strategic minerals, also help explain Trump’s interest in Greenland.

As Greenland’s future is likely to remain at the centre of a geopolitical power struggle for some time, it is crucial to remember that only Greenlanders have the right to determine their own path. What scarce information is available on their views suggests that while many aspire to independence, it is not driven by a desire to join the US. More

Since becoming president, Donald Trump has issued a record number of executive orders. Several aim to dismantle federally funded initiatives based on the idea that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) are goals worth achieving.

In response, many commentators have warned Trump may be dragging the United States back to the dark days of the “pre-civil rights” Jim Crow era.

But who or what was Jim Crow?

The term Jim Crow refers to the long period in US history when black Americans could not exercise the same rights of citizenship as white Americans.

“Jim Crow” segregation began when slavery ended in northern states such as New York, between 1777 and about 1830. There was a brief reprieve from some of the era’s excesses just after the Civil War, when African Americans could do things such as run for political office, vote, and own land even in the South.

But by 1877, conservative forces had regrouped. In the next few decades they enforced inequality through acts of violence such as lynching and by passing laws mandating separate public spaces and schools for black people and preventing them from voting.

The Jim Crow era ended with the mass mobilisation in the 1950s and 1960s of civil rights campaigners, which forced the federal government to take, in the words of President John F. Kennedy, “affirmative action” to make things more fair.

President Trump throws pens used to sign executive orders to the crowd during an event in Washington on January 20.
Matt Rourke/AAP

Who was Jim Crow?

The character of “Jim Crow” first came to life in 1828 on a New Orleans stage. An itinerant white performer, Thomas Dartmouth Rice, blackened his face and claimed to be mimicking the songs and dances of an enslaved man, named Jim Crow.

White performers and later even black ones wore makeup and outfits accentuating the supposed difference of black people from white norms of beauty. They performed songs, skits, and sometimes excerpts of other well-known stage plays, all designed to malign black people. One of those songs was “Jump Jim Crow”.

Cover of the early edition of ‘Jump Jim Crow’ sheet music.
Wikimedia Commons

Within ten years of Rice’s first rendition, the theatrical genre of minstrelsy took hold of audiences in the US, and spread across the British world, including Australia and New Zealand. Its popularity lasted right into the 20th century, as late as the 1960s.

Historians have never quite solved the mystery of how, by the 1890s, the mythical figure of Jim Crow became the shorthand name for the system of laws, violence, and caricature under which black Americans laboured for so long.

But by naming it as such, the shorthand implied the system was required in order to keep an inferior group of people, illustrated by the dissolute and comical character of Jim Crow, in check. The name stuck.

Actor Thomas D. Rice dancing blackface as the enslaved man ‘Jim Crow’ in 1836.
Wikimedia Commons

The name also travelled. In Australia, several Indigenous men were named Jim Crow (and Indigenous women named Topsy, after another caricatured figure in the wildly popular American novel and stage show, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin).

In central Victoria, Jim Crow Creek was renamed Larni Barramal Yaluk in 2023 after a long campaign by Dja Dja Wurrung leaders.

Why separate people by race?

The Jim Crow era emerged after slavery ended because wealthy white people wanted to maintain a cheap labour force.

They justified this system by claiming the aim of keeping white and black people apart was to maintain “racial purity.” (The very word, “miscegenation” emerged in 1864, just a year before the end of slavery in the US.) This rhetoric also helped make segregation appealing to poorer whites, because it enabled them to feel superior to non-white people.

Little Rock, 1959: a rally at the state capitol, protesting the integration of the local high school.
Wikimedia Commons

While segregation is now often imagined to have been total, in fact white and black Americans continued to inhabit many of the same spaces. White and black agricultural workers often tilled the same fields, while African American women worked throughout these decades as maids or cooks in white people’s homes, a very intimate role.

Maintaining inequality

The system of unequal opportunities – “Jim Crow” – was maintained in three main ways. First, with violence. More than 4,000 African Americans were killed in a ritual known as “lynching” between 1877 and 1950. Untold numbers suffered other forms of violence and lived constantly with the fear that they might be its victim.

Secondly, local and state governments passed laws and ordinances to control African Americans. These included dictates on mobility such as curfews; vagrancy laws to force black Americans to sign desperately unfair labour contracts; and prohibitions on black people owning firearms. Later, these laws were expanded to prevent black men (and later women) from running for office, voting, or sitting on juries.

And the laws mandated separate public spaces, such as in train travel or in the theatre, as well as separate educational facilities. In 1896, the provision of “separate but equal” public facilities was given the stamp of approval by the US Supreme Court. That decision was only overturned in 1954.

At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina, May 1940. Photo by Jack Delano.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Thirdly, the racism that had underpinned justifications for the trafficking of 12 million people from Africa across the Atlantic in the slave trade was expanded in new ways.

Grotesque caricaturing of black people became a mainstay of consumer goods (think of “Aunt Jemima” pancakes or “Uncle Ben” rice) and popular culture. This started with theatre in the 1820s, then later in recorded music, film, radio, and television.

Today’s picture

Now, “Jim Crow” is back in public discourse. Conservatives say their anti-DEI policies restore merit-based appointments and are genuinely “colorblind.” But the appointment of Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, for example, suggests “merit” is understood very differently by different groups of people.

Critics such as Margaret Huang, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s president and chief executive, assert that Trump and others’ attacks on DEI “aren’t about a particular program or some acronym — they’re just a sanitized substitute for the racist comments that can no longer be spoken openly”.

Coupled with other presidential executive orders aiming to remove “birthright citizenship,” and to expand deportation of immigrants and limit fresh immigration, it’s clear Trump’s administration is intent on reshaping just who is a legitimate citizen of the US, and which groups of people have access to federal support.

If there is one lesson to take from the ignominious period of US history known as Jim Crow, it is this: it was overturned only by dint of African Americans’ immense collective efforts. These began with civil court cases in the 1830s through to marching across a bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

Participants in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Plenty of people are looking to their examples of community building, civil disobedience, and collective resistance to once again defend the principles of equality. More