Racism in America is law. Law makes social structures. Since white men have had political power, they passed the laws. The laws segregated humans by the perceived race of the white men who made the laws, and by the white men who were empowered by the laws.
For example, the law stating that ministers could not marry a black human to a white human was put into the Virginia book of Laws in 1705. The minister was empowered to marry but restricted on the types of people he could marry, forcing him to judge the people’s race he was joining in holy matrimony. Thus, this meant after 1705 the social structure seen for marriage in that state meant black-looking negroes who were freemen or enslaved, both of which existed, could not marry a white woman or white man.
This law spread through other Slave States as a model for law. It was nullified after the end of the Civil War in 1868 but started again after 1870 in Mississippi and then the 14 other states. It was not overthrown until 1967 in SCOTUS loving ruling. There were laws that restricted negroes in the same way in the other major realms of societal (or political) life: restrictions on education and literacy; restrictions on labor contracts; restrictions on free movement; restrictions on right to assemble and speech.
What most people (not just Americans) do NOT seem to comprehend is that these laws were passed by white men starting after Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 and replicated differently across the 15 slave states, creating structural restrictions on social movements and economic mobility in the British American colonies and then in the United States. In addition, the Negro law passed in 1740 in South Carolina and spread as a template to other slave states, EMPOWERED white men to whip or kill “rebellious” looking slaves. That law created the right to beat or kill an enslaved human and not be punished. That ended in 1865.
Laws conditional society and interactions in societies. They are not “feelings” people have of hatred or niceness. Some laws like the marriage laws were made in California and Illinois among other states banning, by law and fear of penalty to the minister who disobeyed the marriage restriction law that co trolled his actions, the ability to join people in matrimony. This was legalized inequality.
Most of the restrictive laws were reenacted after 1870 and lasted and limited black Americans by the white judgement of skin color until 1967. That is not a feeling. Although other laws were passed that restricted black Americans nationally, like the 1934 FHA housing act that stop black Americans from getting housing mortgages or the Wagner Act they prevent black unions in the South from forming but allowed white unions in the North and West, these primary set of restrictive laws had skin color perception built in and “lowered” black Americans socially and economically based on principled legal conditions of inequality. Not equality.
No. The answer in America is a hard and unequivocal No. Black Americans can NOT be racist, no matter how hard they try. Sorry. Their anger is from being repressed by the law, not from white anger that is used to enact the laws. Racism is not structured by feelings. White Americans can like black Americans and that is very helpful to openly say so. White Americans can join black Americans in protesting for equal enactment of civil inalienable rights and voting with black Americans, and in writing petitions and voicing unqualified.
This essay I am responding to actually does that and is actually a plus, as it supports that effort that should be taken by all, and so I support it even though I sound like I might be condemning it somehow. I am not. The more voices raised the better. I am merely making a distinction between feelings and social structures enacted by laws lasting for centuries, still drastically effecting the social order today. These are NOT feelings.
The vast injustices of oppression many black Americans felt in the workplace, at the ballot box, on the streets, in home choices, in choices of love were bot from people yelling the “n-word.” That word is hurtful. But the laws that allowed those words to pour out white men in power in those fifteen states (though some laws elsewhere) structured and created the true inequality and pain.
I don’t know what bigotry is. I haven’t thought of it. Maybe is an enactment or singular manifestation of the law blurted out in words and deeds against black Americans. And I don’t know in other countries how it works, though I have seen the French France treat the Algerians and Moroccans the way America treats black Americans in the early 1990s. But I know for sure in American “black racism” is ludicrous, absurd, and an impossibility. Black Americans can certainly hate white Americans, but even the laws DA Willis is using were made by whites.
White Americans can not face their racism as it is legal and allowed deep systemic inequality to exist until 1970 in those states, and in others. The “greatness” “we” achieved was made by the economic, educational, and social repression on the majority of black Americans until 1970. Unity has never been possible when deep racists divisions by laws followed everyday made it impossible.
