Racism Never Dies in America

Jena Six
September 22 2007

Last Thursday, tens of thousands of people around the nation gathered in Jena, Lousiana, for the protest rally about so-called "Jena Six" criminal charges.

Negro lynchings by the white mobs up until early 20th century were executed in the South usually on Sunday, for all whites in town were able to attend the hanging party for their family picnic, collecting ears, fingers, and penis as memorabilia from the corpses hung high in noose.

And "Jena Six" case is a copycat incident that insinuates the past and unacknowledged but true history of the United States, a country proudly declared and acclaimed by Americans a nation of Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy.

Am I telling you a white lie?

You may think so, because you never learned it at school, because your teacher never knew or bothered to know about it.

When you read the following article, you may understand why "sand-niggers" in Iraq do not want to import democracy from America.

Today has not begun Yesterday
Myth of racism in America
January 11, 2001

Historically, the United States has never dealt with racism seriously…because it is America’s nightmare that has stamped on African Americans through inhumane slavery with a crushing legacy of poverty, crime, inequality, and exploitation.

Since people can only form opinions based on the knowledge and information to which they have been exposed, rabid racism in America has prospered through the help of the cultural agencies, like school, academia, mass media, church, and government institutions that play various roles writing the history with limited and jaundiced perspectives.

W. E. B. Du Bois, a black writer and educator who received first black Ph.D. degree from Harvard University, argued that the sense of history is crucial to the current predicament of American race relations…far too many Blacks do not have the knowledge of their bondage and struggle against the black slavery and it costs such incalculable damage on the African Americans that the notions of black inferiority are justification for centuries of black exploitation at the hands of whites.

Malcolm X said in the biography: the devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.

“The Negro is an American. We know nothing of Africa,” lamented Martin Luther King Jr.

The US history began five hundred years ago with Columbus invasion of Indian continents in the Americas and Columbus was honored with a pompous parade in the Columbus Day every year.

Never before had the American students learned the atrocious history of Columbus expedition that massacred thousands of Arawak Indians, rounded up Indian men, women and infants, and took five hundreds of them for slaves shipped to Spain. (Two hundreds of them died on the way.)

When the historians raised the issues of the founding father, George Washington, who owned 316 black slaves, abused them as chattel, and willed them to his wife, Martha, upon his death, Attorney General-designate, John Ashcroft, accused the historians, in his Southern Partisan article, of revisionist nonsense, a diatribe against the values of America.

Someone said that black slavery is the most unacknowledged story in America’s history…in 1865, the US federal government let go free of four million penniless black slaves (one third of population in 1860) without rendering them of any means to survive, perpetuating them for centuries suffer under virtual slavery, lynching, exploitation, and poverty up until now.

African Americans were under the constant legislative, executive, and judicial bondages to be subordinated to the whites even after the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln.
Since twenty Africans were sold as bond servants in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, 25 million blacks died in slavery, hundreds of thousands of freed blacks were lynched, burned alive, mutilated and dismembered (their teeth, fingers, ashes, clothes, and internal organs sold as keepsakes, and the photos of lynching were used in postcards mailed via US Postal Service), and blacks were not allowed to buy homes in the white neighborhood and black farmers were forbidden to get financial loans from the Federal government.

Few Americans believe that section 102 in Alabama Constitution prohibits the legislature from enacting any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendent of a Negro. (30 percent of Alabama’s voters still opposed the repeal of the law.)

Here are some of untold stories at the history classrooms in the school:

1. Indian population of 10 million that lived north of Mexico when Columbus arrived was reduced less than 1 million, because Europeans decided to massacre them when they were not able to enslave them.

2. Thomas Jefferson sponsored the bill restricting the movements of slaves and requiring white women who bear mulatto children to leave the commonwealth with their children, while he sired mulatto children with his black slave.

3. Andrew Jackson, a great president in history book, was a slaveholder, land speculator and mass executioner of Indians, and he reneged the treaties with Indians and expelled 17,000 Cherokee Indians through the Trail of Tears.

4. Abraham Lincoln issued Emancipation Proclamation to save the Union not to free black slaves. It was a military maneuver, giving the South four months to stop rebelling, and threatening to free slaves if they continue to fight. He promised to leave slavery untouched if the states surrender to the Union. The proclamation declared the slaves free only in those areas fighting against the Union and said nothing about slaves behind Union lines. He also urged blacks to leave for Haiti or Liberia. Just leave and do not come back.

5. Early 1900, during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, the US government turned the blind eye on the black lynchings in the Southern States and did nothing to stop it. President Woodrow Wilson, a father of self-determination for most of Korean students, instituted federal segregation of workplaces, washrooms, and lunchrooms.

6. It seems enigmatic why Bill Clinton has become so popular among blacks, since his right-of-center domestic policies ranging from the most punitive crime bill to welfare reform bill in history reversed what Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had brought to the poor blacks.

African Americans are over-represented in every sphere of social predicaments: in prison, death row, unemployment line, homeless shelters, and soup kitchen.For 246 years (1619-1865), blacks were enslaved by white Europeans, but are not yet totally freed from the bondage of disparity in status, wealth, and culture…since the Federal Government walked away from four million black slaves, many state governments have kept them under tight noose in the form of discriminatory statutes such as Jim Crow Laws, Peonage system, and racial segregation and discrimination.

And throughout American history, in nearly every instance in which the white Americans have been given a direct vote such as plebiscites, ballot initiatives, referendums and the like, the majority of them have rejected any measure beneficial to the interests of blacks.

In this historical perspective, it is a ludicrous assumption that black Americans would be able to compete and share a slice of pie in the dog-eat-dog capitalistic society with many institutionally favored white majority groups.

Instead of assuming responsibility for grievous injustice, the descendants of the slave-owners hold the very notion of race to justify exploitation, racial inequality and imperial conquest, even though scientific evidence shows that the denizens of the earth are all one big family.

According to the scientific journal Nature, we all descended from a single ancestral group that lived in Africa about 170,000years ago and modern humans spread across the earth from Africa in an exodus that took place around 50,000 years ago.

These revelations are uncovered by new techniques that allow molecular examination of DNA, which expands our knowledge of antiquity far more efficiently than have the traditional tools of fossil evidence.

One of the interesting findings is that some Europeans have more genes in common with Nigerians than do Nigerians with Kenyans; some Cambodians are closer genetically to Ethiopians than Ethiopians are to Angolans, and there is more genetic diversity among Africans than there is among the rest of the world’s people.

For the American racial supremacist group and Southern fundamentalist Christians who support new Bush-fils Administration, the issues of race are such deeply rooted in the country’s history and blacks were so dehumanized that they were rather more comfortable to live under the Old Testament, creation ex nihilo (made out of nothing) than to tolerate the disgrace of being lineal to black Afrikaners.

However, when these racists gather at the garden of the White House to celebrate their messenger’s ascension to power, they can not deny the historical fact that the Capitol and the White House were built mostly by slaves pro bono. (The US treasury rather paid the slave-owner $5 per slave a month.)

There are many buildings in the acknowledgement of human pain in the US capital…Holocaust Museum is funded and managed by the American taxpayer’s money although no Americans were responsible for the killings of the Jews.

A garden in memory of Japanese Americans interned during WWII is there with $20,000 recompense to each internee.

A Native American museum is coming soon and they were helped and cocooned in the reserve.

Yet in Capitol Building, not a plaque in tribute to the black slaves is there or in any books in Capitol Historical Society about the construction that mentioned about the use of slave labor.
No one would miss the reasons why blacks lag behind in every sphere of statistical measures in the mainstream society, if one does observe it with the historical perspectives.

And if the situation were reversed as white Europeans were enslaved in the same fashion as blacks suffered, chances are millions of them commit massive suicide.
The issues of racism in American can not be addressed through a continuation of marginalizing the minorities with a massive incarceration or disenfranchisement of blacks and Hispanics, building the brick wall along the Mexican border or deport non-European immigrants in an attempt to prevent the mongrelization of the populace.

Heavy influx of Latinos and Asians into the California State had reduced Caucasians to minorities joining the states of New Mexico and Hawaii.

It is more pragmatic and humanistic to acknowledge the historical wrongs and the crushing legacy of black slavery that Black Americans of today are not originated from yesterday, but the byproduct of century-old slavery.

In this historical sense, myth of racism reveals its fallacy and unravels to surrender.