Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Symbols of the racist past still prevalent in the United States

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Syed Ahmed Uzair

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Symbols of the racist past still prevalent in the United States

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Global Views 360

Publication Date

August 12, 2020

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A person wearing Blackface

A person wearing Blackface | Source:  foundin_a_attic via Flickr | Source: Wikimedia

George Floyd’s recent death while in Police custody has sparked protests across the entire United States. While it did expose the way Black Americans are policed, it also initiated a much deeper conversation about the prevalent racism faced by Black Americans in almost all aspects of modern life.

Many symbols of the racist past still exist across the US, more so in the Southern states. The recent trigger of protests and the BLM movement has initiated a discussion about these symbols once again. While some argue that it is important to preserve these symbols owing to the American culture, the majority of the people seem to be agreeing that these are symbols of oppression and injustice.

Thomas D. Rice is pictured while performing his blackface role — Jim Crow | Source: Edward Williams Clay via Wikimedia

In the mid to late 19th century, white actors quite commonly employed the use of black grease paint to depict slaves and free blacks on stage. The technique commonly known as blackface was more than just facial makeup. Rather, it was used as a symbol for mocking the African-Americans as inferiors in every aspect of life.

Blackface seemed to have disappeared in the 1960s thanks to the Civil Rights Movement. It however reappeared in the 1980s on college campuses in the wake of steps taken to bring more African Americans to campus. An old yearbook picture from Langley School resurfaced recently revealing the then-principal and vice-principal dressed as whiteface and blackface for Halloween. The current leadership of the school have issued apologies stating that the incident should not have happened.

Despite a racist history surrounding blackface, a recent survey by Pew Research Centre revealed that nearly one-third of Americans surveyed did not find anything offensive in blackface being used at Halloween.

Newspaper ad for Aunt Jemima Buckwheat pancake mix, 1923 | Source: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress

Aunt Jemima, a 130-year-old syrup and pancake mix brand owned by Quaker Oats depicts a black woman named Aunt Jemima who was originally dressed as a minstrel character. The company has earlier made tweaks to the picture of the black woman in response to the criticism it received for propagating a racial stereotype. In June 2020, Quaker Oats announced that the brand would be rejuvenated to feature a new name and image.

Image of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States | Source: Wikimedia

Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president and his family employed hundreds of enslaved people in building their wealth. However, to date, Jackson still haunts Black Americans with his presence on the twenty-dollar bills in the wallets of these Americans. The Trump administration’s decision to not replace the bill featuring Jackson with one that would feature abolitionist Harriet Tubman as proposed earlier does not help the nation’s troubled history with Racism.

Similar symbols of the US racist past exist across the entire country, starting from streets named after Confederate officers to congested highways specifically designed to ensure isolation of Black neighborhoods. Football and baseball games in the country still feature the national anthem penned by Francis Scott Key, a person who used his power as district attorney to prosecute Black men.

George Floyd’s death was the perfect trigger for all the anger and frustration against the systematic injustice that has been meted out to Black people. However, it also served well to initiate debates over the omnipresence of these racial symbols across the country that serve as memorials to slavery and white supremacy.

As many as 800 Confederate statues and monuments have been removed ever since the BLM protests erupted in the country. A few of these racial symbols in the US suffered the brunt of BLM protesters who defaced homages and toppled statues of founding fathers who had profited from slavery.

Those against the removal of these symbols argue that these men merely failed in morality due to the socio-political environment they inhabited. Alvita Akiboh, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan, however, disagrees with the notion. “Just because slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody, because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation slavery,” said Akiboh.

Others, including US President Donald Trump, have employed the notion of removing these symbols as the equivalent of “ripping American history and culture apart”. To this Akiboh voices her opinion saying that the majority of these symbols were erected decades after the civil-war conflict ended. She argues that they are merely “a reminder for Black and brown people to remember their place”.

As the BLM protests gain momentum and support globally the scrutiny of the racist symbols in the US shall increase manifold. With the government not willing to push for major reforms and removal of these racist symbols and an adamant public demanding an end to the systematic discrimination based on race, the road ahead for the recial relation in the US is a difficult and complicated one.

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February 4, 2021 4:37 PM

How the conservatives and white supremacists responded to “Black Lives Matter” movement

The civil rights movement in America labelled “Black Lives Matter”, which erupted after the murder of George Floyd by a uniformed officer has been going in full swing. The event of Floyd’s death triggered a mass reaction against the state violence in which black people are abused without any accountability on the police’s part. A few of the protests have been demanding the defunding of the police department, that the police force should be dissolved.

Many protests are peaceful protests, but there have been instances in which the protestors use violence to express their sentiment. Such protests have received a lot of backlash; Donald Trump, the president, said that “these THUGS are dishonouring the memory of George Floyd” and that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He also mentioned that he would send the National Guard to “get the job done right”, in context of his perceived lack of leadership in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, and consequently, where the protests were taking place. The tweet with the slogan “When the looting starts, the shooting starts” has since been censored by twitter, which gave birth to another controversy.

Trump also blames the riots on Antifa, which is a terrorist organisation according to him, the name of which stands as a short form of anti-fascist. The organisation is a group of leftist activists who protest against an expression of what they find xenophobic, racist or sexist and fascist, claiming that such expression would suppress minority voices. There is no defined hierarchy or membership process, though it has been claimed by the group that it is secretive and is organised into autonomous local cells. In some reports, though, it is categorised as a far left militant organisation which believes in direct action rather than peaceful protests.

The police force in Minnesota believes that there are white supremacists attending the protests to agitate the protests and incite chaos. The Brookings Institution characterized the same as accelerationism, in which people incite chaos to destroy social order, so that in a highly polarized society, people would take their side. In the same vein, it has been reported that a white supremacist channel on Telegram incited followers to engage in violence and start a second civil war by shooting into the crowd. Franklin Graham, an evangelical pastor, has said that the idea of dismantling the police departments “has to be one of the most irresponsible ideas” that he’s ever heard. He says that the police are what stand between “us (the citizens) and total anarchy”.

An UK Member of Parliament told one of his constituents that while racism is a cancer, and I am glad the perpetrator is on a murder charge. Nevertheless, looters, arsonists and rioters have it coming.” While a number of celebrities have been showing support for the Black Lives Matter protests, the former Miss Universe Malaysia Samantha Katie James used instagram stories to say that the protesters who are angry over the murder of George Floyd are “foolish humans”, and that the black people chose to be born as colored people in America. She also said that the brutality should be taken as a challenge and that “the whites have won”. When asked to clarify what she meant by saying that the Black community chose to be born as coloured, she said that their soul chose where and how they were born.

The people are responding in many different ways to the news. On a Brietbart report on Samuel L. Jackson expressing his views in support of the protests, there have been comments which say that “Floyd was a criminal and he was high on drugs and that he was not killed by asphyxiation he had a heart condition.”(sic) or “When da White people start rioting? We are still the majority, and it would really stir up the fudge. These a****ts think they are getting away with something, but only because the silent majority has yet to speak… and act.” (sic).

It seems that George Floyd’s unfortunate death has brought out not just the simmering anger of the long black community in open but also unmasked the outright white supremacists as well as their apologists.

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