NOW AS WELL AS THEN: The surge in overt racism
IT might appear to be an odd subject to undertake at the beginning of Black History month, but it does represent a significant part of the lot of Africs over the last one thousand years. It is also of interest that there is both a surge in racism, possibly as a Eurocentric longing for a time not so long ago (as in ‘make America great again’) as well as the acceptance of a larger number of young Caucasians, who correctly see themselves as part of a diverse human race.
The surge became most obvious when Barack Obama became President of the United States. Out of the woodwork came all the racists who somehow felt aggrieved that a Black man should occupy the White House. One man put it succinctly: “Does he not understand that it is the White House? Donald Trump took it somewhat further by questioning his being born in the USA and followed this up by suggesting that he could not possibly have done as well academically as he had! And a Republican Congress determined to make him fail, the leader of the Senate even declaring that his primary goal was to make Obama a one-term President!
The electoral process has brought this all to the fore with openly racist statements being made on political platforms by the eventual winner of the election process and the current US President, Donald Trump. He attracted the racists who stood in the wings waiting for a leader. Indeed, he chose as his chief adviser Steve Bannon, who had been the editor of the Alt-Right publication. Alt-Right was a euphemism for white supremacist. After Trump’s election, the Alt-Right held a meeting in Washington at which there were plenty of Nazi salutes and a “Hail Trump!” or was that meant to be “Heil Trump?” The speaker insisted that Europeans had done everything that had been achieved in the USA. This fell into the category of alternative fact, since two of the most important devices in contemporary life – the traffic light and the elevator – had been invented by two of his African American compatriots. He was also ignoring the work of Dr. Charles Drew, who died because he could not, as a Black person, be admitted to the nearby White hospital, where the blood transfusion he had pioneered could have saved his life. Or perhaps he forgot that slaves had built the White House.
Historically, he was way off track. Perhaps the greatest man who ever lived, Imhotep, is unknown to him. Imhotep, an apparently simple Black youth from the Western Egyptian desert followed his father to the then Egyptian capital. The old man was a stonemason. The son, Imhotep, was to build the first known pyramid of stone. It was the famous step pyramid, which was 32 stories in height, most of these storeys underground. He also became the father of medicine, analysing some 200 diseases and performing numerous surgical operations. The Alt-Right must also have forgotten the very African Sphinx, dating back to 10 500 BCE or the great pyramids at Giza or indeed that the Egyptians had measured the distance around the world both at the latitudinal and longitudinal with incredible accuracy. Perhaps they had forgotten that Sir Isaac Newton had conceded that the Egyptian cubit was more accurate than any later devised.
What pained me most was that when Trump asked his supporters to buy a brick as a means of contributing to his campaign, there were some white Bajans who bought bricks! If anyone believed that we here lived in a post-racial society, he or she was terribly wrong.
I should point out, however, that one white Bajan I know pointed out that the Trump follower problem was that they did not like diversity. He was voting for diversity.
Stepping back to the Obama era, it was also for a brief while believed that the USA had entered a post-racial era. This illusion was soon shattered. However, what was clear was that Obama could not have been elected without a considerable segment of the white vote. That white Obama votes were generally young speaks well for the future. Given the present racist, misogynist and islamophobic atmosphere in the USA, even with all the protests, which have been taking place, that future may well be some distance away.