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Racial Clowns In Our July 4th Celebration
Edwin A. Sumcad

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By Edwin A. Sumcad
May 30, 2005

All men are created equal -- Thomas Jefferson’s message to the world when he wrote the Declaration of Independence -- cautiously admonitory and prudential, yet clear and unmistakable.

Unfortunately, this historic mandate for racial equality is more honored in the breach than in unconditional compliance.

With patriotic fervor, we are happy when we celebrate the 4th of July. Yet I am sad with the thought that because of prejudice, many of us are only clowns that participate in honoring the solemn significance of July 4th.

To start with, I empathize with the feeling of obscurity, seclusion and gloom of those who have every reason to believe that in our society, they are not being treated equal. I particularly take exception of their nemesis who think that by the color of their skin, they are a superior race.

Skinheads and their gangster-like genre that terrorize and vandalize our neighborhood are notorious signatures of our great racial divide. The infamous Ku Klux Klan had perhaps been outlawed in almost all states but underground, there is no doubt that their tribe had multiplied. Their presence in our midst makes our society too fractious to live in, if it is not, because of hate, already dangerously frightening.

More than just racial predators in many ways, they do not only embarrass but also shame all Americans and all those who love this country and live here for the rest of their lives, every time this nation preaches to the world that human beings are created equal. For racism is not only a social plague attributed to whites against black or colored people, but in fact a racist could also be of any color or race.

The worst racism is racism that dwells in one’s heart, and the most dangerous racists are those who overtly profess racial equality by theory and more profusely by mouth only, but covertly -- and in most cases clandestinely -- act exactly the opposite, catching their victims off guard.

Let us just revisit the archive of racial police brutalities that showcase this infamy. New York’s “finest� the NYPD, is a model of equal opportunity and affirmative action. Its code of ethics stands out against bigotry when police officers conduct their operations. But in 1999, look what they have done to a colored immigrant from Haiti named Abner Louima who was not only beaten to death by four white New York police officers but also savagely sodomized. Aside from criminal prosecution of the culprits, a $465 million lawsuit sought the vindication of the victim's death in the hands of this racially motivated police brutality.

Just standing there in the doorway of his apartment, a black Guinean, Amadou Diallo, who was reportedly visibly, clearly and helplessly unarmed, sustained 41 gunshot wounds from the NYPD all-white officers who gunned him down dead because they thought he was armed, an excuse that baffled only the mentally retarded.

Diallo's death reportedly showed racial hate bordering on insanity. A standing police target, he could have been shot dead or disabled with only one bullet -- but shot 41 times brings to mind a senseless overkill.

The catch here is that, in law enforcement, putting one’s life at the mercy of what just one believes with those itchy fingers on the trigger, is what makes racism extremely dangerous. It snaps out life devoid of reason, only racial prejudice and hate. Either the lawmen in this particular incident were police incompetents or psychiatric misfits suffering an advance case of racial paranoia.

The Los Angeles Police Department had the same history of this kind of violent racial let down. Remember Rodney King, an African-American who was almost beaten to death by white officers of the LAPD right in front of the TV camera? A devastating riot that followed still traumatizes Los Angeles up to this day.

This tip of the iceberg racial phenomenon includes the indiscriminate arrests of color-skinned motorists driving down the road that lately alarmed a disquieted nation. Before George W. Bush became President, the acronym “AWDB� – arrest while driving black – has prompted then President Bill Clinton to issue a directive to the Department of Justice to see to it that for statistical purposes, agents of the law, when making arrest, must log-in the racial components of what they are recording in the police docket. It was one way of monitoring wayward agents of the law that give our justice system a permanent black eye.

Even though this directive was a toothless tiger on the loose and may only be regarded as a political placebo, at least it was shown that the Democratic national leadership then was doing something about this social malady. Now I join those who are concerned that there is not even a ripple of concern from the national leadership over this nationwide problem. On the contrary, it has been reported in many places, especially in California, that if you are not a Caucasian white motorist behind the wheel, most likely the highway patrol car will flag you down for a random check to find out if you just crossed the US-Mexican border illegally when no one was looking.

A Filipino-American friend related to me his harrowing experience in this regard. In El Cajon City, California, he was driving leisurely Northbound on the slow lane of I-8 at about 10:00 PM that he thought the patrol car officers stopped him for traffic obstruction. He was ordered to stop at the dark side of the shoulder road, but he stopped only at the spot where he thought the road was a little bit lighted. When asked by the officers with drawn guns pointed at him under the blinding spotlight of the police car if he was Mexican and he replied that he was a Filipino-American, they let him go after handing back to him his IDs and driver’s license.

This young Filipino-American business executive was scared to death. His experience was similar to the tragic Louima-Diallo incidents although he was not as unlucky. He learned that he was stopped because he looked like a Mexican and drove his car in the highway reportedly like a rustic Mexican, in fact after scrutinizing his ID, his Filipino name even sounded Mexican!

But let it not be mistaken – as I said, racism is not a monopoly of whites against blacks or colored people and vice versa. African-Americans, Latin Americans and Asian-Americans, can be as super-bigots as white European-Americans are notoriously known to be, given the same opportunity of prejudice the latter now have in the established system.

Blacks, whites and colored criminals alike also have their respective abhorrent records of racial notoriety. Studies even show that successful Asian-Americans and Latinos hardly leave their own community and join the mainstream. In business and social relations, they patronize only their own original race to the exclusion of others. Surveys said Blacks who are successful in life are especially noted for this racial bias.

The continuing fight for racial equality is getting worse, more particularly in school and workplace. Covert racism is gaining ground, as in the case of the State of California, following the demise of affirmative action through an infamous state initiative or balloting. Minority hiring and school admission had dropped, deepening the great racial divide and strengthening the great dividing wall that separate minorities from the mainstream.

Historically, the school battleground had shown a pattern of bigotry, but our justice system had been bedeviled. Early on, it could even hardly decide in favor of desegregation. Whites and blacks preferred to segregate and live separately because they mistrust each other anyway and to force them to live together would be an unacceptable imposition.

It was only about 100 years later when the 1954 landmark decision of the Supreme Court (S.Ct.) in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, that the doctrine of separate but equal was thrown out of the book. The S.Ct. ruled that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place.

In court, the racial battle is a swinging pendulum. It is whites’ turn to cry out loud against racial discrimination.

I am not talking about complaints of reverse discrimination which is commonplace. I am referring to bigotry that stigmatized the justice system. The O.J. Simpson celebrated trial of the century has created this notion in the mind of the public that if you have a predominantly black jury, the black litigant in the case wins.

To the predominantly black community, Simpson won the murder case because he happened to be the darling of his race. Thus down with black racism became the new battle cry of the disquieted predominantly white community.

My caveat to the racially hypenated named American public, i.e. Filipino-Americans who are visibly a noisy lot when confronted and confronting a racial prejudice, is simply this: Racism from the conservative right (whites), is as abominable as racism from the radical left (colored bigots). The same with any kind of bigotry that comes from the center perpetrated by ONEL (by others not elsewhere listed, the survey said).

My thoughts on this have always been consistent as I wrote them down in several published and unpublished academic papers and editorial writings: Regardless of ethnicity, we are Americans first, and our racial origin only comes next, after we have chosen to live in this country and be Americans that deserved to be constitutionally treated equal. Those who cannot live with that here in the United States are better off living with their own race in another country where they rightfully ought to be.

The bottom line is, if the celebration of our Independence Day genuinely comes from our heart and soul, no one should pretend to be an American with such un-American discriminatory attitude and bias that prejudice and demean others.

It does not only insult but also desecrate the national flag when racists participate in our Independence Day flag-raising ceremony. This solemn occasion symbolizes the long and hard struggle that we have against what racists are in our fractious society since Jefferson wrote down the Declaration of Independence. If you ask me, by their own choice, they really have no business being there while we ceremoniously raise the spangled banner to the sky to mark the feeling of patriotism that burns in our hearts in just that brief gripping moment of respect and owe, assuring each one of us of being a part of what this greatest nation on earth really meant when it declared to the world that we are all, regardless of race, created equal.

If you are such unfortunate specie because of racial hate, who happens to participate in the July 4th festivity as the nation celebrates our Independence Day, you are highlighted as a clown for believing that your bigotry had turned you into a superhuman being. That’s what Hitler’s insanity was all about when he also once thought of the Aryan Race.

Hitler and those who think like him, are just the opposite of what July 4th stands for. © 2005 Edwin A Sumcad