HOW IGNORANCE OF U.S. HISTORY ENABLES RACISM

The experience of Black people in the US impacted by slavery is not only starkly different from that of immigrants whose families moved there from the 1960s onwards, it also encapsulates a hard truth: that the US wasn't just built by enslaved Africans, it was engineered to keep them at the bottom. In this short video, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practitioner @rahimehramezany (Instagram) explains why - reminding us that the country has a violent history of targeting Black communities down the generations, involving chattel slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, redlining and the War on Drugs.

Chattel slavery, for example, stripped Black people of autonomy and tore families apart. The Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that followed enforced racial segregation, denying them basic civil rights well into the 20th century. This racism inevitably became structural, as exemplified by policies such as redlining, whereby Black communities were denied access to adequate housing, credit and economic advancement. It further ensured that descendants of enslaved Africans were kept in cycles of poverty that disenfranchise them generationally today.

DEI policies have been implemented in a bid to help level the playing field. But they are under attack in the US. Ignorance of the facts of US history continues to facilitate false claims in that debate - for example, that the crises facing Black communities in the US today result largely from their own failures rather than from systemic ones. This is made worse by fallacious comparisons with families who immigrated to the US from the 1960s onwards, who have often enjoyed success in their new lives, but who also didn’t undergo the ordeal of being Black in the US.

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Video Credit: @rahimehramezany (IG)