FINDING ANSWERS
Former SenatorAtty. Joey Lina
Will the United States of America break up into a white and colored country?
Now, more than ever, the degree of divisiveness is getting clearer. Eventually, as the polarization sharpens, the conservatives in the US will not act on the deep-seated issue of racial injustice, but will just focus on the issue of lawlessness, while the progressives will focus more on racial injustice being the root cause of the breakdown of peace and order.
Racism, social injustice, and police brutality are perennial issues seemingly heating up to a boiling point. So important have the issues become that NBA players decided on the most extreme action of boycotting basketball games last week after a black man, Jacob Blake, was shot in the back seven times by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Were it not for the reported intercession of former President Barack Obama who advised LA Lakers star LeBron James and others to continue with the playoffs, the entire NBA season would have ended abruptly as many players felt that the issues of police brutality and social injustice were far more important than basketball.
They felt the most extreme action was needed to draw attention to racial injustice and boost support for the Black Lives Matter movement which gained prominence anew during a summer of unrest and widespread protests following the death of George Floyd, a Black man whose life was snuffed out by a Minnesota white police officer’s knee pressed on his neck.
Racial prejudice has been around in America for centuries. It is so deeply embedded that it has been described as “immovable” by the French sociologist and political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville who, after travelling to the US in 1831, declared that racial prejudice would survive the abolition of slavery. His prophecy was contained in his 1835 work “Democracy in America” which became one of the most influential books of the 19th century.
Thus, even the two-term presidency of Obama, the first-ever US president of color, has not extinguished racial prejudice, thereby boosting the “immovable” theory of Tocqueville who made the assessment three decades before the US Civil War erupted.
The US is a nation of immigrants and white people freely came to America in search of a better life – in stark contrast to the blacks from Africa who came to America in chains to make a better life for the whites.
“The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery,” wrote educator and social reformer Frederick Douglass in 1849 as he declared that “laws ought to be enacted, and institutions established — all distinctions, founded on complexion, ought to be repealed, repudiated, and forever abolished — and every right, privilege, and immunity, now enjoyed by the white man, ought to be as freely granted to the man of color.”
Yet racial inequality persists to this day. Racial equality is not enshrined in the US Constitution which only speaks of equality before the law. That was the compromise. The white supremacists would successfully block every attempt to make equality of races written in the US Constitution. The proponent of racial equality had to compromise the wording “equal before the law” because the proposal could not garner enough votes.
Grievances run deep among black Americans over their past – the horrors of slavery, lynchings, segregation. But amid phenomenal changes to end such horrors, there are some who say that resentments are also “held by many whites over what they see as preferential treatment for the black community.”
Psychology professor Richard Eibach of Yale University said whites and blacks have different yardsticks in assessing racial progress. According to a report in the Washington Post, white people use the yardstick of how far America has become from what it was, while people of color use the yardstick of how far the US has yet to improve as a nation.
And while many agree that systemic racism exists, there are whites who think there is no widespread racism against blacks. In fact, according to a Washington Post 2016 report, “Whites now think bias against white people is more of a problem than bias against black people.”
Staunch supporters of Black Lives Matter insist that it is not enough that one is not racist – one has to be anti-racist. And white supremacists will continue with their assertion that blacks are “less human,” an assertion which seems obvious when one considers that blacks, more than the Indians who were the original inhabitants in America, were subjected to greater sufferings, insults, and other demeaning acts.
With increased polarization, the battle cry would eventually reflect this thinking: “If you are not with us, you are against us, and if you are against us, you are not with us.”
Tensions will continue to rise as President Trump shows no intention of pacifying the protagonists. To win in the November elections at all costs, he will pander to his base, the conservatives, with lies and incendiary remarks, even further provoking people of color. Ultimately, moderates and independents will have to take sides, based on instinct of self-preservation.
The people of color, and some remaining moderates and independents, will harden their position. Nobody gives in as the polarization reaches a boiling point. Will civil war be the next scenario?
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