Racism in America

It has now been one year since the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and it is my sad duty to report that racism is alive and well within the United States.  It is not enough to note that the response of aid to the mostly black city of New Orleans was not only slow in coming, but inadequate to boot.  While I am not saying that Kanye West was correct in his assertion that, "George Bush doesn't care about black people", I will note that government response to subsequent emergencies in predominately white areas seemed to be a little faster.  How quickly would rescue boats arrive at Martha's Vineyard after a hurricane?  Would Bush allow the residents of Nantucket Island to spend a week in a filthy, disease ridden building without fresh water, food and medical supplies?  Of course not.  And while this doesn't provide proof of racism, it does point in that direction.

The previous year has also allowed many members of the far right to speak openly about their contempt of all people of Arab parentage.  Some have called for racial profiling at airports, some even going as far as suggesting a separate security and check-in line for Arabs or Muslims.  One must wonder why there wasn't separate lines for blonde men after Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995.  Pretty simple really, not all blonde men blow up buildings - just as not all Arabs fly planes into buildings.

Americans have a long history of racial overreaction to national crises.  The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II was perhaps one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in the 20th Century.  During the American Revolution, some states refused to allow slaves to join the militia due to a fear of putting arms into the hands of blacks, and it wasn't until the second half of the 29th Century that Whites and Blacks were allowed to fight together in the same military units.

There will of course be some who will claim it is not racism, but fear that drives the current calls for profiling, but that is simply a lame excuse to ease their own embittered souls.  Others will say that Arabs are racists toward Americans, but point of fact, American is not a race, it is a nationality.  But with Americans, their racism stems toward a fear of all Arabs.  Oddly enough, nationality plays a somewhat minor role in the current theater of fear.  Americans seem to be happy about us killing Iraqis and many, including George W. Bush and his administration, will continue to point to 9/11 for justification.  But the men who were responsible for that great tragedy hailed from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - two countries that still conduct a lot of commerce with the United States.  I would be willing to bet that some of the people who claim we need racial profiling have at some point in their lives  done business with one or both of those nations.

It appears that racists attitudes toward the Arab world isn't strictly an American thing.  Over the week-end, a flight from Spain to Manchester, England was halted because the passengers refused to fly on a plane with Arab passengers.

I'm sure there will be some who say I am only writing this because I want the terrorists to win.  This is still such an asinine idea, that I won't even bother to debate the feeble minded people who would make such claims.  I write this because I believe in the real spirit of America.  A nation made up of ideas and cultures from throughout the world.  We are not a "white" country - we are a diverse people - and it is still our diversity and not our divisiveness that should dictate the sort of country we should be.