In America, racism never dies

The following quotations come from an article, entitled, "A House Still Divided", in the October, 2018 The Atlantic magazine.  The author is Ibram X. Kendi.

"In 1858, Abraham Lincoln warned that America could not remain half slave and half free.  Today, the country remains divided by racism--and a threat is as existential as it was before the Civil War."

"Lincoln saved the old house, with the decisive assistance of black troops.  Though he didn't live to see it, the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ensured that the United States would be permanently free.  But the racism that buttressed slavery remained in the living constitution of American policy and the American mind.  The house remained divided, remained separate and unequal."

"It remains divided today.  One hundred sixty years after Lincoln warned of the dangers of disunion brought on by slavery, Americans must bear witness to racism's destructive power.  This government cannot endure, permanently half racist and half antiracist."

Why has racism in America had such an enduring quality?  I found an answer to this haunting dilemma from the pen of Ronald Takaki.  Takaki went back fifty years into British history, fifty years before the first British settlers landed on America's eastern shore.

The Brits had been nibbling away on the Irish for several centuries. Now they engaged in a massive and brutal assault on the so-called inferior, savage Irish.  The Brits wanted Irish land to grow wheat and cattle to export to England.

In the process of the conquering and colonizing of Ireland, the British perfected a rationale for doing so.  The British believed they were superior and out of this flowed ethnocentrism.  And from British ethnocentrism flowed oppression.

Fifty years later, the first British colonists settled on the east coast and brought with them a fully developed ethnocentrism and oppression.

Early on the colonists referred to the Native Americans as Irish.

Our founding documents did not end ethnocentrism and oppression in America.  Our founding fathers such as Washington and Jefferson, did not end ethnocentrism and oppression, instead, they practiced it.  The American church has not incarnated the kingdom of God as justice that releases the oppressed.  So from the early 1600s down to 2018, there has been no restraint on the free excersise of ethnocentrism and oppression.  Ethnocentrism and oppression have ravaged this country like the plague.