America Is Burning From 400 Years Of Oppression And Systemic Racism

Where do I begin… As I awoke this morning, Saturday May 30, 2020, after watching cities burning when I went to bed last night I wasn’t quite sure what I would wake up to. The reason I am writing this is to hopefully try to relate as best I can, as a man of Indigenous descent who grew up in the south and experienced racism of my friends and myself. Contrary to what Trump and many others think, this isn’t just about George Floyd. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” He condemned rioting but at the same time condemned the situations that cause them.

This morning I woke up to our “president” once again tweeting incendiary and self aggrandizing messages instead of calming and uniting a nation of upset people. I am posting tweets from Thursday night/early Friday morning through this morning as a matter of public record and to show how pathetic the lack of leadership is.

To understand how we got here we must understand that the systemic racism that this country was founded on is stronger today than it has ever been and there has been an over 50% increase in white supremacist hate groups since Trump was elected. They have been emboldened by his own racist rhetoric, which he has a long history of, from the Central Park 5 to his Obama birtherism. The video below just covers a few:

I obviously don’t need to cover the 400 years of oppression that has been well documented thousands of times. From the mass genocide of the Indigenous people and stealing our land to the stealing of African people and bringing them to do the work that they were too lazy to do themselves, European colonizers built this country on the backs and blood of those they considered inferior to them. Educate yourself on the History of the Civil Rights fight in America.

Those that attempted to create change in the racial inequality in the 60s were killed. Even white activists that came from the north to support civil rights in hotbeds such as Mississippi were murdered alongside the people they came to help. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X were assassinated.

Small changes such as desegregation have done little to help and throughout all of this time police departments have had white supremacists embedded in law enforcement agencies all over the country.

FBI Has Warned Of White Supremacists in Law Enforcement Since 2006

The Epidemic of White Supremacist Police

While I acknowledge that there are many agent provocateurs embedded into many of the protests across the country, I also know that this is nothing new either. In the civil rights protests there were agent provocateurs as well as sympathizers of the cause and the same is true today. We can not simply bring in armed guardsmen and put an end to this. While we must be aware that there are some embedded within the groups of legitimate protestors whose sole purpose is to use these events for their own nefarious purposes we cannot allow that to de-legitimize the reason that people are upset to begin with.

The time has come to stop putting band-aids on the open wound of racism and get to the root of the problem. We must create a department that investigates, discovers, and eliminates hate groups from law enforcement agencies. We can no longer just mourn and wait for the next unarmed black man or other person of color be murdered by officers that are supposed to “protect and serve.”

10 Years of Murder By Police

We must also identify the hate groups in our country overall, the hate groups that spawn people like those like Gregory and Travis McMichael that murdered Ahmaud Arbery for simply jogging through a neighborhood. The glaringly obvious murders by racist police officers are far more public. There are many that go unseen, especially the murders of Indigneous people in remote areas in the western section of the country. We have to make a concerted effort to root these groups out and eliminate them. Hate groups do not deserve protection of the 1st Amendment. Your rights end where another’s rights begin.

We must stop ignoring the racism in this country and deal with it once and for all. We must finally address the ugly history of racism and oppression in America and put an end to it at the root. If we do not do this now then we will reap what JFK warned about over 5 years ago.

Storm Wolf

@StormWolfWords