USA the most racist nation on the Water Planet (Earth)

April 29, 2011 / Posted in  Adolf Hitler, Bible, Black Americans, Church history, Education, Evangelical Christianity, GOP, Iowa, Martin Luther, Nazis, Robert Vander Plaats, Tea Baggers

Lynching of Larua Nelson (Okemah OK) May 25, 1911, after she tried to rescue her son from the brutality of the sheriff and ended it by helping her son kill the sheriff.

Racism has been the backbone of USA history long before there was a USA. The colonies were racist from the beginning, viewing anyone who was not white or Protestant as being unfit for heaven or equal treatment. Black people, especially in Oklahoma were primary suspects when ever a crime was committed; it was common and standard practice throughout Oklahoma in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to seek out a Black person who could have been anywhere near the scene of the crime, and arrest the individual “for questioning” even if the Black suspect was with family, in a church, or visiting with friends. In Oklahoma, Black people were considered to be guilty before any trial and it was the obligation of the accused to prove his or her own innocence, as court appointed defending lawyers were lackluster at best (as became a subject for the books by John Grishom).  Once accused by a Oklahoma sheriff, the Black person has two options: go peacefully and face either judicial murder or to be lynched by a gang of white Oklahomans who would be allowed to enter the jail where the Black was being held and remove the accused while the sheriff went to lunch, or to strike back and either kill or disable the sheriff and flee. 105 Blacks were lynched in 1901, and 85 om 1902, and so forth (see: http://themidnightdj.tripod.com/1900-1940.htm; Oklahoma refused to let the story of Black suffering appear in its textbooks until recently: http://www.globalafrica.com/BlkHlcst.htm. Little has changed since 1900: http://www.helium.com/items/683100-comparison-of-racism-today-to-racism-of-the-early-1900s).

Lynching of Jasper Landry (William Stark) and his wife Mattie Edwards 1919.

Legally sanctioned racism imposed a heavy burden on Native Americans (who were forced to live on reservations), African-Americans (who were not made free until after the American Civil War–and then only by a constitutional amendment–but in fact remained enslaved to low wages, separate drinking fountains, schools, and so forth), Asian Americans (who were marched into concentration camps (euphemistically called “internment camps” that are particularly associated with World War II, but also occurred during World War I. Most significant was the Japanese American internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII. There was also internment of almost 11,000 German Americans in German American internment during WWII, see: Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), p. 14; and some Italian American internment camps, see: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/50/21.html; cp. Riley, Karen Lea (2002). Schools Behind Barbed Wire : the Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield) especially during World War II), and Mexican Americans and Arab Americans (the former were reserved for agricultural work with Arabs being in the colonies and early days of the Republic allowed to manage small businesses; In a 2009 survey, 52% agreed there is “a lot of discrimination” against Hispanics; 49% agreed when asked the same question about Blacks; 58% when asked about Muslims. Pew Center for People and the Press, “Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination,” September 9, 2009) were the most oppressed by legally sanctioned racism, and all groups were for various periods of time were enslaved, raped, and murdered by white people who were never charged with the crime nor punished.

Eastern and Southern European, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christians were second class citizens by law, and American Jews, Irish Americans, suffered xenophobic exclusion and other forms of racism in American society.  Seminaries that catered to Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, openly preached that sin could be seen in the color of a man’s skin: the blacker the man, the greater the sin. The text used by the seminaries to justify discrimination was the biblical account of the sin of Ham, son of Noah (Genesis 9:18-10:32 with special reference to 9:20-27; Daly, John Patrick When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War (Religion in the South The University Press of Kentucky (31 Oct 2004), p. 37; and, Sylvester A. Johnson (2004). The myth of Ham in nineteenth-century American Christianity: race, heathens, and the people of God. New York: Macmillan. p. 37). At the same time white European Protestant Americans were privileged by law in matters of literacy, immigration, voting rights, citizenship, land acquisition, and criminal procedure over periods of time extending from the 17th century to the 1960s when it took the courage of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson to bring about equality.

Women and children celebrating a midnight lynching

Black people, who were considered property by law and under the original Constitution of the USA, had no rights. Black men, particularly, were not allowed to even go out on the street without “identity papers” that were used against them as a form of harassment, intimidation, and discrimination throughout the years of the American empire. This did not change until the 15th Amendment at enfranchised Black males over the age of 25.

A young girl proudly wears her KKK robes to attend a cross burning

Children were the special targets for KKK indoctrination. From infancy on, the children of KKK members dressed their children in KKK robes, took them to cross-burnings, taught them a rigid Old Testament theology of the sin of Ham (who saw his father naked, for which not he but his son Canaan was “cursed” and his skin turned black as a sign of his father’s sin), and were taught to hate all non-Protestants and those whose skin pigmentation was not white. They were and continue to be supporters of Nazi ideology, have become a new hate group known as Sovereign Citizen, and are adamant supporters of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Annette Sweeney, James Inhofe, and others on the far right.  The KKK now has a firm foothold in all midwestern states, with the KKK flourishing in Iowa cities Cedar Falls, Waterloo, Cedar Rapids, Boone, Des Moines, Alden, Marshalltown and others where there are growing groups of minorities. The Southern Poverty Law Center has a detailed map (http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/hate-map#s) outlining the spread of the Nazi movement.  The movement has taken over many fundamentalist churches and sects and has led to the formation of such groups as Focus on the Family, The Family Leader, and The Family of C Street.

John Heith lynched in Arizona in 1884

White people had no qualms lynching any black person (although more males than females were hung to the gleeful squeals of white “Christian” women and the enthusiastic applause of evangelical Christian  men while little white “Christian” children made hanging ropes and invented the grotesque game of “hangman’s bluff” in a way to learn language). IN the United States, the lynching of Blacks (male, female, old, young, children as young as four years of age) was considered a “photographic sport” and in such backward states as Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, parties were held to “watch the niggers kick.” Lynching, in fact, in such outlandish areas as rural western Texas were excused even if the lynching

Will James lynched in a circus atmosphere in Cairo, IL on November 11, 1909.

dragged Blacks behind “cowboy trucks” until the skin was removed by the rocks and dirt that made up the roadways from bar to bar. In 1871, at least 18 Chinese-Americans were killed by the mob rampaging through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles, after a white businessman was inadvertently caught in the crossfire of a tong battle. Between 1848 and 1860, at least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California alone. (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_2_37/ai_111897839/pg_9/) One particularly infamous lynching occurred on July 5, 1851, when a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia was lynched by a mob in Downieville, California. She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home Jews and Orientals were not treated with the same degree of severity, but were equally assaulted for not being “White and Christian” that became the most celebrated hate organization in this evil empire’s history: The Khristian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan who daily sought to lynch those of Italian descent as being equal to any Black “scum”.

Evangelical Christian rioters breaking into New Orleans parish prison 1891

The New Orleans lynching of eleven Italian immigrants was precipitated by this open hatred in 1891 New Orleans.  It was the largest mass lynching in the history of the USA. (See: Milestones of the Italian American Experience, National Italian Foundation; cp. “An Extreme Prejudice: Anti-Italian Sentiment and Violence in Louisiana, 1855-1924,” by Alan G. Gauthreaux, History4All, Inc.) The crime of the Italian immigrants was that they were Roman Catholic and foreign-born.

Adolf Hitler leaving church after praying with Lutherans and Catholics

When Hitler rose from obscurity to become the leader of the Third Reich, racists throughout the USA applauded his election and flew the Nazi flag beside the USA, while lynching black women, men and children in celebration.

Adolf Hitler and Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W. Bush)

Most commented on the greatness of Hitler who would restore the white race, and US Senator Prescott Bush (R-CT) rushed to fund Hitler’s cause, especially on learning that Hitler proclaimed himself (repeatedly) to be a good Christian and proudly noted that he always carried with him Martin Luther’s New Testament with him and waved it at his rallies, identical to Vander Plaats use of the Bible at his rallies: Helmreich, Ernst Christian (1979), The German Churches Under Hitler, Wayne State University Press, p. 139).  Southern Baptists, especially in Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama celebrated the “rebirth of freedom from the sin of Ham” and saluted their co-religionists in Germany. German Baptists openly acclaimed Hitler was a Christian, and in the USA “U.S. Baptists said surprisingly nice things about Hitler”, Baptist Standard, by Professor Lloyd Allen – Church History at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky — May 27, 2002; As Allen noted:

“This focus on [Hitler’s] personal piety resulted partially from a frontier religious ethic. On the American frontier, where Baptist strength arose in the Second Great Awakening, the most crucial ethical decisions were personal–alcoholism, spousal abuse and violence. Few complex social structures existed on the frontier to attract a sustained moral critique. Baptists equated eliminating the sins of the flesh with Christian living.”

 “Mass evangelism was a second factor in Baptist blindness to the Nazi evil. Some Baptists believed that evangelism and the world order were two circles that never intersected … “Evangelical Christianity transcends all political and social systems,” according to an Alabama Baptist article that appeared that same year. As long as governments, even fascist governments, did not interfere with soul-saving, they could be tolerated.” [Ibid.]

The intolerance of the evangelicals in Germany lit the fires of hatred in numerous states throughout the Third Reich, a fire that carried over to the 2008 election in the Midwest USA, funded by Koch Industries money funneled into the campaigns of Scott Walker (R-WI), Terry Branstadt (R-IA), and others from Indiana to New Jersey and Florida. The Protestants and Roman Catholics through the Nazi empire pointed to the numerous records attesting to Hitler’s piety and Christianity and hatred for Jews, Blacks, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Adventists, etc. and demanded and supported the state sanctioned holocaust of the Jews, Adventists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Polish and White Russians.

Today the fires of racial hatred are fanned by would-be-president of the USA, real estate mogul Donald Trump who shields his well-heeled superrich on luxury golf courses behind foreboding forests and thick underbrush.  Donald Trump’s racism is, and has been easily exposed but the media refuses to call Trump’s spade that turns over trash for what it is: garbage.  At the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan observes that Trump had thrown down “the affirmative action card to pump up the GOP base,” and it’s time to take stock: “We might as well concede it: these are racist smears.” (http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/04/trumps-not-so-great-relationship-with-the-blacks.html) Sullivan notes, furthermore, “We can and should dismiss this man as a clown. But what’s so riveting is that he is testing just how powerful a clown can be when pressing every populist, racist button the GOP has deployed for years – and doing it with a crudeness that Karl Rove would never quite deploy.” Donald Trump questioned, repeatedly, how Obama, as a black man from a modest background could enter Columbia and Harvard–while conveniently, like most Birthers and racists, ignore that Obama was the editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated from Harvard magna cum laude (with the highest honors).

Alex Pareene, at Salon‘s War Room blog, wrote a crisp lede in his story on the emergence of SATs on Trump’s publicity tour: “Donald Trump added a blatantly race-baiting component to his already racially charged campaign against Barack Obama’s Americanness this week….based on things he heard”:

“How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records,” he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, “I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard.”

President Obama, Jared Krushner, Donald Trump

Trump trounced what he sees as the affirmative action of Harvard for someone who is unqualified (Obama, because he is Black) but never mentions that there truly was one male who was so dull, and such a below-average student who (without any explaination) made his way into Harvard: Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.  Kushner’s father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, bought Jared his Harvard acceptance, which cost the senior Kushner $2.5 million (after bribing jurors and evading taxes–for which reason he was sent to jail; http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/books/review/Wolff2.t.html?_r=1 commenting on Daniel Golden, The price of admission : how America’s ruling class buys its way into elite colleges–and who gets left outside the gates; 1st pbk ed., New York : Three Rivers Press, c2007). The junior Krushner went on to buy the New York Observer with additional “dirty money” gleaned by money laundering.

Over on cable, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell has been especially strong in calling out Trump, noting that he has become a “hero” to racists, O’Donnell charged on Wednesday’s “The Last Word” that NBC knows if Trump will run for President.  He insisted that NBC settle the question right away and avoid being part of what he called Trump’s “campaign to legitimize hatred and racism.” (http://www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/news/politics/msnbc-host-has-latest-trump-racism-charge-042811)

CNN blogger, Fareed Zakaria, opting for truth than the fake “balance” defined by the network, flatly dispatched Trump’s birther crusade as “shame[ful] coded racism” (http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/22/fareed-zakaria-on-the-donald-trump-fantasy/). In this he is joined by former Philadelphia mayor Wilson Googe, and numerous other national figures including Bob Schieffer who has been at CBS since 1969.

It is no surprise that Donald Trump tells no one that the Department of Justice of the government of the USA is suing him over racial discrimination in housing when he was in his 20s, and openly refused to rent to Blacks. 

The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals “because of race and color.” It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available. While he claimed that he had nothing to do with the actual renting of homes, certificates, titles and other papers has his name and signature as the lessor. While he has falsely claimed he settled with the US government, even into the 1980s charges were brought that at least 95% of all residences in his Trump Villages were rented by white people. (See: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/04/28/donald_trump_discrimination_suit)