|
Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2005 Columbus Day is in the neighborhood, celebrating the guy who "discovered America." In Quaker summer camp, we had a song that touched on the theme. It was a Peter, Paul & Mary song. In 1492, just to see what he could see It was actually from a song called Mr. Bilbo (no relation to Baggins, actually, Bilbo is substituted for Mr. Bigot). The chorus went, Listen Mr. Bilbo, listen to me, I'll give you a lesson in history However, admirable as its message is, this song overlooks some important facts. The American experiment began around the 15th century with the explorers, pioneers and settlers killing a lot of natives of the American continent. Over time, very nearly every last one. With the them were killed the buffalo herds with which the Indians had survived symbiotically for eons; and the forests were cleared systematically. The mass murder of Native Americans went on and on, from explorer to explorer, into the colonies, and became the official policy of the United States government, which waged an official war against the Native Americans for many, many decades. And the buffalo bones were piled high as small mountains, to ensure they would not return. I have never seen a memorial to the population that the Americans wiped out to make their country. I have seen little historical markers, but not anything on the order of the Buchelwald Memorial that I once visited, where (among many other concentration camp memorials) Germany acknowledges that one of its former chancellors attempted to wipe out all the Jews, intellectuals, liberals, Sinty and Romany people (Gypsies), homosexuals, and just about everyone but 'pure' Germans. Germany lives with its legacy consciously, and in my experience of living there, feels it as a great burden. The United States does not live consciously with any such burden, and it needs to, because otherwise the genocide on which our country was founded will reside in the shadows and come out in the ongoing campaigns of aggression and murder that we now witness constantly, and in our country's evermore ruthless policies against its own citizens. The history of the New World continued with the colonies importing millions of Africans, who became entangled in a very curious form of chattel slavery. In most (not all) societies, the slaves were/are not actually owned by the master; they are part of the land or the factory and indentured by the fact that they need to survive off of that same land (or factory); usually this is quite enough. The landholder owns the land, the slaves come with. In American-styled slavery, the slaves were actual physical property, like a wheelbarrow, and thought of as such. We don't think of slavery as being particularly recently. But my friend Mary Ellen on Vashon Island has a very old father who remembers, when he was little, a freed slave living in his house as part of his family. So slavery still within living memory. But we do not, in this country, discuss the issue to any real extent, certainly not once someone is out of school, and I don't know what is taught in school. I am sure it varies wildly. What we do not recognize is that the percentage of the African American male population who is in prison is a direct extension of the American slavery system -- that, along with many other forms of institutionalized racism. But the prisons are the real abomination; and most of them are factories of some kind, where people are paid a dollar a day. According to the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice, I can tell you the following. Here is the reference link. http://www.cjcj.org/pubs/punishing/punishing.html 3. The Race to Incarcerate [10] As has been well documented by Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Washington, DC-based Sentencing Project, America's incarceration policies have disproportionately impacted minorities, particularly African Americans. In 1997, even though African Americans made up only 13% of the population, half of the 1.2 million state and federal prisoners were African American (548,900). [11] African Americans are imprisoned at 6.6 times the rate of whites (3,253 vs. 491 per 100,000). The nation's imprisonment policies have had their greatest impact among young black men, resulting in alarming rates of incarceration and disenfranchisement: • One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were under some form of criminal justice control (in prison, jail, parole or probation) in 1995. [12] Other studies have shown that half the young men in Washington, DC, and more than half of the young men in Baltimore are under criminal justice control; [13] • A black male born in 1991 stood a 29% chance of being imprisoned at some point in his life, compared to 4 percent for a white male born that year; [14] • 1.4 million African American men, or 13 percent of the black adult male population, have lost the right to vote due to their involvement in the criminal justice system. In the states with the most restrictive voting laws, 40 percent of African American men are likely to be permanently disenfranchised. [15] [footnotes in the original] Wikipedia on Slavery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery Wikipedia on Columbus Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day Wikipedia on Columbus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus | ||||||
|
