Stop Acting Surprised… This Is America!
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By Jason J.G. Gamble
This past weekend marked the one year anniversary of the tiki torch riot in Charlottesville. It seems that every news channel and publication is asking the question, “Is this what America has become?” In actuality they should be talking about what America has always been. The climate that allows white supremacists to march in Washington D.C. has always existed. Most Americans that are alive today are lucky enough to have been born inside this 50 year social experiment called integration. It seems like most Americans like to look back at America’s past and only see things through a clouded lens.
Racism is as American as apple pie and to ignore it is to ignore the humanity of people of color. Most Americans do not realize that the first Hollywood blockbuster film was called, “Birth of a Nation.” It was a propaganda film directed by a known racist and student of eugenics D.W. Griffith. The film tells the story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the Birth of the KKK. This 1915 film featured two white families as they traveled through the antebellum period. This 3 hour film depicted Black people as “subhuman.” It highlighted a white man in black face attempting to rape a white woman. The white woman jumps off a cliff to her death rather than to be raped.
This helped to propagate the false narrative that the KKK was created as heroes to save American society from the black men that would rape their women now that they were out of chains but still in the bondage of oppressive laws and the prison system. This film is regarded by many as the most racist film in history. What does it say about America that the most racist film in history was also this nation’s first blockbuster?
What does it say about the fact that President Woodrow Wilson also had a private screening of “Birth of a Nation” at the White House. Wilson was known for his racism. In a 1902 book about American history, Wilson exposed his bigotry on the page in a passage about immigrants. He described “men of the lowest class” from Italy and “of the meaner sort” from Hungary and Poland, as “men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence; and they came in the numbers … sordid and hapless elements of their population, the men whose standards of life and work are such as American workmen had never reamed of hitherto.”
These words came back to haunt Wilson. He apologized and praised immigrants to the leaders of Polish, Hungarian, and Italian organizations. He even rewrote a new edition of the book, according to Chace’s account of the 1912 election. But this reversal didn’t persuade Wilson to push to remove the ban on blacks at Princeton. The irony is Polish, Hungarians, Italians and Jewish people are often considered white in present day but for most of American history they were marginalized minorities not considered white. Now many treat Mexicans the same way their family was treated when they immigrated to America. In Woodrow Wilson’s biography, Berg suggests that Wilson suffered from “genteel racism,” a prejudice that couldn’t stomach the idea of racial equality or inappropriate behavior in the pursuit of white supremacy.
Cooper, in his biography, puts it this way: “Violence, lynching and virulent racism … grieved him.” But when it came to lynching, he “deplored the passion, disorder, and sullied international image of white Americans rather than injury, horror and death of black Americans.” As for relations between the races, he was appalled that the French Army allowed blacks to serve next to whites, and he worried about Communism creeping into the US among black veterans returning from World War I.
Wilson did occasionally stand up for blacks, at least temporarily, such as when he appointed a black man to serve in a mid-level Treasury Department position that had traditionally been held by African-Americans. This position was used as a means to usurp the limited black wealth in America. Wilson appointed a black man but as most of our community knows, “all skin folk ain’t kin folk.
Wilson eventually folded under pressure from senators who refused to support allowing a black man to be in charge of white women. He also allowed Jim Crow Laws to be put into place in Washington D.C. and allowed the secretary of the treasury and the postmaster general to segregate their departments. This segregation existed in some areas of D.C. until the late 60’s and early 70’s. “For all his talk of evenhandedness,” Berg writes, “Wilson did not consider the races fundamentally equal, and he had no intention of equalizing them under the law.”
Woodrow Wilson was not the only overtly racist President in history. There are similar facts about Andrew Johnson, Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, James Polk, Dwight Eisenhower, Calvin Coolidge, Lyndon B. Johnson, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. When you research it seems that racist Presidents are actually the norm when America wants us to believe it is the exception to the norm. This nation has had many Presidents that used racist insults and propaganda. Bottomline, for any one that thinks the racism and KKK marches are not America I say to you… DO YOUR RESEARCH! Education is the key to end racism. We could end racism in a generation and all we have to do is tell the whole story right and be honest.
Remember we are all in this struggle together. 1struggle, 1 community, 1LUV
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