American's Moral Debt.

I didn’t want to write this blog in Anger. I wanted to do it rationally than with bitterness, that is why I took my time. Yes, I am still mad about what the world saw on Monday, May 25,2020  in Minneapolis. The murder of Georg Floyd by the Police which should have respected his right to live, his basic human right.

When I first saw the video posted by a courageous 17-year-old girl who witnessed the murder, I didn’t believe it just happened seconds before I saw it because black people had been getting killed by the police and white vigintiles for hundreds of years. The mainstream media hadn’t picked up the story yet so I had to fact check to learn that what I saw is true. A “Modern Lynching” as some described it happening in the United States of America which preaches democracy, rule of law and respect to human rights to the world. A country that criticizes, denounces, sanctions, and invades foreign countries when it feels that those values are infringed.

The video shocked the world not because it showed the killing of a black man but the nature of the murder and the character of the killer. George Floyd was killed by a cop kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. George’s plea “I Can’t Breathe” or the begging or bystanders didn’t make the officer flinch a little bit. The other officers didn’t want to hear those pleas either. What struck me most is the officer’s blank stare to the camera while he had his knee on the victim. Though the stare looked blank you can easily sense deep haterade and indifference to the life that he was taking. The officer’s knee was still on Georg’s neck after he became unresponsive and even after paramedics arrived. We all saw George Floyd straggling to take his last breath calling for his Mama. What human would not be angry and ask why after watching this? 

As an Ethiopian, the issue of American racism is sometimes hard for me to grasp. I find myself struggling to understand it, though I have the same skin color as my African American Brothers, I and my forefathers haven’t gone through what they have gone through for centuries. Ethiopian’s had never had White Masters even as colonizers and we didn't suffer direct white oppression. That makes it hard for us to identify racism let alone the subtle institutional racism that people of color face in the US. This doesn’t mean we don’t know that there is racism and we don’t encounter it in America even if we don’t see it right away, we sense it and feel it every day. But Even though the African immigrant goes through many challenges in the white-dominated country, America reserves most of its hate for the descendants of the people it enslaved 400 years ago.

The only people who came to America without their free will are African slaves. When Europeans later Asians immigrated to America looking for a better future or fleeing persecution. Africans were kidnaped and enslaved so that they can be used as free labor to work on the vast commercial plantations of the so-called new world. The industrial-scale modern-day slavery was the backbone and the main means of production of the new immerging wealth of white America. To justify this barbaric means of creating wealth, Europeans and their descendants who see themselves as cultured and civilized had to dehumanize the African slaves. They went so far to prove the superiority of the Caucasian race and the inferiority of blacks so that they have a clear conscious. Greed is the main cause of slavery in America. White supremacy is the justification of it but it didn’t end with slavery it entrenched itself deeper in the subconscious psyche of the USA. We still see and experience it in the 21^st century in a country that champions democracy and freedom of all people.

But Why? Why do African Americans are still treated as third-class citizens after all these years of suffering? Why did America despise and still ill-treat its black population consciously or subconsciously? It may be for many things, guilt, inferiority complex, self-hate (10-20% of African Americans DNA is of white slave owners) and fear. Despite 400+ years of oppression and injustice African Americans have proven to be resilient they have endured slavery, Jim Crow segregation, unequal education, housing, and everting imaginable. They endured with great patience and dignity which gave them moral superiority than their oppressors. Whenever they manage to break through, they have proven that they can do it as much as or better than other Americans. This is an uncomfortable fact for mainstream America which is mainly white which always works systematically to marginalize black and undermine their success.

Seeing the huge demonstrations throughout the US and the world following the death of George Floyd should give us hope because we see for the first time it is not just angry black people who are marching, this time it is the human race marching against injustice. Now is a good time to work on the never healing wounds of racism. I believe the first step should be to address the disadvantage of inequality that was forced on African Americans for hundreds of years. Repatriation is not a bad idea after all when you see what America gained out of slavery and what African Americans missed because of it and all the other benefits that White America had. This will also help to finally relieve America from its moral debt.