For many migrants arriving in the United States regardless of color, preconceived notions abound about one of the oldest indigenous people in the country, speaking of African-Americans.
For those people, the whitewashed American propaganda against Blacks has long penetrated their perceptions and influenced their thinking all the way back in their country of birth.
“Blacks are lazy; they are criminals, they are unwilling to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they refuse to take advantage of the opportunities available in the country.”[sic]
I, too, felt that for far too many African-Americans, the possibilities in America were untapped and unexploited.
Today, I still believe that despite what obtains in the way of obstacles, a greater effort to overcome is necessary to once and for all change the overwhelming balance of power tilted toward whites.
I hold those sentiments because I believe that anything else is a fool’s errand that will not change blacks’ economic or social plight in the United States.
The purveyors of the anti-black propaganda never bothered mentioning that their disdain and derision for the work ethic of blacks started after they stopped working for free.
And so, the continuation of negative perceptions against blacks in their own homeland is continually assured because of the systemic campaign against them by their own government and people.
Whether on the mother continent or in the diaspora, African people have been placed at an extreme disadvantage due to European crimes against them. For well over five (5) hundred years, beginning with the Portuguese Bartolomeu Dias, the African continent was pillaged for its resources, its people murdered, raped, brutalized, and had all kinds of crimes committed against them.
Almost five and a half centuries after Bartolomeu Dias first desecrated the continent with his presence; literally, every European nation, both great and small, became exceptionally rich from their plunder and exploitation of not only the African land but the African people.
Having murdered countless millions, stolen their wealth, stolen their cultural heritage & traditions, lied about who they are, raped and sodomized them, enslaved and committed all kinds of heinous acts against them, one would have thought that descendants of those who perpetrated those acts of savagery would feel some shame.
As I consider this subject, I wondered how could they not feel shame?
Then it occurred to me that if their ancestors had it in them to do the things they did to our ancestors, why would I expect their descendants would have the capacity for shame?
In the United States, literally every attempt to give the recently enslaved blacks a chance at survival was erased in 1877 after the period known as reconstruction ended, while Rutherford B Hayes, a Republican, was in office.
Jim crow laws were ushered in across the south, which made the lives of the recently freed blacks just as bad as when they were under the bondage of forced servitude.
Even though the war between the Union and the Confederacy effectively ended slavery as it were, in the north and other parts of the country, black people were hated and treated no better than in the south, where jim crow was the law of the land.
Across the country, in every state, racism was entrenched in government policy at all levels.
In housing, education, healthcare, food quality, employment, policing, and every other government sector, blacks were redlined and segregated to second-class status as a matter of government policy.
It was government policy to restrict the rights of blacks then; it is government policy to restrict the rights of blacks today.
And so it remains, in the Senate, people like Mitch McConnell, Tom Cotton, and others are vehemently opposed to the teaching of race in classrooms.
In many states, particularly those run by Republicans, there are efforts to remove any teachings about race in schools.
If their actions were righteous, why are they opposed to young people learning about what they did?
The Associated Press reported that teachers and professors in Idaho will be prevented from teaching students about race. In addition, Oklahoma teachers will be prohibited from saying certain people are inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Tennessee schools will risk losing state aid if their lessons include particular concepts about race and racism.
Governors and legislatures in Republican-controlled states across the country are moving to define what race-related ideas can be taught in public schools and colleges, a reaction to the nation’s racial reckoning after last year’s police killing of George Floyd. The measures have been signed into law in at least three states and are considered in many more.
Education Weekly said thousands of schools across the country might soon be forced to upend curricula, discontinue ethnic studies courses and anti-bias training for teachers, and shut down classroom discussions on Black Lives Matter and other race-related events like the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and murder of George Floyd.
That’s because a wave of legislation in some states aims to severely limit how teachers and schools address race — a campaign that district leaders and experts say would squash a range of efforts to root out discrimination, bias, and racism experienced by students of color.
As Republican legislatures across the country embark on a scorched-earth assault against voting rights aided by the Roberts Supreme Court, those same states are also actively engaged in whitewashing history.
They intend to scrub the genocide their ancestors perpetuated to give them the advantage they now enjoy.
They argue that people are not responsible for the crimes of their ancestors, even as they take more steps to limit and curtail the rights of the descendants of those people on whom they perpetuated those crimes.
The amusing thing is that as it was when they were committing the lynchings and other murders, so too were they opposed to black education, while at the same time they took photographs so they could gloat over their grisly crimes.
How do they expect that they are going to stop the free flow of information? Are they counting on black people’s continued reluctance to be educated?
I’ll tell you what scared the hell out of them. It was the legions of young white men and women who marched for racial justice last summer after Derek Chauvin and his cohorts lynchedGeorge Floyd.
.
.
.
Mike Beckles is a former Police Detective, businessman, freelance writer, black achiever honoree, and creator of the blog mikebeckles.com.