A major political debate in North Carolina during the 2011 state legislative session involved repeal of the Racial Justice Act. The act, passed by a previous legislature controlled by Democrats, allows defendants in capital cases to use racial statistics during the sentencing phase of a trial. Leaders in the now-Republican led legislature, as well as numerous district attorneys and prosecutors, dispute the pervasiveness of racism in the legal system.
Yet during the same month Republicans planned to override NC Governor Beverly Perdue’s veto of the repeal, four United States servicemen made international news by being photographed in Afghanistan, urinating on dead Taliban combatants. Is there a racial connection and to what extent does such a connection impact U.S. society and how that society is viewed globally?
A Long History of Racism and Intolerance
During the 19th Century, white Americans expanded west, expelling Mexicans and Native Americans in the pursuit of Manifest Destiny. Scholars point to the impact of Social Darwinism, although racial bias has been traced to the earliest days of eastern colonial settlement.
In 1881, Helen Hunt Jackson’s classic book A Century of Dishonor documented generations of abuse and outright persecution of Native Americans. At the same time, the ramifications of a “separate but equal” policy, upheld by the nation’s judiciary, systematized racism in every aspect of American life.
Racism and Early U.S. Imperialism
By the last decade of the 19th Century the United States ventured beyond her borders in an attempt to join the European powers in an attempt to establish colonies and naval bases. Many of the military officers associated with these efforts, notably the war in the Philippines resulting from the Spanish-American War, were veterans of the Indian Wars.
The subsequent military actions in the Philippines were called a “national scandal” by historian Page Smith. Senator George Hoar, speaking on the U.S. Senator floor May 22, 1902, compared U.S. military actions in the Philippines with the infamous Civil War camp Andersonville. An English war correspondent, quoted in the May 8, 1900 New York Times, commented that, “When life and death are the stakes for which men play, chivalry and mercy are easily forgotten, and the original savage reappears…” Officers subsequently court-martialed were excused on the basis of suffering, “…from mental and physical strain.” (New York Times, March 1902)
The Philippine War was an excellent example of the impact of U.S. racism. On the island of Samar, U.S. General Jake Smith threatened to turn the region into a “howling wilderness.” One member of the Kansas regiment wrote home that, “We take no prisoners.” According to a New York Times item, a member of the Montana regiment tested a new revolver by shooting an innocent Filipino: “he thought it was a good joke.” What motivated troops in the Philippines to deal with “inferior races” similarly motivated Americans in the heartland to participate in and condone lynching and other brutal forms of racially connected actions.
Anti-Asian Discrimination
According to some historians, racial feelings against Asian people in the United States were worse than anti-black feelings and at least equal to the treatment of Native cultures. These feelings ran rampant after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack and legitimized, at least in the minds of many Americans, the 1942 internment of Japanese-Americans and the 1945 atomic bomb attacks.
Racism in America is not only an historical legacy, but a continuing problem, one which President Bill Clinton called attention to in the mid 1990’s. After 9/11, intolerance shifted. In a May 24, 2004 Newsweek special report (“The Roots of Torture”), investigative journalists demonstrated how the Iraq War had led to the U.S. military’s circumvention of Geneva war protocols as well as taking a moral toll on average soldiers. It gave a rationale for why the abuse at Abu Ghraib took place.
North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act helps to explain the question “why do they hate us?” If racism persists in the legal system – as it does in other areas of society (note the recent resegregation of public schools in North Carolina such as in Chapel Hill), then the United States needs to get its own house in order before trumpeting freedom and democracy in the Middle East.
References:
- “Filipino Atrocities,” New York Times, May 21, 1901
- Senator George Hoar, U.S. Senate Speech, May 22, 1902
- “Grim Savagery of War,” New York Times, November 19, 1900
- Mark Hosenball, Roy Gutman, et al, “The Roots of Torture,” Newsweek, May 24, 2004
- Greg Robinson, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans (Harvard University Press, 2001)
- Page Smith, The Rise of Industrial America: A People’s History of the Post-Reconstruction Era (Penguin Books, 1990)
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