[Peace-discuss] Anti-racism and America

[Brussel Morton K.]

In light of the furious, hypocritical, propaganda barrage by the U.S.  
and its European and Israeli clients against the presentation of  
Ahmadinijad---

  [http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090420/ap_on_re_eu/un_un_racism_conference;_ylt=Ahcr1Gsrx0wayQZa1CennYp34T0D 
]

at the Geneva conference on racism and human rights, wherein he had  
the nerve to call Israel a racist state, I thought this article to be  
an appropriate rejoinder (written before the speech and its media  
reception).

Published on Monday, April 20, 2009 by TruthDig.com
Where’s Rev. Wright When You Need Him?
by Chris Hedges
Israel and the United States, which could be charged under  
international law with crimes against humanity for actions in Gaza,  
Iraq and Afghanistan, will together boycott the United Nations World  
Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of  
Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for  
international inspection. Barack Obama may be president, but the  
United States has no intention of accepting responsibility or atoning  
for past crimes, including the use of torture, its illegal wars of  
aggression, slavery and the genocide on which the country was founded.  
We, like Israel, prefer to confuse lies we tell about ourselves with  
fact.

The Obama administration's decision not to prosecute CIA and Bush  
administration officials for the use of torture because it wants to  
look to the future is easy to accept if you were never tortured. The  
decision not to confront slavery and the continued discrimination  
against African-Americans is easy to accept if your ancestors were not  
kidnapped, crammed into slave ships, denied their religion and  
culture, deprived of their language, stripped of their names, severed  
from their families and forced into generations of economic misery.  
The decision not to discuss the genocide of Native Americans is easy  
if your lands were not stolen and your people driven into encampments  
and slaughtered. The doctrine of pre-emptive war and illegal foreign  
occupation is easy to accept if you are not a Palestinian, an Iraqi or  
an Afghan.

"The Obama administration's decision not to prosecute CIA and Bush  
administration officials for the use of torture because it wants to  
look to the future is easy to accept if you were never tortured."

To victims of oppression, the past is never over. It is not even past.  
Trauma, suffering and discrimination do not afford them that luxury.  
Generations bear the scars of whips and chains. They carry heavy  
physical and psychological burdens. And these burdens do not disappear  
when someone glibly decides to look to the future.

The conference in Geneva will discuss racism and continued segregation  
around the world, including in America, where African-Americans remain  
the nation's underclass. In addressing slavery, it will raise the  
issue of reparations, something we deem appropriate for Jewish victims  
of the Holocaust but not for African-Americans. And it will seek to  
force all nations to confront injustices they would rather keep  
hidden. But we are not ready to look.

The Obama administration at first refused to participate in the  
preliminary negotiations for the conference, chaired by Russia, Iran  
and Libya. It then agreed to attend for one week. It demanded the  
removal of references to Israel in the document outlining the goals of  
the conference. The references were removed. It also demanded other  
insidious changes, as Vernellia R. Randall, a University of Dayton  
Ohio law professor, pointed out. The Obama administration asked that  
the call for reparations for African-Americans be expunged. It  
insisted that the description of the transatlantic slave trade as "a  
crime against humanity" be cut. And it demanded the elimination of a  
call to strengthen the U.N. "Working Group of Experts on People of  
African Descent," which deals with the African diaspora.

The document, however, ratified "Durban I," which was the concluding  
document of the first World Conference Against Racism, held in South  
Africa in 2001. The 2001 document included a harsh condemnation of  
Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. And this, finally,  
proved too much for Washington.

"Barack Obama knows full well that he risks nothing by disrespecting  
African Americans at will," wrote Glen Ford, the executive editor of  
The Black Agenda Report. "Across the Black political spectrum, so- 
called leadership seems incapable of shame or of taking manly or  
womanly offense at even the most blatant insults to Black people when  
the source of the affront is Barack Hussein Obama."

The United States, which has a museum to the Jewish Holocaust in  
Washington but has never found the moral courage to officially atone  
for its role in slavery and the genocide of Native Americans,  
perpetuates a disturbing historical amnesia. Our national myth and  
deification of the Founding Fathers studiously preclude an examination  
of the bloody conquest, open racism, misogyny, elitism and brutality  
that led to the country's establishment and that fester like an open  
wound.

We failed to fully participate in every world conference on racism,  
including those held in 1978, 1983 and 2001. Former Secretary of State  
Colin Powell and his delegation during the 2001 conference in Durban,  
South Africa, walked out because of what the Americans termed "Israel- 
bashing."

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, on April 13, 2003, gave a 40-minute sermon  
called "Confusing God and Government." Only a clip from the sermon-the  
phrase "God Damn America"-made it onto the airwaves. It was repeated  
in endless loops on cable news channels and used to turn Wright into a  
pariah. Obama denounced his former pastor. The rest of the sermon, and  
especially the context in which the phrase was used, was ignored.  
Obama would be a better president if he listened to voices like  
Wright's and listened less to his pollsters and advisers.

The sermon was a cry from those who cannot forget what white and  
privileged Americans-as well as, now, the Obama administration-want us  
to ignore. It was a reminder that there are two narratives of America.  
And until these narratives converge, until we all accept the truth of  
our past, justice will never be done. We will continue until then to  
speak in two irreconcilable languages, one that acknowledges the pain  
of the past and seeks atonement and one that does not. We will  
continue to be two Americas.

"This government lied about their belief that all men were created  
equal," Wright told his congregation. "The truth is they believed that  
all white men were created equal. The truth is they did not even  
believe that white women were created equal, in creation nor  
civilization. The government had to pass an amendment to the  
Constitution to get white women the vote. Then the government had to  
pass an equal rights amendment to get equal protection under the law  
for women. The government still thinks a woman has no rights over her  
own body, and between Uncle Clarence [Thomas], who sexually harassed  
Anita Hill, and a closeted Klan court that is a throwback to the 19th  
century, handpicked by Daddy Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, between  
Clarence and that stacked court, they are about to undo Roe vs. Wade,  
just like they are about to undo affirmative action. The government  
lied in its founding documents and the government is still lying  
today. Governments lie."

" ... When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly,  
America failed," he said. "She put them in chains. The government put  
them in slave quarters. Put them on auction blocks. Put them in cotton  
fields. Put them in inferior schools. Put them in substandard housing.  
Put them in scientific experiments. Put them in the lowest-paying  
jobs. Put them outside the equal protection of the law. Kept them out  
of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into  
positions of hopelessness and helplessness.

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a  
three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.' Naw,  
naw, naw. Not God Bless America. God Damn America! That's in the  
Bible. For killing innocent people. God Damn America for treating us  
citizens as less than human. God Damn America as long as she tries to  
act like she is God and she is Supreme."

There will be no delegation from the United States at the U.N.  
conference on racism. Not this year. Maybe not for several years. But  
the day will come, I hope, when justice will finally conquer hate,  
when the truth will allow us to speak as one nation. We can, on that  
day, send a delegation led by the Rev. Wright as part of reconciliation.

© 2009 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com . Hedges  
graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades  
a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of  
"American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. "


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/20-0
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