Submitted by Terence Blackett
“If man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” – Martin Luther King’s Speech in Detroit 23rd June 1963
On June 14th, 2001, George W. Bush in what was meant to be a snide remark to Swedish PM Goran Perrson (though unaware of television cameras still rolling) facetiously opined – “It’s amazing I won. I was running against peace, prosperity and incumbency.”
Since Bush’s disastrous two-term tenure as president – is anyone really laughing? Where are the LOL’s folks? What did George Bush and his Religious Rights friends do to the American moral landscape – touting the virtues of democracy to the known world while at the same time, living a hypocritical lie immersed in the politics of greed, corruption and destabilization?
As I sat to write this article having imbibed and digested Deepak Chopra’s book – “The Third Jesus”: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, I became even more conscious of how the religious politics and ruminations in American society at this present moment raise sinister challenges which few are truly aware of. Religious voices are muttering everywhere but none of them seem to be making any real sense – especially within the establishment of the Religious Right.
Today, the United Sates is called “Obama’s America”. But what does that mean in essence or in real terms? Is this another snide remark on the part of the Tea-Party Baggers/Religious Right fundamentalist proponents? Or is it another deadly form of sarcasm meant to undermine any realistic political or socioeconomic possibility that Blacks will ever be able to attain real parity or pre-eminence given the foundational underpinnings of slavery and/or the moral justification for the antebellum period?
Many commentators in the media were quick to harp on after Obama’s victory of a “post-racial” America. But has this really been the case? What is the current state of affairs in a country that has been fractured through the systematic extermination of its indigenous people, major civil war, and the holocaust and dehumanization of the Black slave – not forgetting its entrenched structural and institutional racist policies and laws based on a class system which is a long echo of medieval Anglo-Saxon tyranny?
Now as America approaches its mid-term elections, Obama has become the target of mud-slinging – where the evidence is ridiculously shambolic. In his own words recently, he said: “They talk about me like a dog.” Something Black folks know only too well.
If all the talk was much to do about nothing – then it bodes well for all concerned. Sadly, the real truth is that all this idle talk has more diabolical connotations.
Let me explain!
OneMillionBlackVoters.com on the eve of midterm elections is suggesting that “With a massive and resistive wave pushing against the Barack Obama Administration from the Republican Right, an old voice from time-past has sprung a new cry among the Republican Party faithful that is aimed at the Black community to repeal the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
“The 14th Amendment provided Black America with equal protection of the law, due process of the law, a citizenship clause that overruled the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and held that Blacks were citizens of the United States.”
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964, invalidating the Jim Crow laws, barred unequal application of voter registration requirements. Outlawed discrimination in hotels, motels, restaurants, theatres, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce Title IX, and made it easier to move civil rights cases from state courts with segregationist judges and all-white juries to Federal court. This was of crucial importance to civil rights activists who could not get a fair trial in state courts.”
“All above is the Republican plan to destroy by repealing the cornerstone of protection against outright segregation against the Black community on November 2, 2010.”
Please note – ANY REPEAL OF THIS LANDMARK STATUTE ENSHRINED IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT WILL NOT BE AN ACT OF GOD – BUT AN ACT OF HISTORICAL TYRANNY!
“Never Again” can Black men or women tolerate any form of racial, social or economic injustice that our progenitors have had to suffer for almost 200 years. The twisted evil of racist slavery – an economic, capitalist conspiracy hatched in the minds and hearts of so-called Christian men whose sole concern was the propagation of Black human life as chattel property and a means of increasing the wealth of rich, Southern land-owners.
In James Webb (2009) book – “Born Fighting: How the Scott-Irish Shaped America shows how the Southern Confederacy fought to maintain the notional system that slavery was acceptable while the Northerners (Yankees) saw slavery as Evil*. For according to Webb – “Slavery’s stronghold at its inception has been in the plantations of VIRGINIA’S Tidewater Cavalier aristocracy. This ruling class of well-appointed English immigrants had consciously created the royalist “THREE-TIERED-SOCIETY that dominated Virginia’s eastern reaches.”
Webb in citing Vernon Louis Parrington’s book “Main Currents In American Thought (1958)” further argues that “many respectable New England Church members – made fortunes as the price of human bondage reached a premium.”
What I found fascinating on pages 202 – 203 is this “thread” which can be traced right down to the current moves we are seeing from the TeaBaggers and the Republican Religious Right where Webb suggests that “the practice of religion took on a harder tone as well. The democracy of the Presbyterian Kirk had eliminated both the formal sacraments and the overarching power of a central church authority, but the transformation of this concept into the Baptist and Methodist backcountry often found whole congregations in the hands of half-educated preachers and travelling evangelists who held every word in the Bible to be absolute and claimed that their voices echoed the “lips of God”. This fearsome fundamentalism, which sowed the seeds of today’s Bible Belt was countered on a daily basis by the heavy drinking that had come, along with the stills, from the glens of Ireland and Scotland, and by an equally long addiction to devilish music, sensual pleasures, constant physical challenge and an inbred defiance of authority.”
So from Webb’s argument it is clear to see why so-called post-racial America is in such serious trouble. With an economy on life support; with increasing social angst; media manipulation and the “FEAR” of structural and institutional fallout from centuries of oppression of a single race of people – the writing is prophetically etched on the wall for both the elitists and for the United States as a whole.
Before George Bush left office, in cahoots with the banking cartel headed by Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson who had market and financial oversite of the greatest SCAM* and heist in American history – consciously wrecking the American economy knowing that a Black president’s time had finally come. The end-result has been major Black social disruption, loss of Black jobs and spiralling economic poverty resulting in disempowerment, social and emotional unrest with Obama’s policies and a Tea Party movement set on reversing the gains made in the last [47] years of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin must be rolling in his grave!
According to Al Jazeera – “The US economy shed 95,000 jobs in September, based on the latest figures from the US labour department. The fall was almost double the previous month’s losses. While the percentage of unemployed Americans remained unchanged at 9.6%, the jobs crisis has had a devastating impact on minority groups, particularly African Americans.”
But is anything really new about this given that “Black unemployment statistics has always been roughly twice that of whites going back as far as the 1950’s?”
The socio-geopolitics of white privilege has had long historical tentacles reaching all the way back into the Norman and Viking conquest of the Eurasian Diaspora – however, if we have learnt nothing from history, one thing is crystal clear – civilizations crumble and fall when they have reached the Pegasus of moral and spiritual degeneracy and decay.
Right now the focus must be to quarantine entrenched American racism, white supremacy and privilege – for this will be critical to the way Blacks around the world are treated and for the life chances of people of color to see greater upward mobility in countries where the white capitalist, exploitative ethos has taken root – scavenging resources through globalization while ravaging environments and livelihoods through predatorial migratory practices.
The challenges ahead for America in the next few years of the Obama Administration (if not dealt with quickly) could very well see the “mythology” of the ‘American Dream’ morph into the reality of a 21st century “nightmare” with Blacks once again bearing the brunt of any societal fallout.
Our attitude must be – “Never Again”…
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