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DESTINY’S MANIFEST LOOM

In these days of regenerating ethnic and religious tension in the Good ol’ USA, it is important to remember how we got here. We are saddled by “the race thing,” together with the now-tendency to attribute to the billion-plus Muslims in the world the outrages perpetrated by a mere fraction of that number who have subverted the tenets of a shared religion in order to achieve their own nefarious ends. We have very selective memory when it comes to the indisputable historic fact that this nation – consciously and deliberately – was constructed upon pillars of domination by the white male of the species. What is more, the Christian religion was subverted in order to sustain the society so produced. Faux Christianity also was used to condemn and marginalize Jews. “Judeo-Christianity” is a fairly recent construct, devised in order to accommodate Christian Fundamentalist and political purposes.

The Pilgrims did not flee the Old World merely for the purpose of worshipping in their own way. As it turned out, they wanted to force their way on everybody else. When the indigenous folk they encountered could not be converted, they had to be exterminated. (So much for “thanks-givving!)

When black, forced labor was introduced into the colonies, it set the tone for everything that was to follow – up to and including this very day! Indians already were the scourge for being so recalcitrant and inhospitable. When they and escaped Blacks attempted to form a community together in Florida, Andrew Jackson and his irregulars showed ‘em how not to defy the “White-man boss”! Thomas Jefferson, in his vaunted treatise, supposedly to the benefit of humankind, while ignoring completely his unpaid, imprisoned African chattel, did, however, remember the, “Murderous Savages.”

There is a lot more under the surface of the Arizona controversy, with its blathering, Bull Connor-type Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. Before and after the reservation doors were sealed, the Indians of the Southwest were treated as a separate species. Mexicans, who were there before and after the border was pulled over their heads, fared little better. (In 1950 Seattle, I was surprised by a liquor store sign refusing service to Indians. The irony occurred to me, “At least ‘WE’ still can buy booze.”) It is significant that the contentious Arizona law was drafted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization that attempts to obscure its racist philosophy.

Thus established, this new paradigm for how Earth’s Homo sapiens-sapiens should be governed, a motto was needed for getting rid of God’s creatures who stood in the way of imposing its rubric from, “Sea to Shining Sea” – Manifest Destiny! It turned out that the nation, as a whole, was not on the same page, as to how that destiny should be manifested. The old, sticky, “Black” question kept the pages stuck together.

When finally the matter was settled with 600,000 buckets of blood, souls were needed to populate those lands and finish off the remnant “Redskins.” The door of liberty was flung open to all comers – those of epidermis unstained by noticeable melanin. In the meantime, the newly “freed” were transferred to another cage, one labled, “Jim Crow.” The value of skin tone now being established, the way was now open to creating the “Last (hypocritical) Hope for Mankind.”

My stock phrase for our “color problem,” is:

White Supremacy is woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of the United States

At this point in our history, that fabric has not yet been bleached – it is only faded.