We hold these truths to be self-evident...

 

What is it about America and race? Why does that country obsess so much about it? And, if you ask Americans, I doubt whether they themselves can give a coherent explanation why it looms as large as it does in their nation’s psyche.

In less than one year, there have been at least half a dozen occasions when race in America became the focus of not only national but international attention as well. Here is a sample of some of the more notorious ones:

·        July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in New York City, after a police officer locked him in a chokehold. 

·        August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old man, Michael Brown, is fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a Ferguson MO cop. 

·        April 4, 2015, Patrolman Michael Slager fatally shoots Walter Scott in the back following a traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light in North Charleston, South Carolina.

·        April 12, 2015 Freddie Gray suffers a fatal spinal injury while being transported in a Baltimore MD police van that made several rough stops, starts and turns. Gray did not have a seat belt on. His only restraint apparently was handcuffs, a latter-day version of the Middle Passage.

·        June 5, 2015 Officer Eric Casebolt, a McKinney TX cop is filmed pulling his gun on a bunch of teenagers at a pool party. He wrestles a 14 year-old girl to the ground for good measure. 

·        June 10, 2015 Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane WA NAACP president is outed by her parents. She had been “passing” as black for many years.

·        June 17, 2015 Dylann Roof, a 21 year old joins a Bible Study group in Charleston SC’s Emanuel AME Church and sits in quietly for an hour. Then, declaiming hatred, he pulls out a gun and opens fire on the group of churchgoers he was ostensibly studying with. He kills nine of them.

The thing about these incidents is that, in nearly all, the victims are black. The exception is Rachel Dolezal's, whose journey to victimhood may have been partially self-mediated although eventually sparked by intra-family dysfunction. 

When you stand back, the dynamic in the majority of these encounters favours those with the power. Yet, those wielding power, influence and authority never seem satisfied unless the disadvantaged are rendered even more disadvantaged and, still better, dead. True, no one in his right senses would describe Mr Roof, the alleged assassin in the Bible Study murders as powerful and privileged (America, that bastion of the classless society has a term for individuals like this) but such is the overwhelming grip of racism in America that it pops up in the most improbable of circumstances.

There are two reasons why I am writing this post. One is that, what happens in America and what America does have resonance for the entire world; American Law is virtually World Law and all of us are expected to tow its line. Just ask FIFA. Besides, America would not have come about except for their expressed conviction thal all men are created equal. They say that upfront in their Declaration of Independence document.

The other reason is that American racism is just another iteration of tribalism. And while we in Africa now generally experience little racism, tribalism is alive and well throughout the continent. It is an ism that is every bit as corrosive as America’s principal moral failing. Perhaps even worse.

Tell Fren Tru