When we witness the activities of White Supremacist Groups in the United States, it is important to understand the foundation of White Supremacy in America, it is not something that just suddenly emerged.
America was founded on White Supremacist ideologies, I recently posted an article on Facebook in which I expressed that there will never be peace until all human beings acknowledge that “all lives matter” some persons had issues with that statement because they wrongly assumed I did not support “Black Lives Matter.”
The point I am really trying to make is that the racial divide cannot be solved by black people alone, racism in America spans a period of over 244 years and in 2020, it is still rampant and raging like an un-caged rabid animal.
Racism will only end when all people regardless of their ethnicity come to realize that they are all human beings and the colour of their skins should not define their humanity, if someone has another alternative let me hear it.
Now let us be realistic about racism in America and address its foundation.
People like Tucker Carlson of Fox News, vehemently deny that there is systemic racism in the United States.
To persons with similar opinions, I ask the following questions:
Why is the third verse of the National Anthem not sung?
“And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Which group of people did the criminal clause in the 13th amendment of the constitution affect the most?
What was the purpose of the “vagrancy law”?
Who introduced the segregation laws?
Who introduced the Jim Crow Laws?
Why did it take 79 years after the declaration of independence for slavery to end?
Which part of “all men were created equal” did the Dred Scott Law represent?
Dred Scott decision, formally Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, ruled (7–2) that a slave (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory (where slavery was prohibited) was not thereby entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which had declared free all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′, was unconstitutional. The decision added fuel to the sectional controversy and pushed the country closer to civil war.
Does the image below resemble systemic racism?
Lets listen to Mississippi Governor George Wallace
Transcript: “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny… and I say … segregation today … segregation tomorrow … segregation forever.” (Inaugural address of Governor George Wallace 1963)
Is there any racial equality in these words
John Chivington a former Methodist pastor who became a colonel in the United States Volunteers, proudly declared: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians, I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians, kill and scalp all, big and little”
Harry Truman said these things before he became president of the United States.
In 1911, the year he turned 27, Truman wrote to his future wife, Bess: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.”
“(Uncle Will) does hate Chinese and Japs,” Truman continued. “So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”
More than 25 years later, Truman, then a U.S. senator from Missouri, wrote a letter to his daughter describing waiters at The White House as “an army of coons.” In a letter to his wife in 1939 he referred to “nigger picnic day.”
Let’s be realistic and acknowledge what the following images convey
One may say that those signs are no longer on display, that would be true, but the ideology which created those signs is very much embedded in the minds of many people and we see that ideology in its most baneful and pernicious operational form on display every day.
If we can all agree that there is a racist problem, then it should not be difficult to accept that the problem can only be solved by all the races and different groups working together.
I am extremely heartened when I see the “Black Lives Matter” protests being supported by all races across the world, maybe we are on the path to the full realization that “all lives matter”.
That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned;
that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation;
that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;
that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.
Excerpts from Haile Selassie’s address to the United Nations in 1963