Come gather ‘round people, wherever you roam
………….
For the time, they are a-changin'
Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the time, they are a-changin’
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticise what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your
command
Your old road is rapidly aging
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend
your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’
Bob Dylan – Lyrics – The Times They Are A-Changin’
'(On July 7th,2007, I had written a blog “Race, Religion & Politics - Race .This is a continuation of this. )
Over the last few months, I have read and seen the following:
Book - Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Interesting book about the trials and tribulations of African Americans and comparisons with the Dalits in India and the Jews during Hitler’s Third Reich.
Television show - The Loudest Voice - It is about Roger Ailes, the person who set up Fox News for Rupert Murdoch.
Movie - The Deacons of Defence - 2003. It is based on a 1964 true story about a group of African Americans who took up arms to challenge the anti-black police, judiciary and the Ku Klux Klan in a small town – Bogalusa, Louisiana and succeeded.
CNN - Mobs laying siege to the Capitol in Washington on January 6th.
Your obvious question is what is the link between them?
The start of racial abuse and discrimination started when the first slave ship arrived in Virginia about 400 years ago. A national culture was created where Americans perceived that the white population should be the dominant majority and the African slaves remain a minority - not deserving of equal rights and dignity. Now, the minorities in the USA are getting together and voting for a party which they feel will provide them equal opportunities.
The second concern among the right-wing conservatives is the rise and influence of the “leftist liberals”, particularly among the recent immigrants who are now becoming political and standing for election at the state and federal level. The conservatives fear that they would push for increased taxes and handouts to the poor thus disincentivizing them from seeking jobs. This in spite of the gap between the wealthy and the poor being at an all time high.(1)
It is perhaps worth going back into time, since America has a relatively short history. Their goal when they declared Independence was to be a Republic and have a democratic form of government which would be a model for the rest of the world.
The opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, read as follows:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
While the words were inspiring,14 out of the 21 signers of the document had at various times held slaves. Thomas Jefferson, the person who drafted the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, is believed to have continued holding slaves and had an African American slave as his mistress and who bore him children (2).
From the early days there was a tendency for America to be not just a White dominated country, but for some of the Founding Fathers it was to be a White Anglo Saxon Protestant nation. In the 1750’s Benjamin Franklin was concerned that “.... Pennsylvania, founded by the English, (would) become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
Similarly, “The Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion”. He was not alone. In spite of the lyrics in the musical Hamilton “Immigrants, we get the job done,” Hamilton, Jefferson and some of others felt the same way (3).
The slave owning practice continued and in fact increased over the next century. While the North was industrializing, the South was increasing the land under cultivation and using slaves to carry out the hard labour. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, he tried to end slavery. The Southern States decided to break away from the Union, resulting in the Civil War which the North won.
After the Civil War, the Congress passed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitutions and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which granted full citizenship to the freed slaves, including the right to vote.
Its Section 1 stated “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The first African American member of the Senate, Hiram Rhode Revels was elected in 1870. However, the equal rights in the Southern States were short lived.
As a means of allowing the country to get back to normality, the federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 and this allowed the Southern States to regain control of their state legislatures. This enabled them to pass laws which restricted the rights of the African American people, including the right to vote by imposing new requirements for poll taxes, literacy tests and strict residency and other requirements which were difficult to satisfy. In addition, they passed the Jim Crow laws which segregated transportation, public facilities and daily life.
The US Supreme Court in 1896 supported these laws under the fig leaf of “separate but equal” judgement. In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed this but the discrimination continued.
This led to extreme violence, including lynchings and race riots against the black population, mainly in the South. It also gave rise to the right-wing organisations such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.
As a result of the violence and discrimination, the African Americans started moving out of the Southern States. The Great Migration happened in two waves – the first wave from 1916 to 1940 when about 1.6 million African Americans went from the rural South to Northern industrial cities, the second wave from 1940 to 1970, around 5 million African American people moved to the North and West where they could exercise their right to vote. The percentage of African Americans living in rural areas declined from 47 percent to 16 percent between 1950 and 1990 (3).
It is interesting to note that Abraham Lincoln the President who tried to end slavery was from the Republican Party. The Southern States were primarily White, Democrat and in favour of slavery. The switch started in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs offered economic relief to deal with the Depression. By the mid-60’s the majority of the African American voters were voting for the Democrats.
As the land mass in America expanded to more states, there was a large influx of European immigrants. Initially, the Germans, Italians and Irish all went through the phase of being discriminated against, but once they assimilated, they all began to develop the characteristics and behaviour of what Isabel Wilkerson calls “the dominant caste “and they also discriminated and mistreated the African Americans.
To build the rail roads across America there had been an influx of cheap Chinese labour. Also, in the early 1900’s a group of Sikhs landed in Northern California. To prevent America becoming a multicultural nation, the government controlled the racial mix through the immigration laws restricting the flow of new immigrants from different parts of the world, and in some cases even restricting the ability of immigrants to bring their families. The group of Sikh immigrants who settled in Northern California married Mexicans and established the first Sikh community around Stockton. They tried legal means to obtain citizenship.
Following the attempt by two Japanese Americans Takao Ozawa and Takauji Yamashita, a Sikh named Bhagat Singh Thind petitioned the Supreme Court. He had served in the US Army and fought in World War I. He was granted citizenship twice and which was rescinded both times. His argument to the Supreme Court was unique.
Thind argued that he was Caucasian, Aryan in fact, descended from the same stock as Europeans, given that it was widely held that Aryans migrated south to India and formed that country’s upper caste. It could be said he had a more rightful claim to being Caucasian than the people judging him. After all, the Caucasus Mountains were next to Iran and closer to neighbouring India than western Europe .His appeal was declined but he was ultimately granted citizenship in 1935.(4)
In the early 1900’s the immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe began to outnumber those from the Northern and Western Europe and in 1921 and 1924, caps were set for total annual immigration and quotas imposed for the Northern and Western Europe countries. In the forties and the fifties, America started to relax the immigration laws and the racial mix began to change.
Starting 1943, and later in 1952 a limited number of Chinese and Asian were allowed to immigrate. In 1965, laws were changed to allow reunification and skilled immigrants were allowed in. Later in 1986 and 1990, the Immigration Reform and Control Act focused on allowing refugees from Indochina, Nicaragua and Haiti and other war-torn countries (5).
The change in immigration laws led to the increase in population and to the United States becoming a more multicultural society. The U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million. In 1950, it rose to 152 million; by 2000 it had reached 282 million and 331 million in 2020. By 2050, it is expected to reach between 422-458 million, depending on immigration. The percentage share of the white population has been dropping since 1950. From 59.7% in 2020, it is expected to drop below 50% in 2045 to 44% in 2060. The Hispanics will be the second largest group followed by the African Americans and Asians.
The Jim Crow laws
lasted until 1965. It was the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-sixties, led by
Martin Luther King Jr, who inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, protested non-violently,
and which ultimately led to President Lyndon Baines Johnson passing the Civil Rights
Act of 1964 and The Voting Rights Act of 1965. These acts outlawed
discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, national origin and
subsequently sexual orientation and gender identity. They also did away with
unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, public accommodations, and employment discrimination.
In 1964 after signing the Civil Rights Bill President Johnson predicted that
the Democrats would lose the South for the generation for supporting the
African - Americans. For over half a century no Democrat running for Presidency
ever won a majority of the white votes” (4).
The passing of the Bills caused some concern that the non-whites combined with the liberal left from the East and West coasts were going to take over the country. The fear was that after almost four centuries, the skin-based colour dominance would be coming to an end as the racial mix became more diversified.
This fear was not limited to just the rich and middle class. Even the poor and working-class whites were concerned, perhaps even more so, because the feeling of entitlement based purely on their skin colour was gradually being taken away. Roger Ailes was the first to recognise the impact it would have on American society as the ethnically distributed population began to change America.
Roger Ailes worked as a political consultant to Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan and George H.W. Bush and others including Mitch McConnell, Quayle and others. Apparently, he also helped Donald Trump, including writing his speeches. After working for CNBC, he convinced Rupert Murdoch to help him launch Fox News in 1996.
According to an article dated May 2011 in the Rolling Stone Magazine, Roger Ailes’s viewers market “…. are old, with a median age of 65. The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the starkest example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent), with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear. This understanding of the demographics helped make Fox News the most viewed channel and a cash cow in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire”. (6)
The interesting thing about the Trump fan base is that there is also a small percentage of coloured persons (including Asian) who voted for him. Their rationale perhaps - the tax cuts which he was promising.
From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a African American nationalist, a 1960s type radical and strongly pushed the “birther” conspiracy theory - insisting that President Obama was not born in the United States.
While everyone thought Obama got elected because he was biracial, spent most of his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, had Asian roommates, studied in Ivy League schools was an “acceptable African American , “the reality was that the majority of the whites did not vote for him. “Only an estimated 43 percent of the whites voted for him - close to two third did not vote for him in 2008 and even less 38 percent voted for him in 2012.
President Obama’s two election successes also proved to the African Americans the power of their votes. This was the trigger point for some of the right-wing organisations and brought out the passive Republicans to vote for Donald Trump. His campaign team also did their best to try and disenfranchise the African American voters and with the support of right-wing news media such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others, together with the use of social media, Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2018.
They tried to employ the same tactics in 2020. In subtle and not so subtle ways, the African Americans continued to be discriminated against. They tried to take away their right to vote by various means, including redrawing the districts or the proof of identity required to vote.
Biden’s victory was in no small measure due to the support from the African American community, starting from his primary victory in South Carolina. Stacy Abrams ten-year effort was instrumental in swinging Georgia to turn blue and helped the Democrats win the two Senate seats which gave them a 50-50 split in the Senate. Like the Deacons of Defence, the African Americans together with the Asians and some Hispanics were better organised and came out in large numbers to vote. In addition to Joe Biden, they helped Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour, get elected as the Vice President, in spite of President Trump and his team’s various attempts to claim that the results were fraudulent.
When all attempts to overturn the results of the election failed, a large number of the Republicans again attempted to do what the opposition party did in the 1890's. At that time a group of Whites and African Americans called Fusionists - whose objective was to seek free education, debt relief and equal rights for the African Americans, won every state-wide office in 1896, including the governorship in North Carolina.
In 1898 during state wide elections, a group of white Supremacists called the Red Shirts rode into Wilmington and started intimidating the voters. A Democratic leader named Alfred Moore Waddell gave a speech urging insurrection, demanding that white men stop the (African Americans) from voting and to shoot them if they refuse. They then forced the resignation of the government and appointed their own Mayor. Within two years new segregation laws were passed and the (African American) population were stripped of their right to vote. The number of African American voters dropped from 125,000 in 1896 to about 6000 in 1902 (7).
Is this the beginning of the end of the single ethnic dominated society? With the changing racial mix over the next three to four decades, my personal view is that the minorities (African Americans, Hispanics, Asians) will all get better organised and you will see a bigger mix of different colours in both houses.
The first Asian to be elected to the US House of Representatives was a Sikh, Dalip Singh Saund from 1959 to 1963. This year there are 109 non-white members in the Congress and 9 in the Senate. The change is also being felt in the business circles as well, as you see more companies being led by Asian and African American senior management. Also, the share of the multiracial group will grow as America finally becomes the melting pot.
It will be interesting to see how the two political parties react to the change? Will the Republicans move more to the centre? The Democrats more to the left to accommodate the newly elected immigrant politicians who are pushing to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor? Will the Republicans split with groups such as the Lincoln Project group forming their own party? Will the gap between the rich and the poor continue to grow as it has been over the last three decades? Will this result in more social unrest? The issue then moves from race to economic issues.
Multicultural America will once again be a model for the world. You will also see the European countries following America as their share of the non-whites increases and the minorities get better organised. The UK and Canada are perhaps slightly ahead with the South Asians already sharing the stage with the whites. The twenty first century will the century when the world truly becomes global. The exception will be Asia.
India is already the United States of India, but it appears now to want to change to a religion-based majority dominated country. China and Japan the other two large economies are probably the only two countries which are racially pure and are reluctant to open the doors to other races. With the aging population, it will be interesting to see how these countries cope and whether they will change in any way. Will they be able to maintain their economic growth?
In the medium- and long-term globally, race will be less of an issue. Will it be religion where many of the recent immigrants, particularly in Europe are Muslims? Will this create tension among the different religions? Time will tell.
As Bob Dylan said during the 60’s …. The Times They Are A-Changin’. They certainly are but at a much faster pace.
1. Source: US Census Bureau and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. – Pew Research Centre
2.https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-and-Slavery-1269536
4.Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
5.America Becoming: Racial Trends and Their Consequences: Volume I (2001)
6.The Rolling Stone: May 25,2011: How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factor
7. BBC.com - Stacey Abrams: The woman behind Biden's biggest surprise - 10th, November 2020
8. “How U.S. immigration laws and rules have
changed through history by D’Vera Cohn - Pew Research Centre
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