Almost every country has some strain of hatred of another group or tribe or ethnicity. Those in power have long done all they could to keep average people divided.
But we in America have an especially vicious and violent racist hatred history. We have almost 400 years of the worst kind of dehumanizing and cruel, evil slavery. When legal slavery ended, a southern militia of sadists sprang up led by former slave trader and rebel cavalry officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest called the Ku Klux Klan that operated with impunity for 100 years and virtually vetoed Emancipation enforcing what author and journalist Doug Blackmon called American peonage. Sadistic torture ending in death called lynching was particularly popular in those years. The brutality continued unabated into the modern Civil Rights movement until a nonviolent revolution finally stopped the worst of the brutality.
The horrific violence against African-Americans persisted outside a much broader context of racist hatred.
And so it is today. Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson were murdered by the police because a mass of radical right-wing haters afraid of losing their privilege and living in a country where racial equality may become possible with the highest official in the land being a Black man. These right-wingers have created such a disrespect, disdain, and disgust for that Black president that the Congress of the United States have reopened America’s everlasting shame of racist hatred, torture, and murder.
The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin are on the hands of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Sean Hannity and the former part-time governor of Alaska and the Tea Partiers and every false prophet of a loving God who preached hatred, anger, and division.
Updated 8/22/14: Please accept my sincere apology for my comments in this blog a couple of days ago. A union brother police officer called me this morning about comments I made about the police in the Garner and Brown cases. I apologize to all the good, responsible, and accountable police officers especially union brothers and sisters. I'm also reminded that there is an ongoing investigation to determine guilt in Ferguson. May the truth come out.
Photo source: Elissa Altman on Twitter