"America is God's crucible, a great melting pot..."
For a long period of history, the concept of racial "melting pot" has made many Americans proud: immigrants from all corners of the world with different cultures and beliefs have "melted" into one in the United States, and the greatness of the United States lies in its "convergence of multiple civilizations and cultures", and its cohesion has also been enhanced by "the continuous improvement of cultural diversity." ”
However, is this really the case?
In fact, since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the United States, which is known as the "Sea of Hundred Rivers", has been extremely unequal and lack of tolerance among various ethnic groups in the country. Racism is a comprehensive, systematic, and persistent presence in the United States, and now as the epidemic worsens, hatred and racial discrimination have become "ugly poisons that plague American society." The claim that the United States is a "race melting pot" in which "all men are created equal" is an outright "true lie," and even americans themselves do not believe it when they say it now!
Hate discrimination is difficult to eliminate in a hundred years African Americans are becoming more and more "unable to breathe"!
"I've seen black people shot, black bodies piled up in the streets, smoke and flames. I saw black shops burned down. ”
In May, 107-year-old Viola Fletcher testified before the U.S. Congress about the genocide she witnessed against blacks.
A woman in New York, United States, a woman attending a commemoration of the centenary of the Tulsa Genocide on May 31 has the word "Tulsa" adorned her forehead. Xinhua News Agency (Photo by Guo Ke)
From May 31 to June 1, 1921, thousands of white thugs ransacked dozens of African-American businesses and burned more than 1,200 African-American homes in Tulsa, using gunfire and arson, killing about 300 blacks and displacing about 10,000 black residents.
The massacre itself was tragic enough, but for a long time, this tragedy has been ignored and forgotten, and the US government, the media, social groups, etc. have chosen to remain silent, and even deliberately cover up the truth of the facts and deliberately erase this historical memory. Famous actor Tom Hanks said, "I have never read a page of the school's history book about this history. ”
A hundred years have passed, the genocide has dissipated, the blood has dried up, but discrimination still exists. From Freud, a black civilian brutally "kneeling" by a white policeman, to Nazario, a black officer who is still beaten for no reason in uniform, the repeated tragedies remind people time and again that slavery and segregation on the surface of the United States today are a thing of the past, but in fact racial discrimination is still widespread and increasingly "breathless", and the dream of racial equality is still out of reach.
On May 31, 2020, a demonstrator was arrested by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, UNITED States. Xinhua News Agency (Photo by Angus Alexander)
In the economic sphere, ethnic minorities, including African Americans, are at an all-round disadvantage in terms of employment, wage income, and economic status. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the unemployment rate for African Americans is typically about twice that of whites, and the median weekly wage for African-American full-time jobs is on average nearly 30 percent lower than that of whites.
In the judicial field, racial prejudice is also "visible to the naked eye". An analysis of cases from 1989 to October 2016 by the National Center for Immunity Records concluded that African Americans were more likely than whites to be wrongly convicted of murder, sexual assault, illegal drug activities, and other crimes. The Los Angeles Times notes that killing African Americans is less likely to face the death penalty than killing whites. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism believes that for African Americans, the U.S. legal system is no longer able to address racial injustice and discrimination.
What's more, sometimes African Americans have a hard time guaranteeing even their basic right to subsistence. Corbett, an African-American immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, said hospitals would be the first to abandon intubation treatment for African Americans in the absence of ventilators. The Washington Post commented that the U.S. response to the pandemic became "a state-sanctioned massacre" that deliberately sacrificed the elderly, workers, African-American and Hispanic populations.
Some commentators believe that the seeds of the tragic situation of black americans were planted long ago when their ancestors were "transported" to North America as goods, because they were not treated equally when they were "born", "For African Americans, America has never been great!" ”
Frequent hate crimes Asians have gone from "model citizens" to "scapegoats"!
Racial discrimination is not only directed at African-Americans who have a more difficult life, but also at Asian Americans who are "model citizens" who are self-contained.
Historically, from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to the surveillance of Communities in Southeast Asia after 9/11... Asian Americans have been subjected to racist attacks and all sorts of tangible discrimination.
On March 21, a demonstrator attended a rally in the San Francisco Bay Area city of San Jose, California, to protest discriminatory practices and hate crimes against Asians. (Xinhua News Agency, photo by Dong Xudong)
In the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Asian Americans were used as scapegoats and became victims of a new round of racist violence. Discrimination, harassment and violence against Asians are on the rise, and U.S. President Joe Biden admitted in March that for many Asian-Americans, it was a "year of living in fear" that even took to the streets.
On March 16, a shooting in The U.S. city of Atlanta killed eight people, including six Asian-American women, but this was by no means an isolated case. The Washington Post website reported that there were about 3,800 recorded hate attacks against Asians in the United States in 2020, ranging from street slander and knife stabbing to deliberate vandalism of Asian-American shops. An Asian-American lawmaker called out, "The Asian community is bleeding, we have been in pain, we have been shouting for help." ”
Some experts believe that the surge in "Asian-vendetta" incidents is rooted in the deep-rooted racial discrimination and xenophobia against Asians in American history, long-formed stereotypes and groundless conspiracy theories. Coupled with the complexity and diversity of Asian Americans, there are certain differences in political tendencies, which leads to their lack of voice in the political and social life of the United States, although their political influence has gradually become apparent in recent years, they will also be considered "indifferent" or "losers" in the political field, and when they encounter injustice and aggression, Asian Americans are considered to be "silent and tolerant", which also condones the soaring "hate crimes" against Asians to a certain extent.
Striving for fairness but creating new injustices "reverse racial discrimination" has aroused controversy
What is even more ironic than the discrimination against ethnic minorities is that the relevant protection policies have produced the negative effect of "reverse racial discrimination": defending rights in the name of "racial equality" has led to "racial discrimination", which has caused dissatisfaction among relevant ethnic groups and caused a lot of controversy in American society.
This kind of "reverse racial discrimination" is particularly evident in the field of higher education. According to reports, many outstanding Asian-American students have lost to very average white and minority competitors when applying to prestigious American universities. Some analysts pointed out that it is because the "affirmative action" formulated by the US Congress has taken care of minorities in college admissions and other aspects in order to eliminate the social inequality caused by previous racial discrimination, but some schools have imposed the proportion of students of certain ethnic groups, causing the controversy of "reverse racial discrimination".
According to the analysis, when the famous schools believe that as Asian students perform better and better, the proportion of Asians in the minorities recruited by the school will become larger and larger, so they cancel the protection granted by the affirmative action policy to Asians, and use the affirmative action policy as a pretext to suppress Asians. The result of this "reverse discrimination" is that "a white person's chances of being admitted are often higher than those of asians of nearly exactly the same conditions." ”
There have been comments that Asians are being discriminated against by U.S. colleges and universities in the name of fairness and equality. "It's ridiculous that a policy supposed to protect Asians has turned into a cover for discrimination against them."
"Disease in the marrow" There is a long way to go to eradicate the "cancer of racism."
"I dream of a day when my four children will live in a country where their qualities are judged not by the color of their skin, but by their character." It was a dream of Martin Luther King Jr.
More than 50 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a famous speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, which became a classic cry of anti-racial discrimination and equal rights in the United States. However, more than 50 years after his death, this "American Dream" is still out of reach, and all you hear is the sad cry of "I can't breathe"!
On April 4, 2018, in Memphis, Tennessee, the public took part in a march to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Source: Visual China)
U.S. Vice President Harris said: "We must remain committed to combating racism and discrimination. "Regrettably, the United States has consistently had little success in tackling racism.
The reasons why the racial problem has become an incorruptible chronic disease in the body of American society are undoubtedly manifold.
From a historical point of view, racism runs through The history of the United States and is rooted in the genes of the United States, which can be called the "original sin" of American history, and it is very difficult to "remove the root of the disease".
As early as the colonial period, after the Anglo-Saxon white Protestants gained political and social dominance, they began to systematically pursue policies based on white supremacy in the land of the United States today. In the nearly one hundred years after the founding of the People's Republic of China, through various disgraceful means, the US government has taken about 6 million square kilometers of land from the indigenous people, accounting for about 2/3 of the us land area.
And the infamous slavery that lasted for more than 200 years in the United States, which is a "beacon of human rights," is even more poignant irony. Although the US government has successively repealed the relevant "evil laws", the trauma has been irreparable, and the ubiquitous racial hatred and deep-rooted racist culture have been formed, and have become the main historical roots of racial discrimination and conflict in the United States today. Former U.S. President Barack Obama has said, "Discrimination ... It's still part of our dna. Society cannot erase everything that has existed for two or three hundred years overnight. ”
On a practical level, racism has been internalized as an integral part of the social structure of the United States, and the national institutions and social system of the United States have failed to eliminate racial discrimination, and the internal support of the social system and the inaction of the state institutions have led to all-round discrimination against racial minorities.
In the United States today, all ethnic minorities in the country face different degrees of racial discrimination, and discrimination, oppression, and persecution are reflected in all aspects of political, economic, cultural, and social life.
Some experts pointed out that since the founding of the Country, the political system in the United States has been a racial hierarchy that serves the middle and upper classes of white people, and it has not changed until now. The eradication of the scourge of racism requires its eradication through profound social reforms. Otherwise it will be difficult to get rid of.
In addition, in recent years, for personal political purposes, some politicians have not only no intention of bridging the racial divide, but also regard identity politics and immigration policies as tools for political wrestling, which has played a very bad role in worsening race relations.
Former US President Trump is a typical representative. In 2018, when discussing immigration reform with members of Congress, the then US president questioned why the United States was accepting immigrants from pit countries such as Haiti and African countries, causing an uproar in international public opinion. In July 2019, Trump tweeted a series of attacks on four ethnic minority Democratic congresswomen who were critical of him, saying they should return to their "shattered, depraved, and crime-ridden" ancestral homelands.
After the Floyd incident, in the face of the protesters, Trump tweeted to paraphrase a notorious racist in the 1960s, threatening to "shoot whenever there is looting", so that the Twitter company wrote a warning next to the tweet to "glorify violence".
Some analysts believe that Trump plays the race card in order to emotionally mobilize supporters to maintain and increase the support rate of the basic plate, but some politicians pointed out that this approach "may be rewarded in the short term, but in the long run, it is destroying the United States and tearing apart American society." ”
For a long time, US politicians have called themselves "human rights defenders", but the domestic racial problem has accumulated a lot, which undoubtedly exposes its institutional structural defects, the hypocritical nature of "American-style human rights" is undoubtedly highlighted, and the "race melting pot" of equality for all is a great irony!
Planner: Liu Gawen
Producer: Xu Qian
Coordinator: Bi Qiulan Liu Xiaojun
Author: Xu Haizhi
Editors: Hou Qiang, Liu Zhongling
Produced by Xinhua Network Overseas Communication Center
Produced by Xinhua News Agency's International Communication Integration Platform
Source: Xinhua Net