Has racism become a benign table talk?

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TOPSHOT – Ku Klux Klan member yells at counter-protesters at rally, calling for … [+] Protection of Southern Confederate Monuments, Charlottesville, Virginia, July 8, 2017. The afternoon rally in this quiet college town was authorized by officials in Virginia and sparked heated debate in America, where critics say the far right was energized by Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. / AFP PHOTO / ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS (Photo credit should read ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP via Getty Images)

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Racism has become a topic many discuss as casually as brushing your teeth or having dinner later at night. During one of these conversations, someone described racism as America’s ugliest religion, a comment many would agree was loaded with truth. But how many Americans remain uninformed about the roots and bloody history of racism as an institution. Because the history of the United States is taught through the prism of the dominant culture from the point of view of the colonizers, the disturbing, deeply rooted and deadly history of racism has been swept under the carpet. The heinous events of American history are often sugar coated and overlooked. Events such as the genocide of the native people and the continued breakdown of many treaties with the native nations; the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II; and the racial profiling of Latinxes, Blacks and other people of color that continues today and this is just the tip of the iceberg

In an in-depth report on racism, PBS reported that the first evidence of racism occurred in the Middle Ages in the 13th and 14th centuries, when Jews were associated with the devil and witchcraft. But it was not until later in the 15th century that the truly heinous nature of racism materialized in the United States through the invocation of slavery. Between 1525 and 1866, nearly 13 million Africans were abducted from Africa and sent to the Americans through the transatlantic slave trade. Just under 11 million people survived the traumatic two-month journey. Africans were believed to be pagans and inferior to whites and Europeans and should be used as objects to perform laborious tasks and serve them. American slave traders and slave owners have often presented a passage from Ham’s story in the book of Genesis as a justification for enslaving Africans.

Although Congress banned the importation of slave labor, slaves such as Matilda McCrear, the last known survivor of the transatlantic slave trade, were still transported to America. McCrear was kidnapped in West Africa and arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned forced labor. The Enlightenment quickly followed and called for the unification of the human race. 18th-century ethnologists began to view human beings as part of the natural world and subdivided them into three to five races, generally considered varieties of a single human species. But in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a growing number of writers, especially those engaged in the defense of slavery, argued that races were separate species.

Despite the emancipation of blacks from slavery and Jews from impoverished ghettos, the force of racism appears to be increasing rather than diminishing. Whether this is the intended outcome or not, some argue that the Enlightenment inevitably led to the rise of scientific racism and that racism shifted from paternalism to more competitive. Darwin’s emphasis on “survival of the fittest” helped develop a new, more credible form of scientific racism at a time when race relations were increasingly an arena of conflict and division. This same understanding of racial difference also led to raging anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, which had a significant impact on how white Americans viewed Jews.

As if these horrific American historical events weren’t heinous enough, the turn of the twentieth century introduced more covert but equally harmful forms of racism. The South has passed several laws on racial segregation and restrictions on black voting rights. Racist-mediated tropes portraying black men as violent, overly-gendered beasts lusting after white women served as a justification for the lynching. The portrayal of black men as sexually dangerous and a threat to the purity of white women was a critical step in perpetuating racism in the South. A vital feature of the racist regime maintained by state law in the southern states was the fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage, which led to efforts to prevent blacks from marrying whites. The civil rights movement in the United States, which succeeded in outlawing legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s, attempted to temper the widespread racial hatred, which fueled Jim Crow South, and was as confrontational as it was deadly. for blacks.

An honest reflection on racism in America would be incomplete without an equally honest and thoughtful examination of systemic and structural racial inequalities. Although the Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal, American democracy has historically and often violently excluded certain groups. Examples of inequality range from overt policies and belief systems to less overtly discriminatory. Historical examples include voting taxes which effectively deprived black voters of the right to vote; the marginalization of black soldiers who fought in WWI and WWII but were treated as second-class citizens upon their return to the United States; Black innovators who did not have the right to file patents for their inventions; white medical professionals exploit the bodies of black women such as Henrietta Lacks and J. Maron Sims; separate trip during Jim Crow; and government-imposed segregation of American cities and schools. Also noteworthy is the controversial Three Strike Act that was passed under the Clinton administration in 1994, which drew fierce criticism for disproportionately targeting people of color for drug-related offenses.

Racial, economic, and educational disparities run deep in American institutions, and we need to talk about these disparities as such. Equally crucial is how American society remembers and teaches the horrors of slavery and other deadly events. But as recent studies have shown, many textbooks offer a sterile view of American history by focusing only on positive stories about black leaders like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Before 2018, Texas schools even taught that state rights and sectionalism, not slavery, were the root causes of the Civil War. And, in Confederate memorials across the country, enslaved individuals are often misrepresented as loyal slaves. Without truthful reflection, many fear that improving race relations will be nearly impossible, but continue to work for fairness and equality for all.

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