Daily Times

There is no exaggeration to say that since President Trump entered the White House he seems to have been fostering a populist campaign-espousing white supremacism. The decay of racial relations in terms of American identity has nonetheless become an inevitable consequence of the racial disdain as manifested by the heinous killing of George Floyd on May 25 through systematic and enduring racial discrimination present in American society. The cultural-cum-political assimilation of the migrants- African or the local black Americans seems to have been the biggest American challenge not only in Trump’s presidential era but also in America’s past legacy. Predictably, the American racial relationships could hardly be improved until American society has undergone a fundamental transformation or even revolutions, in areas such as the political structure and in the economic and ideological systems.

The growing confluence of a ferociously deadly pandemic accompanied by mass unemployment, the police murder of George Floyd and surging authoritarianism has plunged the United States into chaos. A nation could rightly be referred to a state, based purely political entity, whose citizens may nonetheless belong to various ethnicities. In this context, culture in American parlance could be referred either to actual culture or to the categories– of the U.S. Census, scrolling such as non-Hispanic white– referring to race or biological descent. To compound this very confusion, “ethnicity” could be referred both to acquire culture (Amish culture) and to inherit or the consanguinity based- DNA (white or Caucasian). This imbuing confusion is natural and persistent because of the globally linking identities are largely the part of an inherited package that unites race or biological descent with cultural bonds of creed, that is, a religious or secular way of life) – what may be referred to as ethnicity.

In Present America, the irony of the issue is that the current sprouting of this racial clash between the White and the Black Americans amid the growing Corona crisis is virtually not a good omen for America’s own stability and sustainability. U.S. health officials have been warning there could be a new surge in coronavirus cases following the protests of the death of George Floyd, the African American man who died after a police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd lay on the ground. This event has caused unremitting unrest throughout the United States. Social distancing seems hard to observe in normal conditions but is almost impossible during a protest. “I will continue to stress because it seems like a lifetime ago: We are still in the middle of a pandemic . . . We still have hospitals on the verge of being overrun with COVID-19,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz told the Associated Press. The history of American exceptionalism is based on the promotion of equal rights of White and Black Americans.

In 1860, during the American civil war, the presidential contest reflected the way the political parties had divided and had become completely sectionalized. Many Southerners could not even vote for the Republican Party (which proclaimed opposition to the expansion of slavery) and the Democratic Party ran one candidate in Northern states (Stephen Douglas) and a different candidate in Southern states (John Breckinridge). Fundamentally, the split in the Democratic Party was over slavery whilst Southern Democrats were calling for a federal slave code to regulate and permit slavery everywhere in the country; and Northern Democrats opposed this. As a result, the political divide reflected the division in the country between states that permitted slavery and states where it had been outlawed.

The white nationalist movement has embraced increasingly extreme rhetoric in 2019. Some in the movement have been crucially advocating violence and terrorism as a way to precipitate a race war

The question is how inherited ethnic identity should relate to political identity? Black nationalism, political and social movement prominent in the 1960s and early ’70s in America were characterised among some African Americans. The movement, which may be traced back to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1920s, sought to tactically acquire economic power and to infuse among blacks a sense of community and group feeling. Historically, many adherents to Black Nationalism assumed the eventual creation of a separate black nation by African Americans. As an alternative to being assimilated by the American nation, which is predominantly white, black nationalists sought to maintain and promote their separate identity as a people of black ancestry. The concept of “white genocide”-extinction under an onslaught of genetically or culturally inferior nonwhite interlopers-may indeed seem like a fringe conspiracy theory-pondering with an alien lineage, the province of neo-Nazis and their fellow travellers. But the role played by the Greatest Generation during the great depression cannot be forgotten.

Yet not surprisingly, descriptions and projections of the racial and ethnic composition of the American people appear kaleidoscopic, with varied accounts and interpretations. While some commentators have been anticipating a new melting pot, often labelled as the browning of America, characterized by a continued blurring of once-distinct racial and ethnic divisions. This interpretation is consistent with the thesis of the declining significance of race and ethnicity in American society. Yet others perceive new racial divisions arising as some immigrant groups are allowed to integrate with an expanded and privileged white population, while other groups are racialized as disadvantaged brown and black minorities. These conflicting accounts arise, in part, because of differing ideological presuppositions, pondering the argument that racial and ethnic identities are not mutually exclusive or immutable.

History, albeit, tells a different story, Steve King (a Lowa Representative) posed the question-in January-2019 in a New York Times interview — may be somewhat appalling: “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization-how did that language become offensive?” But in the view of Adam server, an American journalist: “That language” has an American past in need of excavation. Without such an effort, we may fail to appreciate the tenacity of the dogma it expresses and the difficulty of eradicating it”.

Notably, the white nationalist movement has embraced increasingly extreme rhetoric in 2019. Some in the movement have been crucially advocating violence and terrorism as a way to precipitate a race war. This growing wing of white nationalists refers to itself as “accelerationist.” At the same time, image-conscious groups like the American Identity Movement (AIM)-which refer to themselves as the “dissident right”-spent much of 2019 trying to distance themselves from the more extreme elements within the movement. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump has chosen the latter strategy of division and not unity or expansion of how we see ourselves as Americans, and we are seeing the same bigotry that stained our country’s history rise again. Stanford University historian Victor Davis Hanson, who asked in a National Review essay last summer: “How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?”

To be continued

The writer is an independent ‘IR’ researcher and international law analyst based in Pakistan