by Xinhua writer Zhao Wencai
BEIJING, July 5 (Xinhua) -- As many Americans are celebrating their nation's Independence Day, a large portion of their fellow citizens, ethic minorities and females in particular, are still agonizing over racism, discrimination as well as abuses of fundamental human rights that continue to haunt the country since its birth almost two and a half centuries ago.
Among them are African American Jayland Walker and his family. The unarmed 25-year-old Black man was shot dead in a hail of bullets fired by eight police officers in a high-speed pursuit last week.
In a body-camera footage of the fatal shooting released on Sunday, officers were chasing Walker who got off his car, and then fired multiple rounds of shots at him. A lawyer for Walker's family said officers had kept on firing even after he fell onto the ground.
Walker's tragic death is naturally reminiscent of the outrageous murder of George Floyd, another Black American, in 2020. Despite Floyd repeated "I can't breathe" more than 20 times, a white officer insisted on pressing his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly 10 minutes, and ruthlessly took away his life.
The difficult truth is that what chokes the African Americans and other ethnic groups, and makes them "can't breathe" is not just some white law enforcement officers. The country's lingering spectre of racism and discrimination is even more repressive and lethal.
For decades, the United States has been called a "melting pot" or "salad bowl." And Washington politicians have grown increasingly used to depicting the United States as a champion of human rights and racial equality. But admit it or not, racial inequality and discrimination have been baked into the genes of the country.
When the U.S. Declaration of Independence was drafted in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow authors literally meant that only the white males were entitled to equality and rights as they penned down the words "all men are created equal."
That was what actually happened to non-white communities. Black Americans were regarded as the "personal property" of slave owners, some of whom were those Founding Fathers themselves. As for native Americans, their fate was even more miserable: "Indians and wolves are both beasts of prey, tho' they differ in shape," once said George Washington, who liked wearing boots made of the skin of Indians.
While Dr. Martin Luther King passionately called for a dream that "men of all races, colors, and creeds will live together as brothers," it seems that the Founding Fathers of the United States never intended that way.
Although some progress has been made in the past two centuries, like giving women the right to vote and ending slavery, yet, in the words of former U.S. President Barack Obama, the United States is not "cured" of racism, and the history of slavery and segregation is still part of America's DNA.
In his book Who are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity, Samuel Huntington, an American political scientist, argued that U.S. national identity is the product of the Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America.
This offers some insights into why Black Americans and other ethic groups are still facing some kind of actual segregation even though the country's Jim Crow laws have been a thing of the past. According to a New York Times article in 2019, more than half of the nation's schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of students are either white or non-white.
With a failure of racial integration, the non-white groups are bearing the brunt in terms of rampant gun violence, ballooning hate crimes and ever widening wealth and education gaps.
Data from Everytown for Gun Safety, an American nonprofit organization, showed that Black Americans experience 10 times the gun homicides, 18 times the gun assault injuries, and nearly 3 times the fatal shooting by police of White Americans.
In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in mid-April, some 32 percent of Black adults said they worried every day or almost every day that they might be threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity. Around one-in-five Asian Americans said the same, as did 14 percent of Hispanic adults.
Yet politicians in Washington seem not interested in bringing a real end to the woes grilling their fellow countrymen whose skin color happens to be darker. They tended to use their time to smear the human rights of countries far away from America's shores.
"The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me ... This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn," African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once sighed back in 1852. His words still ring true today.
While for Floyd, Walker and tens of thousands of other non-white Americans treated as second-class citizens in this country that loves to brag about freedom and equality, they have proved with their personal tragedies of tears and blood that 246 years on, America remains cursed by racism. ■
