A Hispanic male, George, marked a seventeen-year-old African
American male, Trayvon, as suspicious in a gated community in Sanford,
Florida. George ignored the 911
dispatcher's command to leave Trayvon alone; the police, the trained
professionals in the use of deadly force would handle the situation. Instead George continued to follow
Trayvon. A confrontation
occurred. Shots rang out. Trayvon lay dead on the ground. A series of events that unfolded merely
because George thought that Trayvon, a black male wearing a black hooded
sweatshirt looked "suspicious."
Why is it that a young man whose skin tone ranges on the
darker complexion be considered to be "suspicious" when on the other
hand, if I put on the same hooded sweatshirt, I am not give those same
suspicious stares? When looking at
us based on our skin complexion, the only reason why my skin tone is lighter
than my African American classmates is seventy thousand years plus of changes
in the amount of melanin in my skin after my genetic ancestors left the African
homeland.
But it is that difference in the amount of melanin in the
skin that has been the basis for all our racial tensions. That ugly racial and ethnic history
based all on the color of one's skin is whitewashed in the textbooks sitting in
American public schools. That
whitewashed history does not call out the guilty parties; it does not
accurately the horror, the pain, and the evil; that whitewashed history makes
it easy for people to simply state: "why can't these people pick
themselves up by their bootstraps."
It is hard to pull one's self up by bootstraps when you've been beaten
by those bootstraps; when you've been strangled to death by those bootstraps;
denied access to use of those bootstraps; and still arrogantly told to pull
yourself up by those bootstraps.
All because someone had a darker complexion, in the minds of
sixteenth century Europeans, those darker persons were not equal humans. Either they were merely chattel
property as was the case of African slaves. Or they were subhuman in the case of the Indigenous
Americans who stood in the way of Manifest Destiny and were treated like any
other pest; worthy of extermination.
Or that their "brownness" was sufficient grounds to block any
attempt to gain statehood until there was a nexus of whiteness to make them
more acceptable; ignoring centuries of civilization and laws under the Aztec,
Spanish Empire, and Mexican governments.
The ugly reality is that the American Republic's power and
wealth was built upon the scarred backs of slaves and rests upon the mass
graves and stolen land of children of the Indigenous Americans.
All because someone had darker skin, it was unfathomable to
the lily white man that a darker skinned person would have the ability to
think, to write, to be equal in society.
The pseudoscience of phrenology was the racist's tool in proving that it
was impossible that blacks were intellectually equal to the white man merely
by the size of their skulls. In
the minds of enlightened white men, African Americans were at first merely
chattel, a skilled mule to till their fields; but once the 13th Amendment was
passed, these racists had to support their claims that African Americans were
incapable of being equal to whites; hence the explosion of pseudoscience to
support their racist ideologies.
At the same time, these same racist pseudoscientific
theories worked hand-in-hand with the arrogant and racist concept of White
Man's Burden was carried in the vanguard of European and American imperialists
into India, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It didn't matter than India was one of the cradles of
civilization; it didn't matter that it was the Muslim world that preserved the
knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity while Europe wallowed in backward
ideology; it didn't matter that these non-white people had century old
societies and civilizations. They
were dark skinned; it was impossible for them to be equal to the superior
white-European-Christian civilization.
All because Europeans had a diminished need of melanin because of the
environment in the upper latitudes of Europe.
It is this ugly history that must be understood. This history is just but one step to
understanding the problems and to guide our actions in the future. Without this history, we are doomed to
continue to perpetuate stereotypes that young black or Hispanic men are to be feared
as potential criminals. If we
don't realize that our deeply seeded mindsets on race, on color are premised on
intellectually bankrupt ideas of ignorant ghosts, we are doomed to perpetuate
the terrible legacy they have bestowed upon us. We are wiser than our ancestors.
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