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Business News/ Opinion / Columns/  Opinion | The US anti-racism movement might work in favour of racists
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Opinion | The US anti-racism movement might work in favour of racists

Reducing all American history to a simplistic binary could end up being harmful to a just cause

Photo: ReutersPremium
Photo: Reuters

It is quite an extraordinary moment in the history of the United States. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are being toppled, airports and sports teams are being renamed, all heritage is being questioned. Washington, the man who led the US war of independence and was its first president, and Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and is credited with a big role in creating the modern concept of “human rights", were both slaveowners.

Lincoln, the US president who fought the Civil War that led to the emancipation of slaves, and whose copy of the Bible the US’s first African-American president Barack Obama used to take his oath of office, has been “cancelled". It has, after all, been known to historians all along that Lincoln fought the war primarily to maintain the integrity of the nation and not to free slaves per se. He never made a secret of this fact and allowed the states that supported him in the war to keep slaves.

The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University has been renamed the Princeton School, since Wilson, US president during World War I, was an active segregationist. California’s John Wayne Airport will almost certainly be renamed since America’s greatest Western film star made some decidedly racist public comments. The football team Washington Redskins has dropped “Redskins", seen as derogatory to Native Americans. The Texas Rangers baseball team is under pressure to change its name, since the legendary frontier lawmen may have been racist.

The question then is: Where does it all end? Western portrayals of Jesus Christ as blonde and blue eyed are born of European cultural assumptions, since the West Asian who died on the cross could hardly have had such an appearance. Should Americans now replace all the statues and paintings in their churches, and try to “cancel" Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and the Sistine Chapel, where every Biblical entity, beginning with God and Adam, is Caucasian?

What of Columbus, the capital of Ohio? Records suggest that Christopher Columbus, long celebrated as the intrepid explorer who discovered America, was also a plunderer who left many natives of the land he reached dead. In the last decade, many American cities have renamed the national holiday Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day. What about Columbia University, “Hail Columbia", the official US vice-presidential anthem and the district of Columbia? After all, “Columbia" is merely a derivation from “Columbus". Washington DC itself is named after a man who kept an estimated 300 slaves. And the very name “America" comes from Amerigo Vespucci, the 15th century Italian explorer who, as records show, made at least one slave raid in the Bahamas, capturing 232 natives, and was a slave owner.

Today, a loud and voluble section of Americans, though almost certainly a minority, are seeing their country and its history only through the prism of racism. Every individual and every action is being judged by the racist/ non-racist binary, and apparently anyone who questions this classification is by definition a racist. As is anyone who claims he is not a racist, because this is seen as definitive proof that he is blind to his privileges. Obvious questions like whether a person should be judged by the standards of his time, or whether a person’s positive contributions, like those of all mortals, outweigh his negatives, are also tarred with the same brush.

There is no denying America’s history of systemic racism, but could these anti-racism activists, with their bipolar view of the world, end up giving racists just the tools they need to pursue their venal agenda? Caucasian racists can now cite the activists’ starkly black-and-white campaign as proof that they were right all along—that people of colour do not believe in the “idea of America" (whichever way racists define it). When one side reduces all American history to a skin-pigment narrative and calls for endless penitence, it may be arming the other side, which propagates its own hateful melanin story, and confusing the innocent. The attacks on men regarded as America’s greatest national heroes—including the two most prominent founding fathers—may be intensely disturbing to a very large number of average Caucasian Americans who are not racist in any manner, but whose deepest beliefs and pride in their country are now being called foolish delusions at best.

Anti-racism activists appear uninterested in discussion, debate and any nuance. Historical inequities can only be corrected through wisely designed and soundly executed policies—from zoning laws to economic programmes—and reforming institutions, and this cannot happen without informed and sober discourse.

Last month, when the Minneapolis City Council announced that it would disband the city’s police force, council president Lisa Bender was asked at a press conference: “What if, in the middle of the night, my home is broken into. Who do I call?" Bender replied: “That (fear) comes from a place of privilege."

This sort of thinking is not going to help America, or its race relations.

Sandipan Deb is a former editor of ‘Financial Express’, and founder-editor of ‘Open’ and ‘Swarajya’ magazines

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Published: 19 Jul 2020, 08:08 PM IST
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