WHY RACISM?

What is Racism?
Racism is the difference between the races in Equity, Gender, Character, Abilities or Qualities, Inferior or superior to one another.

Gold Smith Said:
                               " Racism is not getting worse , it is getting filmed "

 

Why racism in US is worse than in Europe?

News stories emerge almost daily in the US about police being called over black Americans doing nothing more than being black. Writer Barrett Holmes Pinter explains why he thinks American racism is unique.

Last week in California, three black people - a Jamaican, a Canadian of Nigerian descent, and a London native - were confronted by seven police cars as they checked out of their Airbnb because a white American thought they were robbing the house.

Though they were not American, they were still subjected to racist American stereotypes - and being confronted with tense, potentially life-threatening altercations with police without ever committing a crime.

I've traveled a fair amount around the world, but America's racist status quo remains unique and alarmingly oppressive. American racism is entirely complexion-based and monolithic. One's nationality is immaterial.

Years ago during one of my trips to France, a woman at La Post refused to sell me stamps because she thought I was African.

When she learned that I was American, she apologized and sold me the stamps. The racism I experienced in France is totally unacceptable, but it provided an escape not afforded last week to these three visitors to America.

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In France, nationality usurped race, and while that can have its own problems, it was still very different from the racism back home.

When I was in London, I lived in Bethnal Green during the 2011 riots, which started after London police officers killed Mark Duggan, a black man.

As teenage vandals looted and set my neighborhood ablaze, I remember casually walking down the street during the chaos and having a London police officer politely ask me to return to my flat. There was no tense exchange, I was not arrested, and I never feared for my life.

During the week of the riots, Londoners openly discussed how black people might receive different treatment from law enforcement, but conversations focused on analyzing policing techniques, discussing ways to keep teenagers off of the streets during the summer when they do not have school, and catching looters via CCTV.

In the American discourse, a supposedly inherent danger or criminality of black bodies would have been used to justify the police's killing of Duggan and present the riots as an inevitable by-product of a "culture of crime". The killing of Michael Brown and the riots in Ferguson followed this all-too-familiar American script.

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Image captionA protest holds a sign outside of the Starbucks where two men were arrested

Racism towards black people in America has largely nothing to do with immigration or nationality. There is no home country for African-Americans to connect to. Instead it is essentially a status quo of domestic alienation, dehumanization, decriminalization, and terror. European racism is bad, but it was still more welcoming than America's.

America's systemic racism starts with slavery and the various slave codes - state or federal laws created that codified the inhumane practice of chattel slavery into law. The American South was a "slave society", not merely a society with slaves. However, following the abolition of slavery, laws similar to the slave codes continued to oppress black people.

Following the Civil War, these "black codes" had the explicit purpose of depriving newly freed black Americans of the rights they had won. Black codes varied from state to state, but their legal foundation centered on vagrancy laws that allowed for an African American to be arrested if he was unemployed or homeless. They applied to countless blacks because housing and employment opportunities for freed blacks in the South were almost non-existent after the war.

Supporters of Virginia's Vagrancy Act of 1866, one of these measures, stated that it would re-institute "slavery in all but its name".

White Southerners would report blacks for vagrancy, and law enforcement would arrest them and sentence African-Americans to up three months of forced labour on public or private lands.