America just
keeps committing the same old sin, over and over and over – white supremacy.
Slavery morphed into the Jim Crow South, which recently morphed into the
Supreme Court sanctioned Republican suppression of votes by eliminating polling
places, demanding hard for some to get voter IDs without providing free or
cheap IDs in black and brown neighborhoods, interfering with registration
drives, preventing motor-voter automatic voter registration, etc. etc. etc. –
anything the Republicans can think of to suppress and reduce voting by
non-whites.
White
Supremacy - America’s endless sin. I am
really tired of it. On this day after the
Martin Luther King holiday (not honored by much of America) it is time to see
what incredible damage this empty and mistaken myth of white supremacy has
caused.
Of course,
the main effect of white supremacy was and is to do everything possible to
crush people of color and guarantee white rule in America. That attempt to crush and diminish people of
color has only grown stronger under the presidency of the racist president,
Donald Trump.
One of the
destructive ways this played out was for the South to insist on making all the
states in early America’s expansion to the West, from Kansas onward, to become slave
states. The Abolitionists would not
allow that. In the 1856 debates Lincoln outed Illinois Senator Douglas as one who opposed
slavery on moral grounds even though he spoke of protecting slavery in the
South, and in the election of 1860 the pro-slavery vote split between Douglas
and the Southern Breckinridge, and Lincoln was elected president in 1860. South Carolina and six other states succeeded
from the Union before Lincoln was even sworn in. Nearly 700,000 died in that Civil War.
So, the
slaves were freed by the Civil War and the 13th and 14th
Amendments to the Constitution.
And then the
election of 1876 happened and the Republican candidate, Hayes, bargained away black freedom by agreeing to
pull troops out of the South, which were necessary
to enforce the Reconstruction laws, in order to win the election. And the KKK South ruled with Jim Crow terror of
blacks for nearly a century.
So, slavery, the Jim Crow South, and modern suppression of black and brown votes are the
obvious damages the American sin of white supremacy has and continue to have on
America.
Anything
else? I think yes. I think the deliberate unfairness of the Electoral
College, and the deliberate unfairness of representation in the Senate, are
other damages of white supremacy.
In order to
form the United States of America, the free states had to bribe the slave
states by allowing two bodies of the legislature – the House of Representatives
which is populated according to the population of each state, and the Senate
which has two Senators from each state regardless of population. And then, the Electoral College for each
state has its number of votes to match the number of Senators (2) and number of
Representatives it has. So, the
Electoral College over-represents small states.
And, of
course, the Senate preposterously over-represents smaller states, whereby the
largest state, California, has 2 Senators despite a population of 40 million
people, and Wyoming also has two Senators which has only a little over half a
million people.
Whites, by
the way, are not superior to people of color.
The more obvious that becomes (as for example when blacks, browns,
yellows, reds, women, gays, etc move more competently and excellently and more
into prominent roles in science, arts, government, military, judiciary, law
enforcement, etc) the white supremacists become more insecure, frightened, and
hysterical and do amazingly foolish things like elect a mentally ill TV reality
star whose only real claim to fame is racism and false hype of marginal to
non-existent business success.
White
Europeans (including primarily the English in early America) conquered the
world by force because of the geographical accident of living on the land that
first spawned agriculture and thus first spawned the technology of ships, guns,
and diseases that allowed them to conquer the world. And of course, they had to be cruel enough to
think that killing, crushing, and exploiting the less technologically advanced
peoples was just a fine thing to do – and they actually quoted the bible to
justify their cruelty and inhumanity. Good grief!
So, I am
really sick and tired of America’s sin of believing in the false notion of
white supremacy being repeated over and over and over. The time has come to wave goodbye to it and
leave it behind in the “dustbin of history”.
