“Officer, please, please, please, I can’t breathe…” In May, a black American man George Freud was brutally enforcing the law by white police in the street.
He was kneeled down and crushed by the police for seven minutes after the minister died.
The incident shocked the world and triggered protests across the United States.
The slogan “Black lives are also lives” resounding in all states of the United States.
Why did this violent white police enforcement trigger such a large-scale protest? The root cause is that this is not an extreme case.
White police violent law enforcement and black abuse occur frequently in the United States, which is only a long-term outbreak of racial contradictions.
Ironically, the United States has always regarded itself as a “melting pot”, flaunting the compatibility of all people who come to the land of the United States, and promoting it through gimmicks such as the “American Dream” to create a false illusion of freedom, fairness and racial equality.
But in fact, from the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the United States has been a country with extremely racial inequality.
From the mass killing and expulsion of Indians to the long-term slavery, to the segregation movement and the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act… For hundreds of years, the old wounds of racism in the United States have not healed and added new diseases.
They have been deeply rooted and are hard to return.
Last year marks the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing on the North American continent.
This is a landmark event in American history, but it is the beginning of a nightmare for American Indians.
The Atlantic Monthly of the United States commented that looking back at the 400-year history of Western colonization in North America, it is a “blood and tear road” for American Indians.
At the beginning, in the face of uninvited guests on the Mayflower, the Indians showed their warm and kind hospitality nature, teaching them to hunt, fish, grow corn and pumpkins, and help these “beautiful floats” out of their difficult lives.
With the help of Indians, the white colonists settled down and harvested a bumper harvest. The day of the two celebration of the harvest was later named Thanksgiving.
However, since then, the white colonists have revenged, forcing Indian tribes to sign unequal treaties after another through war, deception, etc., and conceively seized a large amount of land from the Indians.
When the United States was founded, it recognized Indian tribes as independent sovereign governments, but later betrayed their faith and terminated the Indian governance system and took their land.
Previous presidents of the United States have drawn up plans to migrate Indians.
By 1830, under Jackson’s administration, the U.S. Congress passed the Indian Migration Act, which forced Indian tribes to move to the inhabited “American Desert” in the west on a large scale.
If someone is unwilling to move, the U.S. government uses the army to drive them away. There are countless massacres, and women and children are not spared.
After the American Civil War, with the progress of railways and technology, a large number of Americans began to explore the west. These people were surprised to find that this “American Desert” was actually the “American Plains”, where there are not only deserts, but also a large amount of gold and silver treasures.
As a result, the Indians were expelled and massacred again. For nearly a hundred years in the 19th century, American troops occupied millions of square kilometers of Indian land through the westward movement.
By 1900, the number of Indians in the United States had dropped sharply from 5 million before the arrival of white colonists to 250,000, almost to genocide.
As of the end of 2018, American Indians accounted for about 2 percent of the total population, and 22 percent of them lived on Indian reservations. These reserves are mainly located in the barren Midwest, the smallest of which is only 0.5 square kilometers.
21.9% of Indians live below the poverty line, and some tribes have an unemployment rate of 85%, and the average life expectancy is 5.5 years lower than that of the United States. In terms of political weight, there are only four Indian-American congressmen in the United States, and there are no senators.
The black people’s experience is equally tragic.
Shortly after the establishment of the American colonies, white Europeans brought black Africans here as slaves and used them as “cultivated animals”.
When the United States declared independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote “All men are born equal”, may never have thought that the so-called “everyone” should include black people, who himself has more than 100 slaves.
He believes that black people are inherently inferior to white people, and that the two races cannot live together.” One of them is bound to perish. This view was quite representative at that time.
It was not until 1865 that the United States Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, formally abolishing slavery.
Slavery, as a system of imprisonment of slavery, although it ended, the idea that slavery of others did not disappear. The view that the Anglo-Saxon race was a “special God’s electorate” was widely spread in the United States with a strong religious atmosphere, making many white Americans believe that they were “saviors” and superior. .
During the post-war reconstruction period, the free people were nominally protected by the federal government, but many of their legitimate activities and demands, including the exercise of the right to vote, were stigmatized as “conspiracy” by the aristocracy and reactionary forces of the South.
Deep-rooted racial discrimination soon returned. White racists, represented by the Ku Klux Klan, do not hesitate to use extremely cruel measures to kill innocent black people who demand legal rights and freedoms.
According to statistics, about 5,000 black people were killed during the reconstruction period after the Civil War. After reconstruction, the disenfranchisement of the free people in the south continued until the first half of the 20th century.
In 1876, in view of the current situation of “black and white intolerance” and in order to curb the rising rights of blacks, many southern states passed bills one after another.
The authorities nominally advocated “segregation but equality” and required people of color and white people to be quarantined in public transportation, education, restaurants and other places, resulting in the emergence of the “rule of blood”. That is, “as long as there is a drop of black blood mixed in the blood, it is recognized as black”.
This is essentially to carry out racial discrimination in the name of equality, so that hatred and contradictions continue to breed. This isolation has lasted for a hundred years, and it can still be seen in the “black and white” living pattern in American cities.
Although racial discrimination has been repealed by law, it still exists in fact and continues to expand in political rights, employment, education, housing and other aspects.
Chinese immigrants in the United States suffer similar discrimination to those of blacks.
In 1849, attracted by the gold rush, a large number of Chinese came to California to help build the Central Pacific Railway. Due to harsh natural conditions and the violent treatment of white supervisors, thousands of Chinese workers died in the construction project.
“Every pillow has a Chinese worker’s soul under it”.
Over the next 30 years, about 300,000 Chinese emigrated to the United States, most of whom settled on the west coast of the United States.
By 1860, Chinese accounted for more than 9% of the total population of California.
Because Chinese people demand lower salaries, do not join unions, and are unwilling to participate in strikes, employers usually prefer to hire Chinese than whites. Disgruntled white workers repeatedly protested against unfair competition among Chinese people.
In 1952, the governor of California called on the state legislature to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States.
In 1854, the California Supreme Court reinterpreted an injunction extending the prohibition of blacks and Indians from testifying in cases involving whites to Chinese, on the grounds that they were “naturally inferior”.
Starting from 1878, the California Constituent Assembly launched extremely Chinese exterminance measures, including prohibiting the employment of Chinese, segregating Chinese people and segregating Chinese in residence and school.
Since then, the federal government has also joined the Chinese Exclusion Movement. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which clearly stipulated that Chinese were not eligible for American citizenship and prohibited Chinese workers from emigrating to the United States for the next decade.
Dissatisfied that the federal government only restricts Chinese immigration, mass gatherings demanding the expulsion of Chinese have appeared in various parts of the west, police violence against Chinese, and vicious crimes of murdering Chinese people.
In these cases, prosecutors generally refuse criminal prosecution, and even if the prosecution is in front of a white jury, it is impossible to convict.
While abandoning national reconstruction, the United States has also condoned the turmoil caused by the Chinese exclusion bias.
Facing the oppression of ethnic minorities, the Supreme Court did not uphold the dignity of the law and the rights of the people, but chose to bow to racial discrimination.
From the perspective of racial development, American history is a history of blood and tears of ethnic minorities.
As American scholar Thomas Sauvill pointed out in his book A Brief History of American Race, “coloration obviously plays a pivotal role in determining the fate of Americans.”
In this regard, American society does not lack reflection, but always lacks practical actions to curb racism, resulting in old wounds and new wounds, historically and even more so in reality.
In recent years, white supremacy has prevailed in the United States. Especially under the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic, systematic racial discrimination in the United States has become more prominent.
“Only rotten trees will grow bad apples.” The core of racial discrimination in the United States today is actually class discrimination.
Because white people have gained a strong position relative to other ethnic groups and special class through various institutional designs such as political structures, laws and regulations, education systems, etc. This unfair institutional design is still contributing to racism and leads to a vicious circle. .
The United States claims to be the “melting pot” and thinks it is trying to throw racial discrimination into the dustbin of history. It is still a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant country in its bones.
This concept is not addressed and corrected, and the elimination of racial discrimination can only be empty words.
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