Racism has always been in our shameful DNA. Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, was established in 1607. The Spanish were already colonizing Florida. Both colonies discovered that the Native Americans did not do well as slave labor. In 1619, Virginia imported the first Africans. These colonies were autocratic in one way or another. Religion used to keep people in line. It was not until 1681 that a colony established by William Penn promised religious freedom to all. The English colonists and the French colonists to their north went to war in 1754 over the intervening space, recruiting various Indian tribes as proxy soldiers.
Our Declaration of Independence made high-sounding promises about equality, we all know the date. A few years later, the Constitution actually specified those rights in 1791. One of the provisions was obscure language that curtailed the importation of certain persons (slaves) after 1808.
The war against the Native Americans hit one of its most disgraceful landmarks on the Trail of Tears. In 1831, the majority of the Cherokee nation and associated tribes were forcibly marched 1,000 miles from lush North Carolina to the barren Indian-Territory, now known as Oklahoma. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men (including deist who identified with protestant churches) totally dominated American politics until the first Catholic was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1836, Roger Taney. Four of the first five presidents were Virginians, slave owners. It wasn’t until 1837 that a man not white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Martin Van Buren (Dutch) became president. Racism was not limited to people of color. The “No Irish Need Apply” campaign of 1854 attacked some of the whitest of Europeans Irish Catholics. Other newly arrived waves of European minorities especially southern, experienced similar attitude. The U.S. fought wars with the Seminole 41 years until 1858, much longer than Afghanistan, without ever reaching a true peace agreement.
In 1856, a Jew, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis was the first non-Christian in national office. Slavery was still the rule south of the Mason Dixon Line, until the Emancipation Declaration and after the Civil War, the 13th amendment. In 1870, the first blacks Hiram Revels and Joseph Rainey were elected to Congress. That, however, did not stop the slaughter of Native Americans. Custer was on his way to massacre a Sioux village when Crazy Horse intercepted him at Little Bighorn in 1876.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants not satisfied with dominating others passed the Chinese exclusion act in 1882 to preserve a white majority. The domination of Native Americans reached another milestone massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The 1898 Plessy v. Ferguson decision sanctified segregation and 50 years of Jim Crow policies, including the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Although there was no evidence of disloyalty over 100,000 Japanese Americans were interred during World War II in spite of their obvious patriotism.
Some progress finally began to occur when then-President Harry Truman desegregated the American defense forces in 1952. The bravery and valor of black and brown recruits was finally respected. They and the other newly desegregated minorities encountered heavy resistance, but two years later Brown v. Board of Education legally desegregated public schools, undoing Plessy v. Ferguson. The South resisted.
The first Catholic was elected President in 1960, ending a 170-year Protestant monopoly. It led to both the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights acts in 0nly two years, but unfortunately also the pro-segregation presidential campaign of Alabaman George Wallace in 1968. He lost soundly. By then politics was preoccupied with the Vietnam War, Nixon, the War on Drugs, the Iraq wars, the Great Recession and Afghanistan. The progress has been painfully slow but in 2008 a non-white, Barrack Obama was elected president. We now have even, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians and Muslims in Congress.
The 2016 presidential campaign added open misogyny to racism with inflammatory rhetoric and since then the number of headline-making violence incidents has increased significantly. Some but not all appear racist. Our vocabulary has grown with terms that are hard to define. Antifa, Qanon, BLM, LGBTQP+, Critical Race Theory, and terms we thought we understood have become blurry, liberal, conservative, socialist, racist, patriot. No wonder people are confused.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com