Police killings of two black Americans ignited race riots throughout the US, which is devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Blacks, Latinos and Indians are in racism’s crosshairs as the country’s image as the citadel of equality and freedom is tainted.
On Christmas Eve of 1968, astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 lunar mission took a photograph which came to be known as ‘Earthrise’—a seminal view that changed our vision of the earth.
Last week, visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk created history with SpaceX, which brought the United States back to the future—it was the first space mission to take off from American soil since 2011.
However, if astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley could take a picture of their country today from outer space as they orbit through the star-studded cosmos, it would show an excoriated nation that has reverted to its dark past—a legacy of colour prejudice and brutality.
How racist is America? Have white supremacists encouraged by Republican rhetoric and partisan police cleaved the US apart beyond redemption?
What does this bigoted division mean for the future of the world’s most powerful nation which owes its might to immigrants?
Last week, all of America burned. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was suffocated to death by a white police officer kneeling on his neck.
The phrase “I can’t breathe” uttered by the dying man became the war cry resonating through the worst ever race riots to scar the country since Charlotte in 2016. The conflagration of fury among blacks and whites alike spread across over 40 cities in America such as Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and more. Curfew was imposed over most of the country. The National Guard was summoned. Armoured tanks encircled the Capitol. President Donald Trump nearly called in the Army. America became a war zone.
COLOUR-CODED NATION
The anarchy couldn’t have come at a worse time for America reeling under a deadly Covid-19 contagion inflamed by frighteningly poor public management.
Under Trump, the American economy had prospered, business confidence was at an all-time high and an aggressive trade war against China had marked him as an uncompromising Captain America.
But a lethal combination of pandemic panic, job loss and an absence at the top to heal and reassure the desolation worsened the xenophobia, which had brought the real estate tycoon to power as an outlier nationalist.
Coincidentally after Trump’s rise, hate crimes have gone vertical—aggression on non-whites at last count by the FBI is up by 17 percent; over 45 percent of the victims of all races comprise Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists.
Blacks suffer the most; according to Fatal Encounter, a database which monitors US police brutality, not a single day has gone by this year up to May 30 without a police-related death; African Americans are killed at double their population ratio of 13 percent.
Today, White Americans excluding White Hispanics constitute 60.4 percent of the population. New census projections predict that the US will become “minority white” in 2045.
According to Census Bureau’s 2018 figures, 26.5 lakh Indians lived in America in 2018. A group of 16 Democratic senators, including the first Indian-origin senator Kamala Harris, has requested the Trump administration to take concrete steps to stop minority persecution.
Politics in America is driven by colour, just like caste dominates the Indian calculus.
In February 2015, former Louisiana Governor and Presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal had joked about Michael Jackson’s hit single asking, “You mean I’m not white?” During the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination campaign, SR Sidarth, a dark-skinned 20-year-old University of Virginia student and campaign volunteer, was mocked by a Republican senator as a “macaca”—a species of monkey.
Sidarth posted the videotape on YouTube. It went viral and the senator lost the election. In 1965, US President Lyndon B Johnson had cancelled the official visits of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and Pakistani President Mohammed Ayub Khan after they opposed the Vietnam War. Johnson said, “After all, what would Jim Eastland (conservative Mississippi senator) say if I brought those two niggers over here?” Trump looks like a raging liberal Democrat compared to Johnson.
WHITE HOUSE Vs BLACK
Last Sunday, the lights suddenly went out in the White House, home to 43 presidents. To many Americans, the sudden darkness symbolised a nation that had lost its way in the long night of hatred.
While police fired rubber bullets, pepper bombs and tear gas canisters at protestors outside the historic 19th century building, Trump, wife Melania and son Barron retreated to a fortified underground bunker, last used on 9/11.
From its safety, Trump threatened angry citizens with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons.” He declared that ‘many’ Secret Service agents were “just waiting for action,” and “we put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice.”
The Service promptly refuted the president. Its press release read, “The Secret Service respects the right to assemble, and we ask that individuals do so peacefully for the safety of all” though its agents faced serious harm and some were injured. Republicans were split over the responses of their president who snapped at state governors to “dominate” the situation and not “look like a bunch of jerks.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted on May 29 and 30 found that the majority of Americans think that Trump is a racist and should stop “posting messages on Twitter.”
A majority of Americans, over 55 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of the protests, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, including 40 percent who “strongly” disapproved.
Another poll conducted on May 31 and June 1 even said that 54 percent of Americans supported the protests.
Former Republican President George Bush obliquely criticised the White House’s handling of the George Floyd agitation saying, “It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country”—Trump’s Twitter finger echoed a white Miami police chief who had said in 1967, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” the phrase was coined by Eugene “Bull” Connor, a notorious public safety commissioner in Alabama who used police dogs and fire hoses against black demonstrators during the civil rights moment.
A few hours later, the president lamely explained, “Frankly, it means when there’s looting, people get shot and they die.”
Vandals of both races had led coordinated operations to loot and burn commercial establishments under the cover of protest.
But the damage to the White House’s image was done. Trump has accused the Antifa movement—a leaderless network of Left-leaning radical groups who use direct action against Aryan supremacists and fascism—of leading the riots.
The muddle worsened as Twitter exposed an “Antifa” organisation promoting agitation rhetoric as a white nationalist group, Identity Evropa. The FBI said there was no proof of the involvement of Antifa that stands for anti-fascism, which Trump had threatened to designate a terrorist organisation.
Alarmed by the administration’s drift and caught in an endless nightmare of distorted reality, Trump’s team wanted him to televise a national message of unity by appealing for calm. They failed to persuade their boss. The Associated Press reported that it was “scrapped for lack of policy proposals and the president’s own seeming disinterest in delivering a message of unity.” In American cities and towns, flags were raised and set afire, statues were pulled down, out-of-state criminals went on looting sprees—the moral compass of America has lost its magnet.
BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER
Throughout history, irony has bound the sinews of society. From its founding in 1865, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) violently attacked and murdered both white and black Republican leaders who supported Reconstruction-era policies, which mooted political and economic equality for blacks in America. Then KKK, whose primary aim is to restore white supremacy, was paradoxically championed by the Democrats in the South.
Now, time has turned on its pivot—the Republican base is predominantly white, poor and blue collar.
Civilisations are born out of migrations that started in Africa millennia ago. In the US, wealth and strife are parenthesised by the spindrift of slave ships that sailed from Africa to America millennia later—“equal but separate”, according to the landmark 1896 US Supreme Court decision, which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation. American society is not colour-blind. In February, Ahmaud Arbery, a black jogger, was shot by white vigilantes in Georgia. A 26-year-old black woman, Brionna Taylor, was shot at home by three white police officers: her name is now being chanted along with Floyd’s at protest sites.
A couple of weeks later, a woman walking her dog in New York’s Central Park called the cops on a black man who asked her to leash her dog; she said that “an African American man” was “threatening” her.
The video cost her her job and dog. A white man drove a truck into a crowd of Minneapolis protestors last week but has been freed by cops.
Another man shot crossbows into a gathering. In Indianapolis, Chicago and Louisville, shots were fired and black people died.
A black chef in Kentucky popular with cops for his BBQ ribs was killed by police. The chaos has polarised American police: images of an angry New York policeman throwing a demonstrator to the ground and a NYPD police cruiser driving into a crowd have tainted American democracy’s image. Cincinnati cops replaced the American flag at their HQ with the thin-blue-line flag embraced by white nationalists who oppose the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.
The crisis has also thrown up heroes who “make America great again.”
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo hugged protesters and knelt with them in solidarity; he became a national hero of sorts when he told Trump on TV: “If you can’t be constructive, keep your mouth shut.”
New York City police officers took a knee during a rally for Floyd near Times Square. Another police chief led a procession holding a placard that declared “Standing in Solidarity”. Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas had tweeted, “End this race war here in the US, and around the world.
Wherever you live, whatever your circumstances, NO ONE deserves to die, especially at the hands of another because of their skin colour.”
In White America, that’s easier tweeted than done. Of all the police stops recorded in New York City in 2018, blacks and Latinos were 88 percent, while whites were only 10 percent—70 percent of those stopped were found to be completely innocent, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union’s ‘Stop-and-Frisk Data’.
The cultural ignorance of the average American is a contributing cause to white supremacist rage as attacks on Sikhs and gurdwaras show. Celebrated author and Vassar professor Amitava Kumar wrote in the prestigious New Yorker magazine, “I’ve often asked myself lately whether I’ve been right to suspect that people were looking at me differently on the street, at airports, or in elevators.
Whenever a stranger has been kind to me, I have almost wanted to weep in gratitude. Unlike when I first arrived here, distance no longer offers any reprieve from these feelings.
The Internet delivers ugly fragments of report and rumour throughout the day, and with them a sense of nearly constant intimacy with violence.”
South Asians are caught between the colour spectrum in bizarre ways. When Nina Davuluri won the Miss America title in 2014, Americans called her an “Arab,” “terrorist,” and “Al-Qaeda”; other commentators protested that she was too dark-skinned to be Miss India.
INDIANS IN COLOUR CROSSHAIRS
Distrust of people of other colour, brown, black or yellow, in America go back decades. Nearly every Indian in the US has experienced racism, covert or overt, at some point in his life.
A software engineer in Boston doing his master’s experienced racism first hand at a convenience store from a white American who shouted, “@@@ BROWN go back to your country!” He didn’t at first realise that he was the one being called “brown”. House-hunting can be a problem for Indians in suburban America: a professional who moved to St Louis was turned down by a real estate agent who later agreed to lease the same house to his white girlfriend. A bigger irony, says an IT developer who lives in the US, is that Indian American girls on Tinder prefer to date whites which, according to him, is “a bigger problem than whites avoiding Indians.”
Hostility towards Indians date back to 1987, when the notorious “Dotbusters” made their debut on the American racial horizon; the ‘dot’ is derived from the bindi. One of them was quoted saying then, “If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her… They are a weak race physically and mentally.” On May 28, 53-year-old James Lamb was arrested for attacking and severely injuring 70-year-old Meena Puri, an Indian immigrant motel owner in Oregon, to get “rid of people like her” from the US. The homes of Indian Americans have been smeared with dog feces and dirt, a Sikh man washing a car was shot at and a video against Indians saying “the Indian crowd has ravished the Midwest,” uploaded by no less than a computer programmer are markers of racial prejudice. In March 2020, the FBI assessed that “hate crime incidents against Asian Americans likely will surge across the United States, due to the spread of coronavirus.”
But Indian Americans have always put America first. Last month, New Jersey doctors Satyender Dev Khanna and daughter Priya Khanna succumbed to the coronavirus. “They were part of a family of five doctors and I hope that our entire state mourns for them,” Governor Phil Murphy paid tribute to the Khannas. Thousands of Indian origin doctors, health professionals, cops, first responders and other essential service providers are among the 20 million Asian Americans on the frontlines of the war on Covid-19, which has so far claimed over one lakh lives.
Over 40 Indian Americans have died. Covert hostilities have surfaced to scorch America’s beleaguered soul. Indians are caught in the middle. Kumar writes, “An Indian man in the Midwest once told me that, every time an American shakes his hand and says, ‘I love Indian food,’ he wants to respond, ‘I thank you on behalf of Indian food.’ He might just as well thank the American on behalf of—take your pick—spelling bees, lazy Slumdog Millionaire references, yoga and chai lattes, motels, software moguls, Bollywood-style weddings, doctors and taxi drivers, henna, Nobel laureates, comedians, the baffling wisdom of Deepak Chopra, and Mahatma Gandhi.”
WEALTH INVITES SPITE
Statistics show that hate crimes occur in the US the most during employment stress and layoffs. In the Covid-19-devastated country, joblessness is rising to almost the 1930s Great Depression levels: More than 40 million Americans are out of work and one in four workers have filed for unemployment benefits. The Indian community on the other hand is highly skilled and qualified for top-paying jobs. The median Indian household income is $88,000—nearly twice than the average American’s. One of Trump’s first acts after being sworn in was to crack down on the H1B visa programme, which benefits Indian techies in Silicon Valley. Most of the estimated 800,000 immigrants with American work visas waiting for green cards are Indian—they account for three-quarters of all H-1B visas. The Washington Post notes that it will take an Indian national who applied for a green card in 2019 up to 50 years to get one.
Racism has become the lightning rod for American identity. Who is an American? What is the American Dream and who dare live it? History is a quirky record keeper. The Making of Asian America, by filmmaker Erika Lee, tells of American newspaper headlines screaming about ‘Hindoo Invasion’ and ‘Turban Tide’ in the early 1900s. Decades before Jindal and Haley made it to public life, South Asians were attacked by white mobs, ejected from towns and jailed for wooing white women. Indians through the decades had approached various American courts demanding ‘white’ status.
In 1913, a certain Bengali gentleman named Akhay Kumar Mozumdar filed a case in the District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, calling himself “a high-caste Hindu of pure blood”, who claimed that “high caste Hindus always consider themselves members of the Aryan race.” The Court ruled that there is a “line of demarcation between the different castes and classes,” and therefore Mozumdar was ‘White’. The glow wouldn’t last. Another petitioner and former writer, scholar and soldier Sardar Bhagwan Singh Thind, was denied ‘white’ status, and therefore ineligible for the “privilege of citizenship” conferred upon that “class of persons”.
The court ruled that Indian men cannot marry white women or own land and retrospectively denaturalised Indians in America. The judicial ground was that South Asian immigrants were Caucasian, but as in Thind’s case, it did not equate to White. The judge ruled, “When... Martian immigrants reach this part of the earth, and ‘a man from Mars’ applies to be naturalised, he may be recognised as white within the meaning of the act of Congress, and admitted to citizenship; but he may not be Caucasian.” Would the astronauts orbiting the Milky Way’s shining path be able to tell the difference between black and white?
Calendar of Colour Prejudice
Los Angeles, 1992
On April 29, 63 people were killed in riots that broke out after four cops accused of violent excesses and arrest of Rodney King were freed.
Detroit, July 1967
A police raid of an unlicensed bar patronised by blacks ignited the five-day-long ‘12th Street Riot’, in which 43 people died, 2,000 buildings destroyed, and 7,300 people arrested.
Watts, Aug 1965
The Watts riots of Los Angeles occurred after an African-American parolee was stopped by cops. Thirty-four died and over $40 million was lost in damages.
Detroit, June 1943
Shortages in housing and jobs exacerbated by 400,000 new migrants, both black and white from the South, sparked riots killing 34.
Tulsa, May 1921
White mobs destroyed businesses, raped and murdered residents of the prosperous black district of Greenwood, jealous of the success of the wealthiest African American community of the time in the US. Attacks on the ground and bombing from private planes destroyed ‘Black Wall Street’. 6,000 blacks were jailed and 39 were killed: Red Cross put the toll at over 300.
Atlanta, Sept 1906
Armed white mobs attacked African Americans in the Georgia city. According to the Atlanta History Center, black Americans were hanged from lamp posts, shot, beaten or stabbed to death. At least 25 African Americans and two whites were officially reported to be killed. Unofficial estimates put the toll as 100.
New Orleans, July 1866
Around 44 were killed in a violent conflict between white Democrats and mostly black Republicans after a crowd of freed slaves and Republicans in Louisiana protested the newly-legislated Black Codes.
Memphis, May 1866
A shooting between white policemen and black Civil War veterans in Tennesse led white mobs and policemen to rampage through black neighbourhoods attacking, raping, and killing black soldiers and civilians. Forty-eight people lost their lives. It led to the passing of the First Reconstruction Act 1867.
Manhattan, July 1863
The New York City draft riots wiped out Manhattan’s black community after Congress passed a law to draft working-class white men to fight in the American Civil War. The official number of dead is between 119 and 120.
The Klan of White Horror
The Ku Klux Klan is the masked face of hate in America. Its targets are wide: mainly blacks, but also Jews, immigrants, LGBTQ community and even Catholics. Wearing conical hats with two round holes for eyes and shapeless robes, KKK enjoyed a partial resurgence in 2019 but has failed to consolidate due to internecine strife with other members of the Alliance of American Klans, Honourable Sacred Knights and Ron Imperial Klans of America. Formed by anti-black vigilantes first in 1865, it used lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks to intimidate black Americans and anti-white supremacists. Starting in 1867, blacks began to win elections to southern state governments and to the US Congress enraging the Klan.
They mocked White Republicans as “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags”. Klansmen burned black schools and churches. Today, the estimated number of Klansmen is between 5,000 and 8,000, who are split into factions often at war with each other. A Southern Poverty Law Center report has identified 100 active white nationalist and 99 active neo-Nazi groups in the US. They are separated into two categories: National Socialists (or neo-Nazis) and White ethno-nationalists. The head of the National Socialist Party was Adolf Hitler. White ethno-nationalists try to define “what is American” and not “Who is American”.
The Dark Timeline
1619 The first African American slaves arrive in the American colonies. By 1690, every colony has slaves.
1831-1861 Approximately 75,000 slaves escape to the North by the Underground Railroad.
1846 Ex-slave Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) publishes the first anti-slavery newspaper North Star.
1849 Harriet Tubman (c. 1820-1913) escapes from slavery and becomes an instrumental leader of the Underground Railroad.
1850 Congress passes another Fugitive Slave Act, which mandates government to help capture escaped slaves.
1857 The Dred Scot v. Sanford case: Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in the states; slaves are not citizens.
1860 Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) is elected president, angering the southern states.
1863 Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation proclaims that all slaves in rebellious territories are forever free. Civil War begins.
1865 Lincoln is assassinated. Slavery is prohibited.
1961 Anti-segregation movement in Albany successfully disbanded after nearly a year of protests.
1866 Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, conferring citizenship on African Americans and granting them equal rights to whites.
1870 African Americans get the right to vote.
1881 Tennessee passes “Jim Crow” laws barring African Americans from equal access to public facilities.
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case: racial segregation in schools and colleges is ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.
1954 Brown v. Board of Education case strikes down segregation as unconstitutional.
1955 Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old woman, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white male passenger in Montgomery. The next day, December 1, Martin Luther King called for a massively successful citywide boycott against racial segregation on public transport. On November 14, 1956, the US Supreme Court ruled segregated seating as unconstitutional. Parks is known as the ‘mother of the modern day civil rights movement'.
1963 The campaign to end discriminatory economic policies in Birmingham in Alabama by boycotting whites-only businesses invites police attacks by dogs and water hoses, shocking America’s conscience. Such segregation is soon ended.
Martin Luther King Jr delivers the iconic “I Have a Dream”
speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the event which sees an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 participants, seeking jobs and freedom for African Americans. It is credited with helping the Civil Rights Act of 1964 pass.
1964 The Civil Rights Act is signed, prohibiting discrimination of all kind.
1965 Alabama police mercilessly beat up 600 protesters seeking voting rights on US Highway 80. The day is known as Bloody Sunday.
1965 Under the Chicago Freedom Movement, King and his followers march into a white neighbourhood and are injured with projectiles. It inspires the Fair Housing Act, passed by Congress in 1969.
2008 Barack Obama becomes the first African American president of the US.