Apartheid in America

In 1492, Columbus "discovered" India.

Jill Lepore's narration of the story of the United States from that moment is compelling.  Deeply disturbing, even if the facts are not always new.  To read them all in a single-volume book is immensely more powerful than I had imagined.

The 400 year anniversary was during the post-war Reconstruction.  The original inhabitants had been practically wiped out, and most of the rest driven out of their lands.  Humans from Africa had been imported, traded, held as property, and finally proclaimed to be free by Lincoln.  A destructive Civil War was fought, in which the slave states lost.  Meanwhile, Mexicans and Chinese were also given the rough treatment.

Throughout all these, while the citizenship of the European settlers and their descendants was assumed as a given, the citizenship of non-whites was, well, unresolved.  (This is, of course, an ongoing issue as well, with the party of whites desperately trying to deny citizenship to non-whites.)

The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed freed slaves equal protection and due process of law, yes, but they were considered to be "Separate" in the post-war era.  Jill Lepore writes about the irony of the Fourteenth Amendment--business used that to further cement a legal fiction that corporations are persons!

In 1937, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black would observe, with grim dismay, that over the course of fifty years, "only one half of one percent of the Fourteenth Amendment cases that came before the court had anything to do with African Americans or former slaves, while over half the cases were about protecting the rights of corporations.

It shouldn't surprise us that today's Party of Lincoln champions business interests more than human interests, especially the interests of disadvantaged non-white humans.  As Lepore comments, "rights proffered to the people were proffered, instead, to corporations."

In 1892, the country hosted "the largest-ever world's fair" in Chicago.  Frederick Douglass was the only eminent African American invited to address.  Otherwise, "as if to shame the Negro, they exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."

When the day came for Douglass to deliver his talk, "he arrived to find the fair decked out with watermelons, and white hecklers waiting for him."

That reminds me about the time when a white friend "joked" about how to get Obama to quit the presidency. (This friend--a born again evangelical Christian--is a GOP loyalist.)  This white friend "joked" that a trail of watermelons leading out of the White House would do the trick.  I gave that white friend the benefit of doubt, and considered that a reflection of his puke-worthy taste in humor.  But, in retrospect, I should have served the quit notice right then. Mea culpa.

Douglass offered his blunt assessment:

The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.

This is how we can even frame the problem that we now have with trump's voters and enablers: Do they have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution?  So far, the answer is a clear NO! :(

Four years after the 400-year anniversary of Columbus, in 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of yet another atrocity, in Plessy v. Ferguson.  The court ruled that separate accommodations for blacks and whites were not unequal accommodations.  Separate but equal became the law of the land for more than half a century.

Jill Lepore sums it up well: "The Confederacy had lost the war, but it had won the peace."

If only there were more real Vaishnav people!

It is the anniversary of the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi.  He was shot dead on January 30th in 1948. I am re-posting here a modified version of one my op-ed columns

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Gandhi, who was born in 1869, led the independence movement that, in 1947, resulted in the creation of two new countries of India and Pakistan and, with that, the end of the British Raj. The struggle for freedom, in which Gandhi passionately urged his followers to observe non-violence even against the colonizer’s brutal force, inspired many others, including Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is full of tragic ironies — Gandhi and King, the champions of peace and nonviolence, fell to bullets aimed at them. Unlike Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, King had not lived long enough to live in the promised land of freedom.

Albert Einstein summed it up best for all of us when he wrote about Gandhi that “generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth.” 

In the contemporary United States, any talk in the public space about peace and nonviolence is rare. Politicians of all stripes want to prove how much tougher they are than the other, out of a fear of being labeled a wimp.  The worst ones are those who successfully dodged the Vietnam War draft but now want to establish their manliness! This has been especially the case since the fateful events on Sept. 11, 2001. At the national level, the “tough” ones smell blood when an opponent does not talk of war. At this rate, even those running for the office of dogcatcher will have to prove their toughness.

Of course, violence is more than merely engaging in war. The political rhetoric, especially over the past four years since trump as a candidate and then as the president (gasp!) seems to have been anything but peaceful and nonviolent. A new day begins with attacks on yet another person or group of people, based on whatever cultural trait is deemed to be the “wrong” one for the moment. Even I, as insignificant as one can be in the political landscape, have been a target for those who are seemingly at ease with offensive words and rhetoric.

While words, unlike sticks and stones, do not break bones, the violence conveyed through words causes plenty of harm. In the noise and confusion of the violent rhetoric that surrounds us in the real and cyber worlds, we seem to have lost a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

One of Gandhi’s favorite prayers says it all about being human: It is to “feel the pain of others, help those who are in misery.” Unfortunately, the rhetoric and practice--even among those who claim to be followers of Vishnu--is far from that interpretation of humanity.

When it comes to the terrible humanitarian crises, like the situation in Aleppo, Syria, it is depressing and shocking to see how quickly we closed ourselves off from the “pain of others” and how easily we refuse to “help those who are in misery.” We have refused to budge even when the screens all around us flashed the images of dead toddlers. Or, the images of mothers and children running after being tear-gassed at the border for seeking asylum.

The president's adviser on immigration, whose life is possible only because the US offered asylum to Jews fleeing pogroms in Europe, boasts that “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”

The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but the radius of the arc seems to be getting longer.  Perhaps we shall overcome all our problems, but only over a much longer time than I would like. 

Native Americans. Africans. Mexicans. And now? Chinese!

Since 1492, and since Mayflower, and since the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution, it has been one chaos after another for non-whites.  As we get more into the Jim Crow era in Jill Lepore's narration of the history of the United States, we will remind ourselves about what she is exploring in this book:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

And so far the evidence is ... awful!  The original inhabitants nearly wiped out. People from Africa imported, traded, and held as property.  An empire-building America provoked a war with Mexico and gobbled up the upper-third of its territory.  A horrible Civil War was fought in order to abolish slavery. Women were told that they shall not have rights to participate in politics.

Political equality? Natural rights? Sovereignty of people?

It was time to go after yet another group: Chinese immigrants.

Following the gold rush, "Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States in large numbers during the 1850s."

Given the track record of white supremacy from 1492, it is easy to predict that the Chinese would have been attacked, killed, imprisoned, and their citizenship questioned, right?

It is incredible how when I was in the 8th or 9th grade, when Mr. Venkatesan taught (he was a horrible teacher anyway!) history, we were somehow led to understand that it was a glorious American political experiment, in which the only blemish was slavery, which too was corrected by Lincoln after the Civil War. And it was happily ever after!

So, people immigrated from China.

Chinese workers began settling in Boise in 1865 and only five years later constituted a third of Idaho's settlers and nearly 60 percent of its miners. In 1870, Chinese immigrants and their children made up nearly 9 percent of the population of California, and one-quarter of the state's wage earners.

Imagine white settlers looking across and seeing hardworking Chinese.   Oregon and California tightly restricted the rights of Chinese. 

Frederick Douglass was consistent in his view of human rights:

Again, this is the Douglass about whom the current president knew nothing!

As I noted in this post back in September, the United States passed a law to exclude the Chinese. To strip them of their citizenship. And the US Supreme Court even upheld this law in 1889! 

Let's ask ourselves, again:

The American experiment rests on three political ideas--"these truths," Thomas Jefferson called them--political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. ...
Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?