A Columbus Experience

I suppose you are wondering about the title I’ve chosen for this article because we know for sure Columbus did not discover anything. Let alone America! With that said, it is the perfect metaphor for what so many uppity Negroes are witnessing today; meaning the days long past have returned revealing that it never left with respect to injustice and overt racism in America. At a time when the people who live in the wealthiest and the mightiest nation on this little rock called earth; its many citizens of color continue to endure an apartheid like system.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find phrases like “keep America American” kind of creepy. I mean creepy in the sense that the president has been called everything but the N word. Well, not openly yet! But you can bet he is surely being called that often by many who have a problem with his color. I am old enough to remember the likes of David Duke, George Wallace, Bull Connor’s and others who viewed segregation and voter suppression as the American way. They operated under and use Jim Crow as a tool to maintain their privileged like many of the good old racist – Jim Crow, as it was known then – is dead.

More troubling, however, is the new Jim Crow, which is the grownup more sinister version we see today. They use the same dog whistles – something that only a dog hears – as coded language that is understood by those who long for this fantasy of what they say America was like in a time of legally sectioned racism. Frankly, it was not all that wonderful for African Americans or the poor in this time they want to return to when open racism was the law of the land.

There are many blacks who have believed or felt that they have been accepted like the fools you see on Fixed News who “step and fetch” for the right are little more the what Malcolm X called “House Negroes”. What is the difference in the killing of unarmed child and black people then a lynching? Yet, we saw many who look like use defend the murders and a law that indiscriminately search innocent citizens simply because of their complexion.

Here is another example, the last guy hoping to be the next president used a phrase: “We have on one side a president who wants to transform America into a European-style nation and you have on other hand someone like myself that wants to turn around America and keep America American….” In that context, it sounds innocent – right. Well in the 1920s that phrase “keep America American” was use as a slogan by KKK. The Washington Post reported that the "keep America American" line was used even before the 1920s by members of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic group called 'Know Nothing Party" in the 1850s.

It is also worth noting that the Tea Party’s continued preoccupation with the code word “take back our country” is ominous because we hear what they are not saying. Coupled with “Stand Your Ground” and the call for “States Rights” clearly indicate a movement that wants to return the Jim Crow era and what they call the American way of life.

So wake up people, we are about to discover America, the real America, which I call a Columbus Experience. The shameful ghost’s of the past is ever present. And that’s my Thought Provoking Perspective…

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