America’s redeeming graces

In these sombre days in the United States, I think that it is important to stand by our American neighbours on their Independence Day. Ordinary Americans are confused and terrified, and rightly so.

Americans are witnessing the burning of their cities and the nihilistic destruction of their heritage by Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters. Amid the smoke and chaos of falling statues, “woke” elites and progressive politicians, who have administered the burning cities for decades, cynically look on or encourage the anarchy, both financially and in the media. They know that they can easily retreat behind the walls that surround their guarded and gated communities.

Meanwhile, ordinary Americans of all races are stuck in the turmoil, fearing for their homes and livelihoods and scared sick that the leftist politicians who hold the levers of power will defund or even abolish the police. Their businesses, that in many cases have taken generations to build, are being looted before their very eyes. Many of them have been bullied into silence, fearing that they will be labelled racist for pushing back.

But America is not a racist country. Far from it. America has given more liberty and opportunity to more people from more nations than any country in world history.

Yes, Americans did allow slavery in half of their states and that is a horrible stain on their history. But it is also true that every society in the world has practised slavery. In different parts of the world, including the Indigenous societies of North America, across Africa, through the Middle East and around the world to China — all major civilizations bought and sold slaves.

What is different about America is that it fought a bloody civil war to put an end to it. More than 350,000 Union soldiers died to end slavery, a staggering number of casualties in a gruelling war of attrition when the combined population of the northern states was a mere 22 million people. The war to end Black slavery was America’s bloodiest conflict but also its most righteous.

And again in the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s, Americans turned the bright light of honesty on their attitudes towards race and found them wanting. They passed laws ending the age of Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. This document was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. This act and those that followed are a tribute to Americans.

America remains the only white-majority country to have ever elected a Black leader. President Barack Obama didn’t serve just one term; he was elected to serve two. Would a racist people do such a thing?

And what about American families? Interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages have been increasing since the 1960s. By 2010, over 15 per cent of all new marriages in the United States were interracial compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid-20th century.

Maybe Africans know more about America than our woke social-justice betters. By the 1980s, more Black Africans had come to America voluntarily as immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity than had ever come as slaves.

So during these disheartening times of mob violence, let us all wish our American neighbours Happy Independence Day and e pluribus unum.

Peter Martyn lives in Tatamagouche