O let America be America again-
Langston Hughes
The land that never has been yet-
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negros, ME—
Who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Long before ‘Black Lives Matter’ started trending in the social media and in the volatile world around us today, insightful authors and poets like Langston Hughes had painted vivid, penetrative visual poetry reflecting on the tremendous pain of oppression of the African-American people in America. In a nation plagued with the bane of racism which existed since the colonial era, where the cherished American dream of attaining freedom and equality that every immigrant hoped for never became their own, history has been witness to the naked manifestations of racial segregation that are rampant to this date.
Historically important milestones of racism in America:
Won’t we fail ourselves as humans if we forget the heroic, monumental act of Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama in the year 1955, refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger, followed by her arrest? Or the inhuman lynching and killing of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old boy in the same year in Mississippi that forced the world to reckon with the tyranny of white supremacy and American racism? Won’t we be guilty if we forget the excruciating history of slavery of generations of the black population which the book ‘The Narrative of Frederick Douglass’ portrays as a seething document, and which has formed the core fabric of white supremacy in the nation, ruthlessly trampling over black lives? Wouldn’t we need to know the deep-rooted history of socio-economic inequality which has been enjoyed by white Americans as they kept on claiming their privileges in education, immigration and all aspects of their citizenship? How can we forget that throughout the course of nation’s history, continuous racism has been exerted on other races, like the Hispanics, African Americans, and also native Americans and Asians?
The tragedy of George Floyd: the deep-rooted psyche of black discrimination:
Today, as the world news document the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, condemned as a genocide by white lawmakers, resulting in public protests, rallies and riots spreading all over the nation like wildfire, don’t we unconsciously or consciously go back to the days when Martin Luther King Jr. had dreamt of a redemptive America devoid of the dehumanizing bigotry and the venomous politics of segregation?
In fact, if the incident of George Floyd makes our blood boil as we reiterate the importance of the campaign ‘Black Lives Matter’, we must also understand that this brutal act of oppression has its roots in collective experiences in systematic racism. The kind of racism that the European elite initiated long, long back, in the pre-civil war period, propagating the inhuman slave trade. The fact that eight serving presidents in American history have owned black slaves, an act protected by the US constitution apparently upholding the tenets of ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’ proves that black discrimination has been very much a part of the mainstream American psyche. Centuries after the abolition of slavery and the phenomenal Civil Rights Act (1866), various measures of subjugation against black population has existed and gone down the annals of history. These include the institutionalized racism against blacks in the post-civil war period, terrorism and lynching, the inhuman segregation of black and white schools, the violent race riots in Atlanta and Tulsa (1906 and 1921 respectively), the repercussions of the Great Migration, the historic relocation of millions of black population from their roots in the rural Southern states to the industrial centres of the North and West, to live a life of drudgery and excruciating pain.
Many politically conscious immigrants living in the United States from various parts of the globe also refer to the various milestones of black history and the civil rights movement, the various phases of the socio-political scenario of the 1950’s and 60’s and Martin Luther King’s life embedded in it as he paved his way in a strife-ridden America dictated by capitalism, colour, class and creed. Ironically, the situation hasn’t changed much since the fateful day in 1968 when he was shot dead for his political activism and his championing of the black rights movement. Genocide, slavery, immigration and naturalization laws to attain citizenship and also the brutal measures inside imprisonment camps might apparently seem a thing of the past, since formal racial discrimination has been banned and rendered morally unacceptable decades ago. But then, can we deny that even today, discriminatory viewpoints and actions still reign supreme within a large number of white Americans who continue to perpetrate the idea of racism by holding prejudices against other ethnic groups, encompassing the blacks, Hispanics, Latino Americans, Asians, among others?
According to a study facilitated jointly by the United Nations and the US Human Rights Network, submitted to the UN Universal Periodic Review in August 2010, hard realities of racism came up as the study stated that “discrimination in the United States permeates all aspects of life and extends to all communities of colour.” It was the same year when the US Homeland of Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) openly stated that racial violence is one of the deadliest threats of domestic terrorism in America.
Yes, the very fact that ‘people of colour’ happens to exist even today as a significant denomination in terms of economy, healthcare, education, devoid of assimilation in the mainstream proves that a post-racial era in the nation is a far cry away.
With the historic reign of Barrack Obama as the first black president of the United States (2009-2016), the world had probably thought that the advent of the post-racial era in the nation would mark the beginning of a world free from the lethal prejudices of bigotry and exploitation of the people of colour. But in the recent years, incidents of racism and discrimination have increased manifold, and under such environment of extremism, Martin Luther King’s dream of attaining an egalitarian, unbiased society die a thousand deaths every day. Don’t we stop and think how, in the strife-ridden times that we are in today, human unity, irrespective of race, colour and religion, was the only requisite that we should have counted on? But thanks to the historical prejudices and a gross xenophobic mindset, we are left only with deadly, brutal divisiveness among the human race which leads to more oppression, and endless mass destruction. Are the leaders of the nation listening?
References:
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