How Did We Even Get Here?

Trying to pinpoint where systemic racism “started” in the United States is like trying to find the source of the Nile River. Sure, you can definitely go and find it, but the terrain is so harsh that it almost doesn’t seem worth it. Go further down the river and it becomes more recognizable. Then you go further down until you pass cities and flood plains until finally you reach a point where the river has gotten so big and forceful that it can’t be controlled any longer. It goes and goes and goes until it hits the Mediterranean sea and it can’t go any further. It spreads out into a murky, muddy, dirty delta. But as bad as it looks (and probably smells, I’ve never actually been there), it’s actually full of fertile soil.

That’s kind of where we are right now. The “source of the Nile” in this regard probably goes back to Christopher Columbus. Yes, I know his name and image and legacy are controversial right now, as they should be. But the truth is that he is essentially the father of the transatlantic slave trade. The natives of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and other parts of the Caribbean were enslaved, tortured, mutilated, raped, and murdered. The Taino people were forced to collect gold and tribute for the Spanish crown and if they did not meet their quota, they had their hands cut off and made to wear them around their necks. And this doesn’t even get into the enslavement and trade of 9-10 year old girls. Columbus was the Jeffrey Epstein of the Early 16th century.

Skip forward to the point where it was noticed that European diseases were decimating native populations in the Americas and those plantations still needed labor. Here’s where the African slave trade came into being in the early 17th century. Africans had already been exposed to European diseases such as Smallpox and already had an immunity. And they were also living in a hot, humid environment…perfect for working plantations. In the early 1600s, the first African slaves were brought to the Americas.

And then we fought the Civil War and slavery was abolished through the Emancipation Proclamation as well as the 13th amendment. Everyone lived happily ever after and racism was solved once and for all!

LOL

Reconstruction was, to say the least, a complete clusterfuck. Just because the Civil War was over didn’t mean you didn’t still have people who wanted to keep Blacks enslaved. We were already dealing with two and a half centuries of programmed dehumanization of “the negro.” And people also resist change. Everyone in the country now had to adapt to an economic shakeup, a change in race relations, rebuilding destroyed cities, and veterans from both the North and the South who now need medical care and their old jobs back, but now with a labor force that grew in size virtually overnight. There was a lot of resentment towards former slaves. This was the era that saw the rise of the KKK and the adoption of the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia as the symbol of southern “heritage.”

As the 1800s drew close to ending, America saw an enormous influx of European and Chinese immigrants seeking work in the factories, in the fields, and on the railroads. Blacks were still not paid nearly as well as even the Chinese or Irish or Italian laborers. Not to say there wasn’t racism towards those groups as well, there were. In the 1910s, there was a string of lynchings of Italians in Louisiana. Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for crimes they did not commit.

The 1930s brought us Jim Crow and the erection of most Confederate statues and monuments. But that’s going to require an entire post itself.

In the 1940s when the U.S. joined WWII, units were still segregated. The U.S. put its own Japanese citizens into concentration camps.

In the 1950s, during the suburban expansion, Blacks were redlined out of the neighborhoods built for veterans and their families.

The 1960s – The Civil Rights Movement. More than a hundred years after slavery ended, Blacks still couldn’t vote or share water fountains.

In the 1970s and 1980s, The U.S. government flooded Black neighborhoods with crack and heroin and then declared a war on drugs, giving the police an excuse to pretty much arrest anyone they wanted. In 1985, more than 60 years after the Tulsa Massacre, the Philadephia police dropped a bomb from a helicopter on a house thought to be a headquarters of the Black rights group. That whole block burned.

In the 1990s, the result of the socioeconomic downfall of Black neighborhoods being torn apart by drugs and violence, led to the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

In the 2000s, we found a new enemy to fight. Muslims became the enemy on one fateful day in September of 2001. But in 2008, America took one of its biggest steps forward and we elected a Black president. This angered a lot of people.

In 2016 America took a huge step backwards and elected the polar opposite of Barack Obama and as a result, we’ve seen racists and white supremacists become emboldened once again. We’ve had vehicle attacks, mass shootings, lynchings, and have opened up actual concentration camps for people trying to seek refuge in the United States.

And now we’ve arrived in 2020, a genuine annibus terribalis. We started with the U.S.-backed assassination of an Iranian general in Iraq, then we had the Australian wildfires, then the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread rapidly in Asia and Europe. A lockdown followed as the virus began to spread rapidly in the United States, centered mostly in the NYC area. As a result, the stock market crashed, at one point the price of oil went into the negative numbers, we hit ~25% unemployment, and our “normal” changed at breakneck speed. And just as we were starting to poke our heads back out at the end of may, a man named George Floyd was murdered by a vindictive, racist police officer in Minneapolis, MN. That police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck, while three other officers either held him down or watched it happen, for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Floyd said “I can’t breathe” and called our for his mother while his life slipped away.

And now our cities burn – because it’s been over 400 years and people are just fucking DONE. Because #BlackLivesMatter whether we believe that or not. I certainly do. I know I’m white (apparently not enough for some people) and I grew up in privilege but I was also raised to do the right thing when the right thing needs to be done. I’ve always tried to stand up for people who are oppressed and I make and effort to embrace infinite diversity in infinite combinations.