Being Honest About american Racism Past and Present

IT IS PERFECTLY OBVIOUS to anyone conversant with American history and willing to be honest about today's American culture that the United States always has been, but remains, a surpassingly racist nation, arguably the most racist nation in history. Racism is neither inherent in human thought nor ancient in origins. There are no references to it in any work of literature or written document before the year fourteen fifty, when it appeared a biography of Prince Henry the Navigator, a fact which many might find surprising. It was invented in the fifteenth century as justification for the Portuguese conquest of Africa, and in the sixteenth century European North and south America refined, elevated, and institutionalized skin pigmentation discrimination, where it remains today. The federal government, under intense, sustained pressure from liberal interests, has only within the past half century begun trying to force racial equality down the American throat. President LBJ alienated his entire southern constituency by forcing the Civil rights Act through congress, over the strenuous objections of conservatives in both parties. The considerable yet obviously insufficient progress we have made is entirely the product of legislation, prodding by meddling liberals, and penalties for non compliance. At no point during the late twentieth century has there existed a majority of Americans willing to take the necessary steps to eradicate the scourge of race based hatred. And yet, the very promulgators of racist ideology incessantly claim that, since slavery and Jim Crow are no more, neither is racism. They are deceiving nobody, including themselves. America's founding "fathers" were all racist, and so is our current president, who was indicted by the federal government in 1974 for housing discrimination, refusing to rent to African-Americans his father's properties. They settled out of court. The recent manifestations of Trump's racist attitudes are well documented. The United States will never be free of the racist curse as long as there exists a conservative white plurality which believes that social engineering is unacceptable, because without social engineering, we have no hope of attaining true equality.