Today is the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
At the Founding of America we set two goals: A democratically-run nation and equality for all citizens. We’ve largely put into place the democracy part over the years; now we must make the “equality” part happen.
A white man busted for passing a bad $20 wouldn’t get murdered by the cops — in fact, a white person in America is safe doing pretty much everything else that Black people have been killed by cops for doing just in the past few years (playing, eating, driving, parking, sleeping, walking, standing, selling cigarettes, seeking help, etc.).
Which raises a question that’s both existential and practical: America set the example for democracy in the world; can we now set the example for racial justice and harmony?
Or will the possibility of that dream die if the GOP regains power in 2022 or 2024 and pushes America back into being an openly apartheid white-run ethnostate, as we were pre-1965? Will Republicans gain enough power to revert America back to their “Southern Strategy” 20th century roots?
President Ronald Reagan justified his defense of apartheid South Africa by pointed out that the country was “a democracy,” and even though Black people couldn’t participate in that democracy, it was still all good…just like in much of America at the time. This was the worldview of America just a generation or two ago.
Congress, in 1986, however, overrode Reagan’s veto of an act condemning South African apartheid. Bishop Desmond Tutu, after he won the Nobel prize in 1984 and on a visit to America, referred to Reagan’s policy of supporting apartheid as “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.”
Tutu was right and Reagan was wrong, and South Africa is now a multiracial democracy. But world and US history — in this regard — have moved with glacial slowness.
South Africa’s apartheid government fell in the years immediately after the end of Reagan’s presidency, and has had both successes and difficulties in building a multiracial society. The same is true of Cuba and, at various times, Malaysia.
But they’re still relatively small countries. Today the world’s greatest superpower, America, is on the verge of living out the ideal that our common humanity is more important that our ethnic, religious, racial or sectarian differences. Of fulfilling the second promise of the Declaration of Independence: that “all men are created equal.”
Nonetheless, it’s still an effort that’s going to require Americans of good will to pitch in to make work. And it has powerful opponents, from MAGA to dozens of countries that are actively defending and promoting racism in America and in cyberspace.
In the beginning, most all countries were ethnostates – countries made up of a single ethnicity. Every nation was what it was because of the genetics of the people who made it up. Nations had evolved out of cities, which had evolved out of racially homogeneous tribes.
Swedes looked like Swedes, Persians looked like Persians and when people did occasionally travel, or armies invaded other lands, you could identify who was who simply by looking at them. Languages and subtleties of appearance were part of the equation as well: Swedes and Italians were identifiably different, and the British, Germans and the French spoke different languages.
The United States was established as a white British-ancestry ethnostate, although our founding documents declared otherwise.
At a time when about half the 13 American colonies held Africans in brutal slavery and all were actively engaged in the largest genocide in history, slaughtering Native Americans, idealists among the Founders and Framers included language in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, that explicitly proclaimed this country was formed to protect the rights of “all.”
It was also the first national founding document in the history of the world to assert that the purpose of government was to make sure that “all [people]” had equal access to “the pursuit of happiness.”
While that’s what we said, it wasn’t what we did for the first two centuries.
The naturalization act of 1790 only allowed “white people” who had lived in this country two years to qualify for citizenship. In 1924 we began to allow immigration of non-whites as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act (which also created the Border Patrol), but at a rate that couldn’t exceed 2% of their ethnic population in this country as of the 1890 census.
It wasn’t until 1965, with a heavy push from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, that Congress officially changed the law to make our immigration policy colorblind. Finally, the United States could claim to seriously and legally begin to live up to the ideal that all are “created equal” by explicitly rejecting racism in our nation.
That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is one that many Republicans and virtually the entire white supremacist movement in this country assert must be reversed, because it’s allowed people of color into America as immigrants.
The GOP/rightwing-media/racist argument is that domination by a single race or ethnicity is the “normal” state of humankind, and if white people are “replaced” by Blacks or Hispanics, that new majority will turn the tables and oppress and subjugate the newly-marginalized whites.
It’s just a modern retelling of how racism has dominated nations worldwide over the previous few centuries. Racist domination has a lot of history on its side — racial equality is an ongoing struggle for nations around the world — but in 1776 the idea that a kingdom was the only viable form of government also was “normal” and democracy was a struggle.
Nonetheless, we set it as a goal and we’ve been moving in that direction, slowly and painfully, with every generation since the Founding of the republic.
It’s been a long and torturous road, but, with a lot of help from legislation passed by President Johnson and now elevated again by the Democratic Party, America stands on the verge of becoming one of the first nations in the history of the world to not only proclaim, but actually live out, the idea that we are intentionally bound together by our common humanity, rather than a common immediate ancestry.
The pushback against this has been intense and violent, particularly since the Obama presidency, with the rise of multiple reactive white supremacist groups and the acknowledgment by the FBI that armed white supremacist groups now represent the greatest terror threat to America and Americans.
All the way back in 2008 Trump led the charge for America to cling to its racist roots with his “birther” charges against the legitimacy of President Obama and his assertion that immigrants from Mexico were mostly rapists and killers.
As Chauncey DeVega brilliantly explains:
The Age of Trump was and remains a type of cruel tutelage for the American people on the reality of political monsters and monstrous political movements. These truths cannot be wished away or made to disappear. These anti-democratic, antisocial and anti-human politics must be confronted and defeated.
Had Donald Trump prevailed in stealing the 2020 election, odds are he would’ve institutionalized his temporary racist immigration policies and America would be sliding rapidly back toward white supremacy as federal policy, while increasing the violent persecution of Americans who are not white, and purging the nation of non-white immigrants.
The last thing Trump and his Boys want is racial or religious harmony in America. They thrive on hate and division, which the billionaires and big corporations behind them also appreciate because it takes the focus off issues of economic justice and equality.
The urgency of this issue today is not exclusive to America.
Largely as a consequence of increased international trade and inexpensive travel, but also driven by increasing numbers of refugees across the world fleeing climate change and sectarian violence, numerous other countries have begun shedding their ancient trappings of racist ethnonationalism by taking in refugees who don’t look or pray like their own historic citizenry.
And, like America, countries including England, France, Germany and Sweden are experiencing widespread push-back and white-supremacist political and social crises.
While that’s what we said, it wasn’t what we did for the first two centuries.
The naturalization act of 1790 only allowed “white people” who had lived in this country two years to qualify for citizenship. In 1924 we began to allow immigration of non-whites as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act (which also created the Border Patrol), but at a rate that couldn’t exceed 2% of their ethnic population in this country as of the 1890 census.
It wasn’t until 1965, with a heavy push from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, that Congress officially changed the law to make our immigration policy colorblind. Finally, the United States could claim to seriously and legally begin to live up to the ideal that all are “created equal” by explicitly rejecting racism in our nation.
That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is one that many Republicans and virtually the entire white supremacist movement in this country assert must be reversed, because it’s allowed people of color into America as immigrants.
The GOP/rightwing-media/racist argument is that domination by a single race or ethnicity is the “normal” state of humankind, and if white people are “replaced” by Blacks or Hispanics, that new majority will turn the tables and oppress and subjugate the newly-marginalized whites.
It’s just a modern retelling of how racism has dominated nations worldwide over the previous few centuries. Racist domination has a lot of history on its side — racial equality is an ongoing struggle for nations around the world — but in 1776 the idea that a kingdom was the only viable form of government also was “normal” and democracy was a struggle.
Nonetheless, we set it as a goal and we’ve been moving in that direction, slowly and painfully, with every generation since the Founding of the republic.
It’s been a long and torturous road, but, with a lot of help from legislation passed by President Johnson and now elevated again by the Democratic Party, America stands on the verge of becoming one of the first nations in the history of the world to not only proclaim, but actually live out, the idea that we are intentionally bound together by our common humanity, rather than a common immediate ancestry.
The pushback against this has been intense and violent, particularly since the Obama presidency, with the rise of multiple reactive white supremacist groups and the acknowledgment by the FBI that armed white supremacist groups now represent the greatest terror threat to America and Americans.
All the way back in 2008 Trump led the charge for America to cling to its racist roots with his “birther” charges against the legitimacy of President Obama and his assertion that immigrants from Mexico were mostly rapists and killers.
As Chauncey DeVega brilliantly explains:
The Age of Trump was and remains a type of cruel tutelage for the American people on the reality of political monsters and monstrous political movements. These truths cannot be wished away or made to disappear. These anti-democratic, antisocial and anti-human politics must be confronted and defeated.
Had Donald Trump prevailed in stealing the 2020 election, odds are he would’ve institutionalized his temporary racist immigration policies and America would be sliding rapidly back toward white supremacy as federal policy, while increasing the violent persecution of Americans who are not white, and purging the nation of non-white immigrants.
The last thing Trump and his Boys want is racial or religious harmony in America. They thrive on hate and division, which the billionaires and big corporations behind them also appreciate because it takes the focus off issues of economic justice and equality.
The urgency of this issue today is not exclusive to America.
Largely as a consequence of increased international trade and inexpensive travel, but also driven by increasing numbers of refugees across the world fleeing climate change and sectarian violence, numerous other countries have begun shedding their ancient trappings of racist ethnonationalism by taking in refugees who don’t look or pray like their own historic citizenry.
And, like America, countries including England, France, Germany and Sweden are experiencing widespread push-back and white-supremacist political and social crises.
Originally posted at The Hartmann Report