From:"Aman Lekhi" <aman_lekhi@rediffmail.com>
To: hinduvivekkendra@yahoo.com
Subject: American hypocrisy
Date:9 Jun 2002 12:58:39 -0000
Respected Sir,
I have written an article protesting American "concern" about alleged human rights violations in Gujarat. I am emailing a copy for your site. I would be glad to contribute article for you as I share your ideology and would like your site to be more popular.
Warm Regards
Aman Lekhi
====================================
June 7, 002
To.
The Editor,
The Pioneer,
Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg,
New Delhi.
Sir,
It was amusing to read of the American concern about “human rights violation” in Gujarat and the constitution of a committee to probe the same. This concern reminds one of a person searching for an honest man with a stolen lantern! Having raised baseness, cruelty and abomination to a fine art and regarded segregation as a treasured possession the descendants of Jim Crow have no right to lecture India on human rights.
Between 1776 and 1863 7 million blacks lived and died as slaves in the United States of America. 3000 blacks were lynched between 1889 and 1930, 1 black every 5 days and despite pressure from NAACP Roosewelt refused to support the Anti-Lynching Bill for fear of alienating white southerners. The New Deal in 1935 excluded majority of the blacks from its benefits and a manual published in 1977 described desirable areas as “100% Caucasian” and “without adverse effects from minorities.” Dr. Sanger of the University of Cincinnati subjected between 1960-71 88 black men to “whole body radiation experiments” forging their consent forms and killing 87 of them. And Daryl Gates. Los Angles Police Department Chief 1979-1992 commented that in blacks “veins and arteries do not open as fast as they do on normal people.”
In a 40 year work life a median black household gets $600,000 less than corresponding white household, whites pay 15% less than blacks for equivalent housing and are more likely to receive low interest loans than blacks with similar qualifications.
This is the land of Black Codes and Crowism where rules of etiquette required a black never to assert that a white man lies nor lay claim to superior knowledge. Blacks were to be introduced to Whites never Whites to Blacks who could also not offer their hands to a white male nor show affection to one another in public. Blacks and Whites could not eat together and where they did Whites were to be served first and some sort of partition was to be placed between them. Jim Crow etiquette operated in conjunction with Jim Crow law that excluded blacks from public transport, juries, jobs and neighbourhoods. Blacks were denied the right to vote by grandfather clauses and literacy tests. Even when the Voting Rights Act was signed by the President as late as 1965 a Gallup Poll reported that 40% of the Americans felt that integration was “being pushed too fast.”
Racist images still abound in the United States. In 1940 All Metals Products Company of Wyandotte Michigan marketed a “Sambo Target” for use with their toy pistol set. A gap toothed wide eyed “picaninny” was the center piece of the metal target board. In 1994 the AAA Sign Company Coitsville Ohio making tin signs reproduced the Sambo Dart Board as a decorative tin sign.
African Americans are still caricatured as lazy Coons, bossy Mammies, promiscuous Nellies and violent Brutes. In the 1990s Mother Productions reproduced 42 early 1900 post cards and marketed them as “Colored Only: Black Bashing Art”. And reproductions like “Amos n Andy” continue to carry Jim Crow images of Blacks into the present.
Anti black images are also found in new children’s games like Pokemon whose character Jynx has jet black skin, large protruding pink lips, gaping eyes, straight blond mane, full figure complete with cleavage and wiggly hips described by a cultural critic as “a dead ringer for an obese drag queen.”
Books with racist jokes are popular. Blanche Knott’s Truly Tasteless Jokes and Maud Thickett’s Outrageously Offensive Jokes remaining bestsellers comprising jokes on white supremacy groups web pages like Stormfront established by Don Black, a former Grand Dragon of Ku Klux Klan and Micetrap Distribution which also sells racist songs like “Some Niggers never Die” “Coon Town” “We Don’t Want Niggers In Our Schools” and “Move Them Niggers North.” Tee Shirts with words “Aint RACIST Just Never met A Nigger I Liked” or “Martin Luther Coon” are also sold at these sites.
Forget the living even the dead are not allowed to rest in peace. The Barnetts Creek Baptist Church voted to exhume the body of a baby merely because her father was Black and the Church had a policy dating back to the Civil War excluding minorities from its cemetery.
Not that one is secure if one is black and alive as Timothy Thomas discovered in April 2001 when he was shot dead by a white police officer while trying to run away after breaking traffic rules. The taste for guns grows young and shooting is the second major cause of non-normal deaths averaging 15000 deaths annually. School shootings are common. And ironically on March 4, 2002, the very day the US State Department published its annual report on human rights violations a 4 year old boy shot dead an 18 month old baby girl with his father’s gun.
Blacks account for 13% of the American population but can win only 5% of the public posts by election. None of the CEOs and presidents of top 500 companies in the United States are Black, a mere 17% of the Blacks are able to finish higher education and the unemployment rate among blacks is twice as high as that of the whites. According to Andrew Hacker Whites still believe that Blacks carry inferior genes and prefer to move out of neighbourhoods when proportion of black residents increases.
And not the Blacks alone Asians and Latin Americans are subject to similar abuse and discrimination. Described derogatively as coolies, wet-backs and dinks, they too are treated shabbily and subjected repeatedly to racist violence the most recent being the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
The Americans should put their own house in order before pointing an accusing finger at others and their concern for human rights would seem more real if they address its violation, both gross and rampant, within their own country first. We need neither to be taught nor to be reprimanded and least of all by people with as dubious a human rights record as the Americans themselves. Incidentally the men who built the White House and US Capitol were not free men. Thus those who laid the foundation of the best known symbols of democracy were denied the right to participate in it! And we are lectured about human rights from these monuments of slavery.
Yours faithfully,
AMAN LEKHI