'The worshipping of whiteness': why racist symbols persist in America

[FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer]

Racist symbols still persist in American BECAUSE Whites were NEVER
CIVILIZED, they "merely cunningly BRAINWASHED everybody TO THINK that
whites are civilized".

"REAL REALITY" is completely different from the "FAKE/DELUSIONAL
REALITY" injected into this world by the "whites".

============================================================================

https://www.yahoo.com/news/worshipping-whiteness-why-racist-symbols-080048241.html

'The worshipping of whiteness': why racist symbols persist in America

Alexandra Villarreal in New York

The GuardianJune 30, 2020, 1:00 AM PDT


In life, the seventh US president, Andrew Jackson, and his family
accrued their wealth at the expense of hundreds of enslaved people. Now,
even in death, Jackson still wields the power to haunt Black Americans
whenever they pull a $20 bill from their wallets.

“Racism isn’t always abrupt. It isn’t always in your face. Sometimes,
it’s very insidious,” said Franklin Eugene Forbes II, an architect and
urban planner. “Why am I, a Black person, using a bill where a man who
believed I was inferior to somebody else as a way to buy things, the
same way people that look like me were bought by him?”

For weeks now, historic protests against systemic racial inequity and
injustice have also reinvigorated passionate debate around the most
obvious memorials to slavery, white supremacy and racism across the
United States. A growing number of the nearly 800 Confederate statues
and monuments in the US have been removed, alongside a few toppled or
defaced homages to founding fathers who profited from slavery.

Brands such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben’s and Cream of Wheat are
reconsidering the racial stereotypes emblazoned on their packaging. Gone
With the Wind was temporarily pulled from HBO Max, and Nascar devotees
no longer have the green light to unfurl Confederate battle flags at races.

But plenty of other symbols persist.

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman was supposed to supplant Jackson on the $20
bill. Then came the Trump administration.

The redesigned bill with Tubman’s portrait was originally expected to
debut in 2020. But last year, the treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin,
announced that the unveiling had been delayed. He has since said the new
version won’t be released for another decade and may not even feature
Tubman.

“Maybe every single time you pay for something, you’re not thinking, ‘oh
goodie, there’s Andrew Jackson, my hero.’ But in a way, that’s kind of
the point, right?” said Alvita Akiboh, an assistant professor of history
at the University of Michigan.

When Akiboh taught in Chicago, her students assumed that the local park
in a majority Black and Latino neighborhood was named for Frederick
Douglass, the famed abolitionist. It was instead a salute to Stephen A
Douglas, an Illinois senator whose political machinations enabled
slavery, and who is quoted saying: “I am in favor of confining
citizenship to white men.”

Similar tributes to a checkered past exist all over the US, from streets
named for Confederate officers and slave traders to congested highways
originally designed to reinforce segregation and eliminate Black
neighborhoods. When sports fans attend baseball or football games, they
turn to the American flag and sing a national anthem penned by Francis
Scott Key, a slave owner who abused his authority as district attorney
to persecute Black men and abolitionists.

“I hope at least that the questioning that has started with monuments,
because they’re visible, because they’re large, and because they’re easy
to remove, will continue to happen as we start to re-evaluate the
symbols on money, on our stamps,” Akiboh said. “The flags and other
symbols that we use. The songs that we sing for our patriotic anthems.
And that definitely, we will get to re-evaluate our K-12 curriculum.”

The attorney general, William Barr, recently came under fire when he
casually quipped that “history is written by the winners”. For
centuries, white Americans have always had the position and privilege to
shape the country’s historical record.

“The American story has been a story of progress, of triumph, of
victory, right? Of liberty and freedom,” said Daina Ramey Berry, Radkey
professor of history at the University of Texas. But “enslaved people
don’t fit well into that narrative”. nor do other racial minorities who
have suffered because of the American experiment.

“That is the story of America, to have Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama
simultaneously. To have Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and 4
million people enslaved simultaneously. That paradox is the American
narrative,” said Rhae Lynn Barnes, an assistant professor in Princeton
University’s history department.

Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice
for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic
genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy
rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom. But
more dated history textbooks rarely provide that level of insight around
how minority communities were treated during the country’s early years,
and slavery gets all but erased – “there’s no discussion of what life
was like in the United States prior to 1860, or if it is, it’s just
African Americans were enslaved in this country, and the civil war freed
them,” said Berry.

It’s this inconsistent retelling that has allowed for the veneration of
deeply flawed characters, whose biographies are often cherry-picked for
effect. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, despite waxing poetic about how the
institution was a “moral depravity”. Even Benjamin Franklin, revered as
an early abolitionist, owned enslaved people for much of his life and
ran ads selling others in his newspaper.

Champions of these men often attribute their moral failings to the
sociopolitical environment in which they lived. But “just because
slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white
population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody,
because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous
people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation
slavery,” said Akiboh.

A different logic has been used to justify the Confederate shrines that
commemorate men who committed treason in an effort to uphold slavery.
Defenders, including Donald Trump, decry “the history and culture of our
great country being ripped apart”. But the monuments they are trying to
protect aren’t usually civil war artifacts; they were instead erected
decades after the conflict ended, as “a reminder for Black and brown
people to remember their place”, said Akiboh.

Meanwhile, book publishers, songwriters, Madison Avenue advertisers and
Hollywood studios immortalized the racist caricatures and racial
stereotypes such as Aunt Jemima that have recently fallen under
scrutiny, said Karen Cox, a professor of history at the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte. Even Mickey Mouse, a beloved American
staple, rose to prominence in 1928 with a tune from blackface
minstrelsy, Barnes said.

“The racism and white supremacy is our national sin,” said Cox. “It
doesn’t belong to the south.”

Much like currency, larger objects and icons have often been resistant
to change, despite public repudiation of them; as recently as last year,
more than 1,700 publicly sponsored symbols of the Confederacy still
appeared everywhere from Maine to Washington state, according to a
report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Almost any relic’s retirement
seems to get blowback from subgroups of Americans, for reasons ranging
from historical preservation to outright bigotry.

“It’s all about shoving this down people’s throats and erasing the
history of the white people, and I think that’s wrong,” Virginia state
senator Amanda Chase recently exclaimed in a video.

When earlier this month Nascar hosted the first major sporting event
with fans since the coronavirus pandemic, a plane with a gargantuan
Confederate battle flag flew across the skyline to protest against the
new ban. Far from an isolated incident, overt tributes to the
Confederacy and acts of racial terror are still common in the US.

At least 34 Confederate monuments have been dedicated since 2000. In the
last few years, high school students in states such as New Jersey,
Illinois, Connecticut, Minnesota and California have been caught donning
blackface, sometimes alongside a racial slur or Confederate flag.

But even the US’s bloated catalogue of racist iconography barely
scratches the surface of a more general “built environment” and way of
seeing that’s deeply embedded in the country’s infrastructure, suggested
Sherwin K Bryant, an associate professor of African American studies and
history at Northwestern University.

“Every single arena and area of American life is dominated by a kind of
worshipping of whiteness,” he said. “And so this is inescapable.”

[KWills]

https://www.bitchute.com/video/MnTqE5vNYuOo/
--
KWills
Strategic Writer, Psychotronic World Dominator
https://imgur.com/a/B6dTADP

[Daniel A. Desfosses]

Since the article you posted was written by a female, can I suggest you read and look at the photographs in the free book AN OUTLAW'S DIARY
free over the internet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bela_Kun

[Daniel A. Desfosses]

also written by a female.