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Minority Report: How Blacks Became Demonised in America

Minority Report: How Blacks Became Demonised in America

You cannot be the President of the United States if you are not a Christian. Only two of the 45 American Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, did not follow Christianity. (1) Indian origin Nikki Hailey (Randhawa) and Bobby (Piyush) Jindal both converted to fundamentalist churches in order to get elected in deeply Christian states. Tulsi Gabbard, the only Hindu member of the US House of Representatives, has been repeatedly attacked by Christians and the liberal media for her religion. Blacks are quarantined in ghettoes in American cities and are condemned to inter-generational poverty which is a rare phenomenon in the world. In the Bible Belt, they are routinely lynched by ordinary white citizens and by the police. And of course, the Native Americans, who numbered around 200 million before the arrival of European Christians, have been almost wiped out.

So when the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom in its 2020 annual report alleges that minorities are under increasing assault in India, it is the ultimate chutzpah – a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. In terms of religious freedom, this sad US government body equates India with Pakistan and North Korea. (2) If that’s really the case, why don’t we see a huge exodus of Muslims and Christians out of India. Well, it won’t happen because India is the best place for minorities who are free to breed, convert Hindus, kill Hindu holy men, get freebies from the government and then burn down trains and public property without consequences. Where else can minorities threaten the majority with genocide? (3)

Let’s be clear about one thing – the USCIRF is a nakedly partisan outfit with a Christian agenda. Its current chairman Tony Perkins is a failed politician and the president of the Family Research Council which was formed to advance the “Christian worldview”. In 2007 he opposed the first ever Hindu prayer before the United States Senate, saying, “No one can legitimately challenge the fact that the God America refers to in the national motto and other places is the monotheistic God of the Jewish and Christian faith. There is no historic connection between America and the polytheistic creed of the Hindu faith.” (3)

Perkins, who has links to the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK), also opposed a US Marines yoga and meditation program for PTSD prevention, terming the Hindu and Buddhist practices as “goofy”.

After being the globocop for decades, the US is once again trying to take the high moral ground by mandating the USCIRF to “monitor, analyse and report on threats to freedom of religion worldwide”. But is the US fit to judge other countries when its hands are stained by the blood of its own minorities? The American treatment of its black minority is a disheartening chapter in world history because it shows that even if blacks are keen to integrate and gentrify, white America will demolish their foundations in order to keep them ghettoised.

Making Africans Poor Again

Once upon a time, there was a small — but rapidly growing — black middle class in America. The members of this new gentry were African-Americans who became free men and women after the abolition of slavery in 1865. By the beginning of the 1900s, black people were buying homes, sending their children to elite colleges, becoming business owners, joining academia and — as a sign of their increasing confidence — entering the federal bureaucracy in the thousands. Things were looking so promising that in Washington DC, for instance, public transportation wasn’t segregated. But just when blacks were poised to become a solid pillar of society, white America decided it had had enough of equality.

The election of Woodrow Wilson as president in 1912 was the defining event that drove a stake through the heart of the Black middle class. It was the cause of the great racial divide that exists today and threatens to rip apart America’s social fabric.

Eric Yellin, associate professor of History and American Studies at the University of Richmond, explains in his book Racism in the Nation’s Service how the Wilson administration wreaked havoc on the government careers of African-Americans in the 1910s, undoing a hundred years of Black gentrification.

“When Wilson arrived in the nation’s capital in March 1913, he brought with him an administration loaded with White supremacists,” Yellin writes. “His lieutenants segregated offices, harassed Black workers and removed black politicians from political appointments that had been held by Black men for more than a generation.” (5)

The Wilson administration’s systematic approach to drive African-Americans from the centre stage of US society towards the ghettoes was so efficient that it may well have inspired Adolf Hitler to send German Jews to the ghettoes less than a generation later.

Many administrators and congressmen arrived with the specific goal of redeeming the US capital for White supremacy. “Long ago we determined that (the Negro) never should be our master,” explained one of Wilson’s administrators, assistant secretary of the treasury John Skelton Williams. Williams vowed “stern, final, definite prohibition” of any “social or political equal(ity)”. Wilson appointed white men to important executive positions usually held by leading black politicians, and racist bureaucrats went out of their way to humiliate ordinary black clerks.

According to Yellin, in its attack on a nationally known and symbolic black middle class, “federal segregation” signalled the US government’s support for a national racial regime in which African-Americans were not only politically disenfranchised but also professionally and economically hobbled. Particularly damaging was the progressive justification given by Wilson and others, whose ideas about black corruption and the inevitability of racial “friction” allowed them and others to portray discrimination as reform.

Migration to Russia

The situation had become so bleak for blacks that over 18,000 black Americans chose to move to Russia after the 1917 communist revolution. “Most of the African Americans who came to Russia were seeking a better life, desperate to flee the social inequality and Depression-era hardships that racked America at the time,” says a report in the Los Angeles Times. “They were looking for a society where they could escape colour prejudice and racism. They were engineers, educators, entertainers, journalists, lawyers. The actor-activist Paul Robeson and poet Langston Hughes were among those travellers captivated by communism.” (6)

Russia under Vladimir Lenin’s brutal communism was a dangerous place rife with state sponsored pogroms, chronic food shortages, wars and general chaos. And yet black Americans found the murderous regime to be a safer place than back home. “The experience of African Americans who travelled to or settled in Russia was overwhelmingly positive, descendants said. In turn, they made valuable contributions to Soviet society. Agricultural specialists helped devise different uses for materials, such as rope made from hemp. They also helped develop plant species that were cheaper to cultivate. Their contributions provided a boost to the Soviet economy.”

Incidentally, in 1879 Tsar Alexander II of Russia had said to the American banker Wharton Barker: “I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty than America did for the Negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. I am at a loss to understand how you Americans could have been so blind as to leave the Negro slave without tools to work out his salvation. In giving him personal liberty, you gave him an obligation to perform to the state which he must be unable to fulfill. Without property of any kind he cannot educate himself and his children. I believe the time must come when many will question the manner of American emancipation of the Negro slaves in 1863.”  (7)

Operation Whitewash

Having broken the back of the black middle class by walling off an entire community from the best paying and most secure jobs, white America launched its next big assault. This was operation whitewash, to ethnically cleanse blacks from mixed neighbourhoods and turn these into lily white suburbs. The plan was to drive every last black person away from the mainstream and into the ghettoes.

It started with banks refusing to provide home loans to blacks. American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from ‘restrictive covenants’ to bombings, to keep their neighbourhoods segregated.” (8)

The US government helped the mobs by creating the Federal Housing Administration, which made black neighbourhoods ineligible for home loans. “Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion.”

Soon, such discrimination spread to the entire mortgage industry, which was already rife with racism, excluding black people from most legitimate means of obtaining a mortgage. While whites wanting to buy a home could rely on a lending system backed by the US government, blacks were driven towards scam artists who ripped off innocents.

To illustrate how unfair the situation was, consider that home ownership rates increased from 30 per cent of the US population in 1930 to nearly 60 per cent by 1960. This was possible only because the US government pumped money into the housing loan market and lowered the down payment to just 10 per cent of the house price. The beneficiaries were nearly all whites.

The American real estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned: “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood… any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values.” (9)

A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters — and “a coloured man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites”.

Because home ownership is the easiest — and for most people the only — way to create wealth, the lack of upward mobility in the housing market condemns black Americans to the permanent underclass.

The implications are chilling, concludes Coates. “As a rule, poor black people do not work their way out of the ghetto — and those who do often face the horror of watching their children and grandchildren tumble back.”

Turning blacks into Drug Addicts

During the 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) sold tons of cocaine to streets gangs in Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an insurgent army in Nicaragua. (10) CIA-supplied planes and pilots carried cocaine from Central America to US airports and military bases. (11)

The CIA’s drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America and provided the cash and connections needed for LA’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

“While the insurgency war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine – a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.”

And the LA gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving, turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.

Predictably, the US has denied this wholesale destruction of black neighbourhoods was officially sanctioned. Who are they fooling? There is no official document that shows that Adolf Hitler officially  signed the Jewish Holocaust but the fact is six million Jews could not have been gassed to death without directives from the very top of the German leadership. It’s plain as daylight that aim of the CIA operation was to destroy blacks – starting from LA.

Obama’s presidency: Increased racism

In 2008 when Barack Obama became the first – and perhaps last – black US President, there was a lot of chatter about “post-racial” America. It shows how naive people really are. For, the reality is the election of a black man to the highest office in the most ‘exceptional’ and ‘moral’ nation on the planet sparked off a state of panic among the elites. There was a spate of shootings of blacks, including children, by frenzied American policemen, during Obama’s presidency. White Americans started walling off themselves from minorities; moved into whites only housing developments; and bought guns at an unprecedented rate. (12)

In ‘Fears of a Black President’, Coates writes: “Before Barack Obama, the ‘black president’ lived in the African-American imagination as a kind of cosmic joke, a phantom of all that could never be. White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett’s boyish gaze. Dr King turned the other cheek, and they blew it off. White folks shot Lincoln over ‘nigger equality’, ran Ida Wells out of Memphis, beat Freedom Riders over bus seats, slaughtered Medgar in his driveway like a dog…. (13)

“What black people are experiencing right now is a kind of privilege previously withheld — seeing our most sacred cultural practices and tropes validated in the world’s highest office. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon. The expansion of this cultural power beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous advance for black America.”

But what does it mean for the other side? “Conversely, for those who have long treasured white exclusivity, the existence of a President Barack Obama is discombobulating, even terrifying,” writes Coates.

State of Blacks

Clearly, America has become a country where blacks are denied the right to social mobility that is every American’s right. In the entire history of mankind, such a systematic destruction of a community has scarcely been undertaken. While the Jewish Holocaust lasted just 14 years, the Americans have been lynching African-Americans for more than 200 years. In fact, the word lynch (hanging of blacks by white mobs) originates in the US — from the actions of Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County and Colonel Charles Lynch of Bedford County. (14)

The US claims to be the land of the free and yet black children can’t walk safely without the likes of vigilante George Zimmerman and cop Darren Wilson gunning them down. (15) In fact, in the grotesque imagery of white policemen, blacks are “demons”. (16) The alarming frequency of clashes such as the Ferguson riots (17) is evidence that the US is sitting on dynamite.

Double Standards

Everyone – and his uncle – in America wants India to be secular and democratic. But they don’t subject themselves to the same probity. Sreedhar Potarazu writes in CNN: “One has to wonder why India, a nation of nearly 1.3 billion people, 79.8 percent of whom are Hindu, has had a Sikh prime minister and a Muslim president, yet for more than a century and a half the chief executive of the United States has always been a Christian.” He then asks, “Can we, the citizens of the greatest democracy on earth, elect a president who is not a Christian?” (18)

Well, that won’t happen because America has more than 200 million Christians affiliated with fundamentalist churches. Many of these Christians, especially the evangelicals, are not only bigoted against followers of other religions but are also racist. A number of these denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention were first formed to defend slavery. Well-respected Christian scholars dedicated their lives to rationalising racial hierarchies with the Bible. (19)

American outfits such as USCIRF have zero credibility. Says Hindu American Foundation Executive Director Suhag Shukla: “From the lack of religious representation among Commissioners to the hiring of questionable ‘experts’ with ties to radical, separatists outfits, USCIRF remains bereft of any diversity, transparency, and accountability, and as a result, hurts our country’s ability to be a genuine torchbearer of religious freedom. The appointment of Tony Perkins only worsens USCIRF’s credibility as an objective monitor of religious freedom around the globe.” (20)

Clearly, it’s the US, which practises systemic racism against blacks, that needs to stop reminding India annually that India is an intolerant country. The Indian foreign ministry now dismisses this annual rigmarole with the contempt it deserves, and it’s left to a low ranking diplomat to say, the USCIRF’s “misrepresentation has reached new levels… We regard it as an organisation of particular concern and will treat it accordingly”. (21) We’ll say amen to that.

Bottom line

Nobody in India has delusions that Christian America has Hindu India’s best interests at heart. But circumstances have brought them together. With the fire breathing Dragon and the Islamic State both determined to bring down Western civilization and a resurgent Hindu nation, Delhi and DC have become strategic partners. Large-scale joint military exercises and data sharing between the military forces of both countries are also common, thereby contributing to mutual trust. What’s more, according to a Pew survey, as many 49 per cent of Indians view America favourably – ahead of Russia and Japan. (22) The US should pull back its impotent hyena because the USCIRF’s annual provocation of India serves no purpose other than creating mistrust.

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SOURCE

1. Fact Tank, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/20/almost-all-presidents-have-been-christians/

2. Republic TV, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knVzOool4F8

3. Republic World, https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/politics/akbaruddin-owaisi-booked-for-hate-speech-during-poll-campaign.html

4. Hindu America Foundation, https://www.hinduamerican.org/press/appointment-far-right-evangelist-tony-perkins-strains-credibility-uscirf

5. Eric Yellin, Berfrois, https://www.berfrois.com/2013/10/woodrow-wilsons-federal-segregation-eric-s-yellin/

6. Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/world/great-reads/la-fg-c1-black-russian-americans-20141119-story.html#page=1

7. Webster Tarpley, http://tarpley.net/2013/09/23/american-banker-wharton-barkers-first-person-account-confirms-russian-tsar-alexander-ii-was-ready-for-war-with-britain-and-france-in-1862-1863-to-defend-lincoln-and-the-union-americans-will-und/

8. Ta-Nehesi Coates, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

9. United States Commission on Civil Rights, ‘Fair Housing in America: Fair Housing Enforcement in St. Louis’, Volume II, page 55.

10. San Jose Mercury News, https://web.archive.org/web/19961220020751/http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs/day1main.htm

11. Institute for Policy Studies, https://ips-dc.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/

12. USA Today, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/05/obama-still-best-gun-salesman-ever/2136201/

13. Ta-Nehesi Coates, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/fear-of-a-black-president/309064/

14. World Wide Words, http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-lyn1.htm

15. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/george-zimmerman-darren-wilson-crowd-sourced-legal-fees

16. Slate, https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/the-language-of-darren-wilson-s-testimony-close-reading-the-demons-and-supervillains.html

17. Ferguson Riots, Blackpast, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/ferguson-riot-and-ferguson-unrest-2014-2015/

18. CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/30/opinions/potarazu-ready-for-non-christian-president/index.html

19. Hindu America Foundation, https://www.hinduamerican.org/press/appointment-far-right-evangelist-tony-perkins-strains-credibility-uscirf

20. The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/jemar-tisbys-new-book-challenges-white-evangelicals/581494/

21. Swarajya Magazine, https://swarajyamag.com/insta/mea-slams-uscirf-for-its-india-report-says-its-a-biased-organisation-of-particular-concern

22. Pew Research, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/11/15/india-and-the-world/

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Rakesh Krishnan Simha

Rakesh is a globally cited defence analyst. His articles have been quoted extensively by national and international defence journals and in books on diplomacy, counter-terrorism, warfare, and development of the global south.