Racist Atrocities Soar as America Regurgitates Its Soul

While concern is on the rise due to terrorism overseas, this nation continues to ignore the sharp increase in terrorist incidents right here at home. The corporate media obviously refuses to report it, politicians act as if there is nothing to really worry about. The Talented Tenth seek to find ways for Black people to somehow blame this on themselves, and the rest of the public seems to have turned a blind eye to it. For an entire country to ignore the demons of its past, is to condemn future generations to certain repetition.

A society is like a factory in the production of human personalities. During World War Two we were forced as a nation to learn that in order to turn a factory which once produced pots and pans into one that produces tanks and warships, a certain level of deliberate institutional restructuring had to take place. Rules and regulations had to be re-written in order to reflect the new product that the factory was attempting to create. We succeeded because all who participated were made to respect the new rules that governed the plant; or to face the dire consequences instead. When it comes to the life of Black people, this message appears to have been lost on the United States. Sadly enough, although we have emerged into the 21st Century, and actually elected an African American president, nonetheless the old familiar legacy continues to repeat itself. Racist atrocities are once more on the rise, as America continues to regurgitate its soul.

This is solely because the concerted effort to dismantle apart-hate that began one half century ago, never really lent a patient ear to those voices that were seeking to truly outlaw that which had made segregation an evil system in the first place. The notion that one group of human beings in a society simply by virtue of something as mundane as the color of their skin, are led to believe that that they can actually awaken each morning with the license to rape, kill, roast and militate another group of human beings, is what made Jim Crow the evil system that it was. Racism is the psychopathology of 'projection'. Yet, as far as we know, not one member of what over the years must have been thousands of bloodthirsty White mobs, was ever offered even a moment of counseling for their wanton madness. Moreover, Blackfolk were constantly mislead by a government that consistently refused to protect them; and by a false cabal of the Talented Tenth that lead them into a specious struggle for Civil Rights-integration while ignoring the strident demands for the indisputable respect for their Human Rights as well. As a result, by slight of hand Black life was actually devalued from three fifths of a human being to one eighteenth1. Today the work of Ida B. Wells continues, as it does not require a rope and a tree to lynch somebody. On November 21, 2006, a 92 year old grandmother Kathryn Johnston was lynched in her own home in Atlanta Georgia. Five days later, on his wedding day November 26, Sean Bell was lynched in New York City. In Lawrenceville Georgia, after his wife called 911 on June 4, 2004 Freddie Williams was tazzared to death in front of a worldwide television audience; making his the largest and the latest public lynching in American history, and it goes on and on and on.

In April of 1864, Major General Nathan Bedford Forest, whom Jefferson Davis would declare 'the greatest solider of the war!' ordered the massacre of over one hundred Black soldiers attempting to surrender at Fort Pillow Tennessee. Forest would proclaim:

"The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with southerners!" 2

Others corralled, "We must keep this a White man's country!"3 Within months, southerners formed a variety of White vigilante groups, allegedly in order to "control" the newly freed African Americans. In South Carolina, Wade Hampton's Red Shirts terrorized the newly freed. Elsewhere, groups like The Pale Faces, The Sons of Midnight, and The Knights of The White Camellia, all worked in concert to fully ingrain terrorism into the very physic of American culture. During that time one observer remarked:

"In my experience [South Carolina] has no parallel, either in wanton and brutal cruelties inflicted...or in the utter deadening of the moral sense in large parts of the White communities reputed and believed to be far removed from the barbarism of savages!"4

Then, on December 24 of 1965, in Pulaski Tennessee, the Klu Klux Klan was founded. Three years later in 1867, at its convention in Nashville Tennessee, the Klan ordained its very first Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire; this was none other than Nathan Bedford Forest. From that very moment in the wake of the Civil War, with the founding of the KKK, and the subsequent massacres in Colfax Louisiana on April 13, Easter Sunday in the year 1873, and in Hamburg South Carolina on July 8, 1876, all the way down through the decades to the Rodney King beating one week after Bush the Elder's Iraq Campaign in 1991, there has consistently existed a conspicuous pattern in American life, of the two-fold ritual play of war and a sudden rise in racist atrocities in the aftermath of war. Many Black soldiers returned from overseas liberating Europeans in both WWI and WWII, only to be lynched in uniform when they returned home. The summer of 1919 would gain the notorious distinction as 'The Red Summer' with a record of over twenty-one deadly White riots in over a period of just a few months.

Throughout the primary campaign Hillary Clinton never once hesitated to cleverly cajole and mine White racist sensibilities wherever they could be discovered throughout Appalachia; and the rest of the world said nothing. All year long we saw the all too familiar classic racist iconography of Obama as a monkey, Obama Waffles with the distorted face of a Black man with huge lips, and so on; and there was even one White man who was sick enough to walk around New York City with at T-shirt that read: "Obama is My Slave!"5 Yet, for the most part, the world said nothing. It was only until Sarah Palin's rhetoric finally incited open air displays of wanton bloodlust; like what happened on October 26, in Clearwater Florida when amongst her crowd of 3000, people were heard screaming "Obama terrorist", "Arab" "Kill him!" "Kill him!", that John Lewis would finally interject the need to turn the temperature down just a little bit.6 Even then it appeared as if he was almost made to apologize for it, and it surly didn't stop Sarah Palin or Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R-MN) 7 from reminding whoever would listen that people like Obama were part of that "other [unauthentic] America". Racist atrocities have suddenly soared all across the nation since the moment that Barack Obama was elected. A popular White Supremacist website literally crashed due to the overwhelming traffic on Election Day. Even as the November 4 victory was being joyfully celebrated around the world, one lawyer has charged that Police in Chicago committed a hate crime, and at the same time on Staten Island a 17 year old African American boy was reportedly attacked with a baseball bat by rioters chanting 'Obama' The President-elect has already been hung in effigy far too many times to mention. Students at North Carolina State have been accused of spray painting the words "Kill that n ... " and "Shoot Obama!"8 and students at Appalachian State University have been reported to be walking around on campus wearing T-Shirts with the caption Obama '08, Biden '09' insinuating that the President-elect will be assassinated 9. Indeed, several blogs have carried the furious rants and raves of numerous posters who outright call for Obama's assassination. One website called the JD Underground, reportedly dedicated to lawyers has carried the thread "Nigger President" since the beginning of the year 10 , and on another site a poster identifying himself as Dalderian Germanicus of North Las Vegas wrote; "I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest."11 On yet another site run by someone identified only as Strider333 a post reads "The KKK or someone Will assassinate Obama!"12 Elsewhere on yet another site a pollster identified as "Kill Da Nigga" says "I'm hoping someone will do his public duty of putting a bullet through Obama's head."13 Another post reads "LOOK OUT NIGGER THE KLAN IS GETTING BIGGER!!!!!!"14 One poster who calls himself "amerikkkan" says "The deep south is making plans"15, and it goes on and on as racist hate groups throughout the country appear to have suddenly lost their minds. Sadly enough, parents in one Idaho community have even reported discovering that second and third graders where heard on a school bus chanting "Assassinate Obama!"16 In contrast, as of this writing not one single incident has been reported anywhere in America of any Black person saying so much as an unkind word to a White person as a result of Barack Obama's election. However, of course I could be wrong about that; who knows. Nonetheless, racism is the psychopathology of 'projection', and its viral effects can be rather deadly. All over the nation reports are suddenly surfacing of innocent Black people being attacked with increasing frequency; and it goes on and on and on.

Just this last year once again there were many African Americans crying out with angst in our hearts over Obama's deadening silence towards the plight of Black people in this country; save that is his sole desire to criticize Black men on Father's day; thereby casting a shameful net over all Black men. Many of us felt that if the oppression of Black people had to be rendered as insignificant in order to put a Black man in the White House, this would be a denial of the humanity of untold millions who suffered in the past, not to mention those who are sure to fall victim in the future. Mr. Obama's father's family is from Kenya and he does not exactly share the same psychic memory of the horrors of American slavery as many of us do. Nonetheless, his wife and children do. As long as racism is continually treated like some deformed child that we all have quietly kept hidden in the basement, that we're not really supposed to talk about, instead of like the potentially deadly psychopathology that it actually is; this violence against African Americans is sure to continue.

End Notes

.1 The United Declarations of Human Rights is built around two distinct conventions that lay out the constituent concept of Human Rights. The internationally recognized concept of Civil Rights is but one individual aspect of one of those conventions.

2 William Wells Brown. The Negro in the American Rebellion - His Heroism and His Fidelity. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1867. Read and online excerpt at: Fort Pillow Massacre. United States. Congress. Joint Committee. Scholarly Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library. ISBN: 9781425513634 13 September 2006

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 See 6 US racist attacks skyrocket after Obama's election. African Americans become a target of racist attacks.