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OpEdNews Op Eds    H5'ed 5/25/21

Can America Rise Above Racism & Embrace a Higher Vision of a Common Humanity?

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But they're still relatively small countries. Today the world's greatest superpower, America, is on the verge of living out the ideal that our common humanity is more important that our ethnic, religious, racial or sectarian differences. Of fulfilling the second promise of the Declaration of Independence: that "all men are created equal."

Nonetheless, it's still an effort that's going to require Americans of good will to pitch in to make work. And it has powerful opponents, from MAGA to dozens of countries that are actively defending and promoting racism in America and in cyberspace.

In the beginning, most all countries were ethnostates -- countries made up of a single ethnicity. Every nation was what it was because of the genetics of the people who made it up. Nations had evolved out of cities, which had evolved out of racially homogeneous tribes.

Swedes looked like Swedes, Persians looked like Persians and when people did occasionally travel, or armies invaded other lands, you could identify who was who simply by looking at them. Languages and subtleties of appearance were part of the equation as well: Swedes and Italians were identifiably different, and the British, Germans and the French spoke different languages.

The United States was established as a white British-ancestry ethnostate, although our founding documents declared otherwise.

At a time when about half the 13 American colonies held Africans in brutal slavery and all were actively engaged in the largest genocide in history, slaughtering Native Americans, idealists among the Founders and Framers included language in our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, that explicitly proclaimed this country was formed to protect the rights of "all."

It was also the first national founding document in the history of the world to assert that the purpose of government was to make sure that "all [people]" had equal access to "the pursuit of happiness."

While that's what we said, it wasn't what we did for the first two centuries.

The naturalization act of 1790 only allowed "white people" who had lived in this country two years to qualify for citizenship. In 1924 we began to allow immigration of non-whites as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act (which also created the Border Patrol), but at a rate that couldn't exceed 2% of their ethnic population in this country as of the 1890 census.

It wasn't until 1965, with a heavy push from Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, that Congress officially changed the law to make our immigration policy colorblind. Finally, the United States could claim to seriously and legally begin to live up to the ideal that all are "created equal" by explicitly rejecting racism in our nation.

That law, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, is one that many Republicans and virtually the entire white supremacist movement in this country assert must be reversed, because it's allowed people of color into America as immigrants.

The GOP/rightwing-media/racist argument is that domination by a single race or ethnicity is the "normal" state of humankind, and if white people are "replaced" by Blacks or Hispanics, that new majority will turn the tables and oppress and subjugate the newly-marginalized whites.

It's just a modern retelling of how racism has dominated nations worldwide over the previous few centuries. Racist domination has a lot of history on its side -- racial equality is an ongoing struggle for nations around the world, but in 1776 the idea that a kingdom was the only viable form of government also was "normal" and democracy was a struggle.

Nonetheless, we set it as a goal and we've been moving in that direction, slowly and painfully, with every generation since the Founding of the republic.

It's been a long and torturous road, but, with a lot of help from legislation passed by President Johnson and now elevated again by the Democratic Party, America stands on the verge of becoming one of the first nations in the history of the world to not only proclaim, but actually live out, the idea that we are intentionally bound together by our common humanity, rather than a common immediate ancestry.

The pushback against this has been intense and violent, particularly since the Obama presidency, with the rise of multiple reactive white supremacist groups and the acknowledgment by the FBI that armed white supremacist groups now represent the greatest terror threat to America and Americans.

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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