I can’t breathe. These were the last words of African-American George Floyd, brutally murdered by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. As is common knowledge now, Chauvin knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. This “incident” sparked outrage across the twin cities of Minneapolis-Saint Paul and throughout the world. Mr. Chauvin is currently being prosecuted for a second-degree murder charge. However, African Americans are not the only targets for racism in America.
Especially with the pandemic in 2020, racist violence against Asian Americans has increased quite a lot. Hate crime against Asian Americans is at a decade-long high, with Asian Americans of East Asian origin as the primary target. In 2019, the United Nations issued a report citing “an alarming level of racially motivated violence against Asian Americans”. Many have set the blame on the rhetoric of former President Donald Trump who often referred to the pandemic as the “China Virus”, or the “Kung Flu”.
In this article, I would like to help people understand the problem of racism in the US by examining three different communities. The African Americans, the Native Americans and the Asian Americans. Do note, First American is also used in place of Native American as a sign of acknowledgment that the First Americans were in fact the first to settle the North American landmass. I shall also be examining the history of these aforementioned communities, as they are particularly relevant to the current problems that they face. The importance of history to understand present problems is something well known by many. This is something commented upon by the French philosopher, Voltaire in his magnum opus La philosophie de l'histoire.
These incidents, like many before them, have degraded the United States in the eyes of the international community. How can America call itself the leader of the free world when it is consumed by internal strife? This is also being exploited by America’s geopolitical rivals such as Xi Jinping’s China, which are touting their political systems as an alternative to western democracy.
History of Racial Discrimination The problem of racial tensions and inequality predates the founding of the United States. America was and is a nation of immigrants. In fact, the first wave of immigrants were the white European settlers from Germany, the British Isles, and France. African Americans can be thought of as the second wave of immigrants. The main difference was that unlike the Europeans, the African-Americans did not immigrate of their own free will. The vast majority of people sold into the Atlantic slave trade were of Central or West African descent. These people were usually sold by other West Africans or European merchant princes. A small minority of these people were captured in coastal raids.
By the 17th century, African slaves were considered property and were being traded in markets as such. The offspring of African slaves were also considered indentured or “bound” to the owners. Current estimates suggest that over 12 to 12.5 million slaves were shipped to North America. By trade volume, the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the British Empire were neck-deep in the slave trade. At the turn of the 19th-century slavery as an institution had been abolished in various
countries, but the damage had already been done. African Americans in the US were never really free until the civil rights movement circa 1955. Prior to this, they had a status similar to that of the black South Africans in apartheid-ridden South Africa.
After the 1960s, the practice of institutional racism ended. However, there still existed a massive divide between the White Americans and various people of colour. Various pillars of the African American community, from Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, to more recently, the rapper Tupac Shakur were assassinated
in a wave of repression against Black Americans. This is in addition to the various instances of law enforcement-sponsored violence against African Americans and other people of colour. Various people of colour have often been the target of school shooters.
According to Renee-Tajima-Pena, a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, the intended target group of racist violence changes every decade or so. In the 90s, it was homophobic violence against white men, post 9/11 it was various Muslim groups, people of Arab descent, and the Sikh community. These three communities have suffered undue violence and the Native Americans more so have experienced the severe repercussions of colonialism by the white man.
Background on Violence Against Native Americans
Under the guise of expanding the burgeoning American state’s borders, unspeakable acts of genocide were committed against the Native Americans. These acts, which to this date go unanswered for, were truly shameful. We must have to keep in mind that the Native Americans were the original inhabitants of the North
American continent. These groups, about 15,000 years ago, arrived in North America from the Bering Strait. There are many schools of thought as to the population of the First Americans, estimates range from a low of 2.1 million to a high of 18 million. Most scholars agree on a population of around 12 million for the contiguous United States. Contrast this to a population of 2.9 million now, and the true scale of the genocide is known. Most of the Indian tribes living in the Contiguous United States, such as the Iroquois, the Lakota, and others had gained American citizenship on June 2, 1924, under the Indian Citizenship Act. This however did not guarantee the right to vote. This was gained much later during the civil rights movement kicked off by Martin Luther King, Jr. The First Americans, as they are called now, bore the brunt of the racial violence. State-sanctioned killings and massacres were the norm back in the day. The establishment’s view that the First Americans were in the way of “Manifest Destiny”, the idea that the US had the right to all of North America. Now the few remaining pockets of First Americans either live in “Indian reservations” or in provincial towns across the American Midwest and Southwest. The community's darkest days seem to be over, as through the centuries gradual assimilation has taken place. Intermixing with the European American populace and the gradual acceptance of their culture have aided in the assimilation process. The flip side of this is the loss of their unique culture. For instance, the language of the Cherokee, a tribe that once spanned the Midwestern states of Oklahoma and Arkansas, is now spoken by a couple of hundred people. This is in stark contrast to the Cherokee’s heyday when the tribe, by the popular consensus, numbered around 3 million.
The plight of the Asian American community
A recent example of racial violence against Asian Americans was the ghastly mass shooting of eight people- six of them Asian American- at three massage parlors in Atlanta, Georgia. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University surveyed several police departments in several cities and found that hate crime against Asian Americans has more than doubled between 2019 and 2020. This strangely is a reversal of a long-standing trend. For example, the decades between the 1990s and 2010s witnessed a sharp drop in the number of hate crimes committed against Americans of East Asian origin. The idea that Asian people were bearers of disease is not new, however. Angel Island, San Francisco, overshadowed by its more famous brother Ellis Island, was a place where new immigrants were to be tested for diseases such as the hookworm, and various venereal diseases. Many people, overwhelmingly Asian, were turned around because they couldn’t pass. This was despite the fact that many were easily treatable diseases. Something more insulting was the 1875 Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese women were barred from entering the United States and her territories as they were seen as more likely to engage in sexual activity.
The situation did gradually improve in the latter half of the twentieth century, as America was fighting communism all over Asia. Japan went from enemy to ally in less than 10 years. As a consequence, Asian-Americans were becoming more like the model minority. Drawing parallels, the majority of Donald Trump’s rhetoric has been a by-product of the increased geopolitical competition between the US and China. Various experts believe that targeted crimes against Chinese-Americans, in particular, will increase as the Chinese nation grows more powerful and assertive.
Conclusion President Biden has inherited an America that is fractured at the core, with centuries-old disputes spilling blood onto the streets. A clash between the Far-Right and Antifa seems inevitable in the near future. Unless Biden can pull a rabbit out of the proverbial hat, the future of America as the leader of the free world and indeed as a nation seems increasingly bleak.
Article by-
Rohit N
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