Don’t be fooled, we have our own unique strain of racism
ON APRIL 3, 1968, the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr predicted, in a sad and foreboding speech, that his fellow black Americans would one day overcome the obvious and crushing injustices of endemic racism in the United States. He told how he’d been to the mountain top, looked over, and had seen the promised land.
On April 4 – the very next day – he was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet powered by the hatred he was devoted to eradicating.
The dreadful killing of a black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in Minnesota and the traumatic outpouring of grief, street protests and violence that has followed, demonstrates once again how we are all still suspended in a kind of limbo existence between optimism and tragedy captured in those two days more than 52 years ago.
Dr King’s optimism that human beings would eventually opt for our better angels, that things would improve, that love is stronger than hate and that evil can be defeated, has still not been rewarded. The tragedy continues. Because racism is complicated. It’s a moving target, a chameleon, clever and ruthlessly persuasive.
And, like that neuralyzer gizmo made famous in the Hollywood blockbuster Men In Black, racism can make us forget all the misery it has caused previously – a fact illustrated by the resurgence of far-right nationalism and xenophobia, even in Europe only 75 years after the Nazi scourge was ended.
RACISM is all about tribe and power and violence. It’s about self-interest and scarce resources. It’s also as old as the hills, part of our DNA, dreadful, obscene and self-maiming. It’s a virus without a vaccine and we’re all infected.
And for those who fail or refuse to recognise the truth of that, it must surely also be invisible.
It’s a simple fact of history that black people – all people of colour – have been the victims of unspeakable crimes down the centuries, in the United States and elsewhere.
Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery on January 1, 1863, was empty of any real substance. Blacks were technically ‘free’ but were still enslaved in poverty and ill-health, marginalised, shunned and deprived of the obvious benefits mainly enjoyed by white people. And so it has remained.
Anyway, the much-revered Abraham Lincoln would have had no objection in principle to allowing slavery to continue if Southern States – with 3.5m slaves in 1860 out of a total population of just over 9m people – agreed not to secede from the Union. Black people have always had conditional protection.
The multiple disadvantages experienced by blacks and other ethnic groups in the US are revealing themselves again during the current virus pandemic, which has claimed a disproportionate number of lives in those communities because of lifestyle and healthcare privations, as compared to whites.
As Billie Holiday reminded us all in her powerful song Strange Fruit, there’s still black blood on the leaves and at the root.
On this side of the pond there was a great deal of justifiable – but largely unreflective – outrage this week when that truly incredible American president Donald Trump used a Bible as a prop for his re-election campaign during a grotesque, stage-managed visit to an historic church in Washington after police attacked and cleared peaceful protesters away from the White House. Here in Ireland we operate in a fool’s paradise, in a self-congratulatory, make-believe world where racism and discrimination based on ethnic difference doesn’t exist.
And we fail to understand that the only reason we haven’t experienced the very worst excesses of racism is because whites feel they have nothing to fear at about 92% of the population, with blacks at well under 2%.
However, the historic neglect and marginalisation of Travellers demonstrates our capacity for bias and unfairness.
A UCD study into Traveller health threw up telling similarities to blacks in America. Traveller men and women have significantly shorter lives to the rest of the community here and tragically, also, infant mortality is about three times higher in the Traveller community as compared to settled people.
The law on incitement to hatred in Ireland is next to useless, as was made clear following the recent racist abuse of footballer Ian Wright by an angry teen in Kerry.
This week Martin Luther King’s son spoke about George Floyd’s killing with the same optimism his father had on the day before he was gunned down in Memphis. Mr King said this latest slaying of a black man by police may be the tipping point for real change in America.
But, you have to wonder if in another 52 years future generations will still be hearing the same unfulfilled predictions of imminent conversion to righteousness. In truth, the omens are not good.