Racial discrimination and protests and public outrage on them are nothing new in America. The hope in recent times that leftists will root out this menace from the society is also not new of its kinds. Furthermore, it is not surprising how this meaningful protest is being used for elections. The party in charge would face unlimited public backlash because the unfortunate incident unluckily happened in the times of elections. However, in these critical times, the only foolish question is does that even matter which party is going to be in the office when it comes to the matter of rights, especially in a country like America. Yes, it does, and it always concerned the parties to attract new chunks of voters and sustain the old one. Because if we go back to American political history, parties were not designed based on pseudo ideologies that we see today but on the voices they raised on controversial matters turned them into what they are called today right or left-wing and the most interesting part is an era of evolution that they lived, which must be admitted as a grandmaster of a chess game where parties were attracting in different classes in different times in order save their kings.
President Trump, in his recent tweets, gloated of how, in the history of racial discrimination, the Republican party had stood by the coloured people as he gave the example of Lincoln’s abolishment of slavery. Sadly, his memory eclipsed to ask himself whether this was the same republican party that Lincoln had led? Because unluckily, to our knowledge, after the civil war, it had become more of a business-class party than a popular one. The obstruction of the civil rights act for Blacks by Barry Goldwater put another bloat on the party’s human rights chart. This was the historic time when most of the Blacks had started shifting from Republicans to Democrats because Lyndon Johnson had introduced this civil rights act into the constitution. To our curious minds, we indulged to ask what happened that changed the white supremacist Democratic Party of the South into the northern one, which once supported slavery during the civil war. Now, it’s ensuring the blacks’ rights and the Republicans who once gave Blacks freedom have now outrageously silent when they are suffocated to death. All this pushes us to admit that there had occurred a shift of ideologies and territories. Republicans of the past must be called the Democrats of the present and old Democrats have turned into today’s Republicans.
Another amazing thing about these parties is that they have always targeted a specific group of people, which restrict their approach of bringing every American into the fold. Can Republican party, with White conservatives on its back, introduce such bold reforms? The answer is no because they are heavily bound by white voters. This became even clearer after Marco Rubio’s stunt on collaborating with Democrats on immigration laws, which completely failed and alienated even the leftover White voters. The Democrat’s approach, on the other hand, is becoming pretty wider. They are trying to cover as much field as they can. Through various strategies, they have tried to calm the intolerant clash between Black and White voters. The facts are self-evidentiary.
If we look through several speeches of Mr Obama given for Blacks on the issue of racism, they seem to be golden words; crying out to turn into reality very soon. His rhetoric even made people believe that he was going to be another Martin Luther King, Jr, who will rewrite the history of African-Americans once again when he used the words of “dark history” and “original sin” for their dark past and tried to connect the present with past. He encouraged them to move on and have a progressive attitude towards life and share the American dream with their successors. Unluckily and to the public despair, those were only words with no intention of seeing the real world.
Day after day, Blacks were targeted even when a man of their colour was sitting in the country’s most effective office
During his administration, the Black unemployment rate went to new heights. Once, a civil rights activist asked the president to redress this issue. To which, he responded in quite shocking words that he was not only the Blacks’ president and the decisions that he had to take were taken after considering the whole country.
Apart from that, he paid bleak attention to reforming the legal system, which was continuously threatening Blacks all over the country with mass incarcerations and extra-judicial killings. Albeit, his presidency inaugurated with the death of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a transit officer Johannes Mehserle in the same manner as George Floyd. This issue enraged the same rage and same sort of protests and movement but to no avail. Nothing concrete followed this public unyielding attitude to change this anti-Black system of police enforcement. Mehserle, who was the perpetrator of this crime, was tried for involuntary manslaughter and released after a year. Several cases of similar injustices were pending in different courts. Day after day, Blacks were targeted even when a man of their colour was sitting in the country’s most effective office. Maybe, he was aware of the fact that these poor souls were going to support him no matter what, so why not garner some white folks votes also while in office.
In actual, if we see through the voting prism, we found that his approach was not to be recognised as a Black President. On the other hand, President Trump doltishly kept pleasing white business-class. Through his tough immigration policies and reversing Obama’s little reforms, like gradual abolishment of a private prison, he put another bad impression on the public’s mind. Rather than moving the Republican ship to a popular direction by introducing further reforms, regarding the current pertaining matter, he constricted the party more to one specific class. Maybe this is the reason why it is losing the popular touch because it is representing the Whites in a majority non-white country. However, even his recent executive order of police reform is not enough to soothe protesters’ demands even though in such a situation, not every president would have introduced radical demands of the people. Unfortunately, in the present case, his previous record on human rights speaks louder than these meagre reforms.
For Black rights, it would be better to summarise in simple words that African Americans were never in any government’s priority whether they were killed, burned, tortured or incarcerated. They were always used for votes and changing the currents of politics. Hopefully, it seems that from now on, they will realise the worth of their strength and never be lured by these hypocrites and their artificial reforms.
The writer is a lawyer and a human rights activist