I applaud your efforts and I find myself asking some key questions that I have only been just asking myself, and I don’t know the answer to. I certainly don’t dispute the racism that is rampant and continually destructive in American history, that started in 1776. (Before that it was the British and Spanish who were responsible for the slavery, with the first slave arriving in 1528 in Florida—not splitting hairs just winding the origins of racism). But the part that leaves me questioning is what thinkers like yourself (and even me, people interested in this type of continual overt repression based on classification of others in disparate “flesh groups” - I just made that up), is what to make of the some other genocides. In particular the Sudanese and Rwandan genocides. In 1994 the dominant ethnic group in Rwanda (formerly Rhodesia) , the Hutus, slaughtered about 1.15 million Hutus, the minority ethnic group. Starting in 2003, the minority group in Sudan, the Darfuris, were killed by a separate ethnic group, the Muslim black Khartoum government, ending about half a million lives of relatively unarmed farmers.
These two genocides were spurred on by perceived ethnic differences. So isn’t racism really based on perceived differences by a dominant group led by a small group of leaders who use violence to maintain or gain power by using group hatred against another ethnic group, typically a minority one? Yes, in the US, the racism is obvious to some of us Americans (the ones at least who recognize history books as being inclusive of suffering and facts, having common sense, honoring the integrity of great leaders like MLKJ, Fredrick Douglass, and even white Quaker abolitionists in the late 1600’s).
But elsewhere it may not be so obvious. In Germany, as we see from the recent Whoopi controversy, the Germans and Jews both looked white to outsiders. In France the racial animus is the whites towards the northern Muslim Africans rather than the blacks. In China, the Uighurs are repressed right now by the Han Chinese (who took over and assimilated other ethnic groups like the Cantonese and Tibetans). I don’t know. This is just an extended question about racism, since this list of ethnic repression of one group over one or more based on perceptions is not exhausted. We have our own unique history, and black repression has blanketed our history since the first day the country was founded on July 4th to today, but not so unique when considering ethnic violence differences and denigration of one ethnicity—or race—over another. Wasn’t it the Igbo ethnic group that sold blacks from other ethnic groups as slaves to the visiting white ethnic groups during the slave trade and kept slaves themselves?
Thanks for contributing and for considering..