jennifer-roberts “
Many of America’s systems are rooted in racism. When the 13 colonies became the United States in 1776 and declared their independence from England, racism was already deeply imbedded in the fabric of society because of the enslavement of thousands of African American human beings.
Racism began long before 1776 when Africans were captured and forced to Jamestown, Virginia, starting the heinous institution of legal, chattel slavery in what was become the United States. This detestable American tradition would continue for 246 years. Unlike other forms of enslavement which are also despicable, chattel slavery doomed Africans and African Americans to generational abuse and subjugation that would span for 12 generations. Chattel slavery introduced the concept of race based on a person’s skin color, labeling Europeans as “white” and Africans and later African Americans as “black”. It also wrongfully assigned a superior value to people having white skin and an inferior value to people having brown skin.
To justify slavery, European enslavers erroneously used passages from the Bible and fabricated economic and medical reasons why slavery was not only the Christian thing to do, but the American thing to do.
According to The Southern Argument for Slavery(www.ushistory.org), “Defenders of slavery argued that the institution was divine and that it brought Christianity to the heathen from across the ocean. Slavery was, according to this argument, a good thing for the enslaved. Defenders of slavery argued that the sudden end to the slave economy would have had a profound and killing economic impact in the South where reliance on slave labor was the foundation of the economy. The cotton economy would collapse. The tobacco crop would dry in the fields. Rice would cease being profitable.”
John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice-president of the Unites States, said, “Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.”
Do you see how racism was imbedded into America’s systems? These two references alone illustrate how the enslavement of black people supported political and economic systems so much so that the United States went to war against itself in 1861 largely over the issue of slavery.
Racist practices and laws such as legal enslavement, Jim Crow Laws and systemic racism were entrenched into the United States Constitution and impressed upon the minds of Americans. These ideas are as much a part of American History as George Washington himself; America’s first president who was also an enslaver or Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence who enslaved hundreds of African Americans in addition to fathering African American children by one of the women he enslaved.
In 2020, Americans looked in horror and disbelief at George Floyd being murdered on a Minnesota sidewalk by a police officer. Millions of people around the globe saw the officer’s knee on George Floyd’s neck and the smug and indifferent look on the officer’s face. We watched the life slowly and drain from George Floyd as he stopped breathing. Peaceful protests erupted around the world as people used their voices to demand justice for George Floyd.
For the first time, some people were exposed to the racism and injustice that African Americans have endured for hundreds of years. George Floyd’s public murder proved that this deeply rooted racism is still alive and well.
But how is this so? Some Americans erroneously think that because Americans elected a black president twice that somehow magically disappeared. Others think that because that because they’ve never been called “nigger” or personally discriminated against or that they were admitted to an Ivy League school that racism doesn’t exist. It does. And it continues to exist because racism is programmed into every fiber that makes this country; it’s baked into the structure.
In her book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Isabel Wilkerson speaks eloquently to the unseen structure of America when she says, “
“Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call homes. Caste is at the infrastructure of our divisions. Its is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light.”
I don’t know if we will ever eliminate racism but American can certainly repent of the corporate sin of slavery, atone for this sin, and do the work of reteaching our history and dismantling the systems that uphold racism and give it a place to thrive.
According to www.britannica.com, a root is “that part of a vascular plant normally underground. Its primary functions are anchorage of the plant, absorption of water and dissolved minerals and conduction of these to the stem and storage of reserve foods.” In other words, the plants roots are where it takes in what it needs to grow, and the roots run deep and are not seen.
America’s racist roots run deep and are often invisible, but the fruit is obvious. Just like you can look at apples growing from an apple tree or an orange growing from a orange tree, if you look closely, you can see racism growing from a racist tree. When we choose to closely inspect the fruit we can see that some of the fruit is rotten. The stench of rotting fruit fills American school systems, criminal justice systems and employment systems and housing systems just to name a few. The fruit is the result of what is happening at the root, the unseen part of the tree.
If we are to make lasting progress in eradicating racism, we need to chop the trees down and plant new ones. This takes honesty, humility, work and commitment to change. We need to plant new seeds of racial equality, equity and accountability. We need to plant new trees.
As I educate myself about American History and teach young people accurate American History, I am hopeful that the future can be better. Many young people get it. They understand that enslaving another person is wrong and they understand that a person’s skin color does not and should not determine their value. I pray that these young people will use their voices and eventually their votes to bring about change and that more people will be about the work of uprooting old trees and planting new seeds of freedom for all.
