Minority America | Chenyang Zhao

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Dec 16, 2022

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Minority-America

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Surely, in history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost.

Wounded Knee

Extraction

Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?

In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost ... especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.

After all, neither Indians nor Pilgrims had access to the germ theory of disease. Indian healers could supply no cure; their medicines and herbs offered no relief. Their religion provided no explanation. That of the whites did. Like the Europeans three centuries before them, many Indians surrendered to alcohol, converted to Christianity, or simply killed themselves.

But pre-Pilgrim American epidemiology is not a field of everyday knowledge in which "common sense" can be allowed to substitute for years of relevant research. By "common sense" what McEvedy really meant was tradition.

What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

Argument

Starting the story of America's settlement with the Pilgrims leaves out not only the Indians but also the Spanish.

Beginning the story in 1620 also omits the Dutch, who were living in what is now Albany by 1614.

The warmer parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa have historically been the breeding ground for most of mankind's illnesses.

enjoyed before or since. Many of the diseases that had long shadowed them simply could not survive the journey.

Europe and Asia were also made unhealthy by a subtler factor: social density.

Some areas in the Americas did have high social density.

The scarcity of disease in the Americas was also partly attributable to the basic hygiene practiced by the region's inhabitants.

Ironically, their very health proved their undoing, for they had built up no resistance, genetically or through childhood diseases, to the microbes that Europeans and Africans would bring to them.

Many Indians likewise inferred that their god had abandoned them.

Today, as we compare European technology with that of the "primitive" Indians, we may conclude that European conquest of America was inevitable, but it did not appear so at the time.

If colonists had not been able to occupy lands already cleared by Indian farmers who had vanished, colonization would have proceeded much more slowly. If Indian culture had not been devastated by the physical and psychological assaults it had suffered, colonization might not have proceeded at all.

Europeans were never able to "settle" China, India, Indonesia, Japan, or much of Africa, because too many people already lived there.

The Europeans' advantages in military and social technology might have enabled them to dominate the Americas, as they eventually dominated China, India, Indonesia, and Africa, but not to "settle" the hemisphere. For that, the plague was required. Thus, apart from the European (and African) invasion itself, the pestilence is surely the most important event in the history of America.

But there is no record of any continental [European] population being cut back by the sort of percentages needed to get from twenty million to two or one million. Even the Black Death reduced the population of Europe by only a third.

Scholars who viewed Native American cultures as primitive reduced their estimates of precontact populations to match the stereotype.

The problem is not so much the estimates as the attitude.

About the plagues the textbooks tell even less.

In colonial times, everyone knew about the plague.

Certainly the Pilgrims already knew quite a bit about what Massachusetts could offer them,

These considerations prompt me to believe that the Pilgrim leaders probably ended up in Massachusetts on purpose.

Each textbook picks just one reason and presents it as fact.

The whole story places the Pilgrims in a somewhat dishonorable light, however, which may explain why only one textbook selects it.

So far as any record shows, this was the first time in human history that a group of people consciously created a government where none had existed before.

"This rare opportunity for a great social and political experiment may never come again." The American Way declares, "The American people have created a unique nation." How is America exceptional?

And the goodness started at Plymouth Rock, according to our textbooks, which view the Pilgrims as Christian, sober, democratic, generous to the Indians, God-thanking. Such a happy portrait can be painted only by omitting the facts about the plague, the possible hijacking, and the Indian relations.

The chief Design of all Parties concerned was to fetch away the Treasure from thence, aiming more at sudden Gain, than to form any regular Colony.

looking for gold instead of planting crops. Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Indian corpses to eat or renting themselves out to Indian families as servants-hardly the heroic founders that a great nation requires.

Textbooks indeed cover the Virginia colony, and they at least mention the Spanish settlements, but they devote 50 percent more space to Massachusetts. As a result, and due also to Thanksgiving, of course, students are much more likely to remember the Pilgrims as our founders.

But neither our culture nor our textbooks give Virginia the same archetypal status as Massachusetts. That is why almost all my students.

Throughout New England, colonists appropriated Indian cornfields for their initial settlements, avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock.

Moreover, not all the Native inhabitants had perished, and the survivors now facilitated British settlement.

From the start, the Pilgrims thanked God, not the Indians, for assistance that the latter had (inadvertently) provided-setting a pattern for later thanksgivings.

"Their profit" was the primary reason most Mayflower colonists made the trip. As Robert Moore has pointed out, "Textbooks neglect to analyze the profit motive underlying much of our history.”

We have seen, for example, how King James and the early Pilgrim leaders gave thanks for the plague, which proved to them that God was on their side.

God on our side, civilization wrested from the wilderness, order from disorder, through hard work and good Pilgrim character traits-continue to radiate from our history textbooks.

"For these unexcelled blessings, the pupil is urged to follow in the footsteps of his forbears, to offer unquestioning obedience to the law of the land, and to carry on the work begun.”

In this invocation, the Pilgrims supply not only the origin of the United States, but also the inspiration for democracy in Europe and perhaps for all goodness in the world today! I suspect that the original colonists, Separatists and Anglicans alike, would have been amused.

Today Americans believe as part of our political understanding of the world that we are the most generous nation on earth in terms of foreign aid, overlooking the fact that the net dollar flow from almost every Third World nation runs toward the United States.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition.

The ideological meaning American history has ascribed to Thanksgiving compounds the embarrassment. The Thanksgiving legend makes Americans ethnocentric. After all, if our culture has God on its side, why should we consider other cultures seriously?

Today, when textbooks promote this ethnocentrism with their Pilgrim stories, they leave students less able to learn from and deal with people from other cultures.

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi-but neither is it exceptionally less violent.

The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give moral instruction, the way origin myths have always done, they could accomplish this aim by allowing students to learn both the "good" and the "bad" sides of the Pilgrim tale. Conflict would then become part of the story, and students might discover that the knowledge they gain has implications for their lives today. Correctly taught, the issues of the era of the first Thanksgiving could help Americans grow more thoughtful and more tolerant, rather than more ethnocentric.

Report

Before reading this paragraph, I learned a lot about the history of North American Indians. So when I saw the title, I did not have too high expectations in my heart. In addition, before reading this article, I also watched a TED Talk shared by the teacher. That TED Talk mainly tells the history of the Lakota ethnic group being deceived, oppressed, and slaughtered by the white race for hundreds of years, which has deeply aroused people's empathy. I thought this document would be like the TED Talk, telling some of the contradictions between Indians and White and then detailing the cruelty, hypocrisy, and cunning of White to awaken national consciousness.

However, reading through the whole text, I can't help but admire the author's original intention in writing. We can summarize his original intention in the following three sentences.

In history, truth should be held sacred at whatever cost. U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi-but neither is it exceptionally less violent. What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work toward a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are essential.

Through many details, the author explains why white immigrants settled in the Americas, not colonized them. Then discuss the impact of the plague on the Indians far beyond imagination. It has since been explained that even for the Puritans aboard the Mayflower, their arrival in the New World was hypocritical and by no means as noble as the American history books record. It explains why Americans, and even major Western countries, do their best to cover up this history of violence and conflict to make their national claims look very noble. Written here, the author has achieved the meaning of disenchanting American history, but the author finally discusses his claim.

He wrote that much dirt is behind the seemingly glorious history of the United States. However, discussing these issues is not to criticize the United States but to enable Americans, especially American children, to recognize and face up to the history of their own country. America's history is full of violence and conflict, but this is a common human problem, not an American problem. The United States will not be more conflicted than Russia, China, and India, but it will never be less. Everything he writes is about making a better America.

Next, I would like to discuss two aspects in detail.

It is irresponsible to question the impact of the disease.

Some scholars believe that because the Black Death only killed one-third of the people in Eurasia, they questioned that milder diseases such as smallpox and malaria would not kill more than 90% of the Indians. The author criticizes this and believes that these so-called scholars are just unwilling to admit the hypocrisy of the history written in textbooks, want to maintain the sanctity of American history, and insist on the tone of the past.

But pre-Pilgrim American epidemiology is not a field of everyday knowledge in which "common sense" can be allowed to substitute for years of relevant research. By "common sense," what these scholars meant was tradition. The author spends considerable time in the original text discussing why the disease has a tremendous impact. Many diseases sound very mild in Eurasia. Why did the Indians die in large numbers? I was also surprised by this, and I was skeptical at first. Also, I've read something similar in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, and I still find it a little unbelievable. However, after reading the author's exposition or studying the historical materials written by the author, my doubts have been resolved.

Deviating from some so-called common sense and thinking through learning has always benefited me a lot. However, many people do not want to do so. Because for humans, thinking based on logic is pain or a burden. The goal of learning and logical thinking is to seek a new body of knowledge, which must first overthrow the inherent mode of thinking. For example, after learning Newton's laws, you deny the common sense that large and small iron balls fall at different speeds, and you must abandon the intuition that force is the cause of object motion. This process is very uncomfortable and can even cause a sense of strangeness and fear in the world because of reacquainting with the environment.

Therefore, human instinct is to protect the spiritual comfort zone and refuse to give up existing knowledge systems. If it is not for the great benefit or fear of threats, human beings would instead tie up and burn those who force themselves to think and accept the simple and crude answers provided by religion. In the 10,000-year history of civilized society, most human beings usually allowed a particular religion to exercise spiritual control over themselves. The main reason is to obtain an answer and gain a sense of psychological security.

However, in the past few hundred years, the tremendous geographical discovery and the industrial revolution have brought unprecedented development space for humankind, and the situation has begun to change. Some people find that they can lead a more prosperous and accessible life through logical and rational thinking. Some people even find that if they do not learn to think logically and solve problems with reason, the spiritual security provided by religion and feudalism cannot be maintained. Therefore, the modern education system has expanded worldwide along with the industrial society, forming the modern society we are familiar with.

Above is my understanding of the necessity of learning and thinking logically. The same goes for this article. Only when we give up the so-called common sense about diseases and learn relevant historical materials can we realize the massive impact of conditions on Indians and then face up to the history of whites and Indians. Emotions cannot resolve conflicts, and conflicts are not ethnic conflicts.

Throughout the article, the author does not have much emotional narrative, which is different from the TED Talk I mentioned at the beginning. And I agree more with the author's approach. Emotions cannot solve contradictions. Only by facing history squarely can we solve contradictions.

Emotions cannot resolve conflicts, and conflicts are not ethnic conflicts.

However, the author has written so much that I do not see how he views the contradiction between the Indians and the white colonists. One of the big reasons I cannot entirely agree with the TED Talk is that TED Talk constantly exaggerates the conflicts between nationalities, believing that the root of the conflict is that two different nationalities have lived in a very long historical process with massive oppression and bleeding. There are many bloodsheds, and the current white people need to atone for the sins of their ancestors.

This view has some validity, but I cannot fully agree with it because the source of conflict is not a race. I believe in Marxism, and for me, there is only one kind of contradiction in the world: the contradiction between the vested interests and the proletariat.

Marx creatively put forward the theory of class struggle in the 19th century, arguing that all social history so far is the history of class struggle. The difference between the vested interests and the proletariat is whether or not the means of production are mastered. Those who master the means of production are the bourgeoisie, and those who do not master the means of production are the proletariat. Marxist theory is so simple that even an uneducated person can know which class he belongs to and who his enemy is.

To disrupt the impact of the proletariat on their rule, vested interests in the United States created the theory of identity politics.

The main feature of the so-called identity politics is the political movement based on identity. In detail, the American ruling class differentiates between groups with different external characteristics. For example, people are divided into black, gay, Asian, transgender, and so on. All the demands of the proletariat are anti-oppression. However, the ruling class does not speak of anti-oppression, only labels. For example, today, the ruling class designs policies to care for black people. Then other groups will be dissatisfied and start to hate black people. Then, the ruling class develops an approach to taking care of homosexuals. The homosexuals are satisfied, and other groups are dissatisfied. By analogy, these policies are similar, but the ruling class has to formulate them separately and distribute benefits according to various labels. Finally, the contradiction between the ruling class and the proletariat is transformed into a conflict between labels. This is the so-called identity politics.

In the Marxist view, the only enemy of the American proletariat is the ruling class itself. However, through identity politics, the proletariat has become enemies of each other because of their different identities, and the real enemy is hidden behind the scenes.

Only a party based on a precise class can formulate an effective movement program. For example, the working class will hope to form a Labour Party and establish a sound social welfare system. To ensure the quality of people's work and life, the bourgeoisie will want to develop a liberal party, reduce the market regulation, and facilitate them to squeeze the labor income of the proletariat. However, it is difficult for political parties established by external identities to have precise demands. Suppose a black party was set; what else could they do but demand better welfare for all blacks? When underclass blacks label themselves black Americans, their enemies change from vested interests to groups of other colors. Yet the vast majority of other groups are also proletarians. This will only lead to infighting the proletariat rather than genuinely resisting the oppression of those with vested interests.

Only when every proletarian American realizes that he is an American, not a so-called African-American or Asian-American and that his enemies are vested interests of the United States and not other fellow Americans can unite and make a nation better instead of putting your group at odds with other groups.

The.Black Atlantic

Overall, I have a high opinion of the film. The film's exploration of the sense of national origin and freedom is excellent. Although it deeply touched my sensibilities, I felt that the film's discussion of resistance to the oppression of slavery was not spot on and even worthy of criticism. I am afraid I have to disagree with the film's dialogue about the Haitian revolution, which is highly regarded.

Haiti, the world's first black republic. Never before in history have enslaved people overthrown their masters.

The history of the Haitian Revolution is briefly summarized in the film as the overthrow of the French colonists by enslaved Black people, the unification of a black republic, and the establishment of equality as the basis of the state. By this logic, it would seem that Haiti has a great history and is still a country with a bright future. However, the truth is the exact opposite.

On February 22, 2021, the UN Security Council met on the issue of Haiti. China's Deputy Representative to the UN, Ambassador Geng Shuang, severely criticized the Republic of Haiti. He pointed out that the Haitian people do not seem to see their future and that the Haitian government and leaders bear the primary responsibility for the current situation of disappointment and despair. The country's governance has been highly unsuccessful for a long time, with endless battles, inactive politicians, and repeated abuses of power and corruption.

Generally, the Chinese government rarely openly criticizes the internal affairs of foreign countries. Yet, Haiti is a country that recognizes the divisive regime in Taipei and has a low level of national development. One hundred eighty-nine countries participated in the UN Human Development Index ranking in 2019. Haiti ranked 169th, surprisingly followed by war-torn Afghanistan, which has been at war for years.

From the looks of it, Haiti is a garbage dump inhabited by millions of people. Less than half a million people have access to the fruits of modern civilization. No one would threaten me with hell if I were a Haitian civilian. Haiti is not in Africa and has not had a foreign war for decades, yet the country is ridiculously backward.

There are several layers to Haiti's backwardness that I believe are responsible.

First, most people understand Haiti's severe economic burden after independence. When enslavers ruled it, the Haitian government grew very little food on the island to highlight the economic benefits of plantations. It mainly grew cash crops in exchange for food. In addition, the extreme oppression of the enslavers led to most blacks becoming expendable. The average life expectancy of 21 years made it difficult for them to live their whole life. After independence, however, blacks wanted to spend their entire lives on the island, leading to a severe ration crisis. The conversion of coffee and cotton plantations to rations made cash crops less internationally competitive than during the colonial era. In addition, after independence, the Haitian Negroes drove out the French land forces, but no navy existed. It was still necessary to be recognized by the European and American powers to sell their products. However, Europe was less willing to recognize Haiti as a country with independent trade needs. Haiti had to give France 60 million francs in reparations, putting a heavy burden on the economy.

However, Haiti was once one of the most economically valuable islands in the world. Tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, and coffee were all of outstanding quality in quantity. On the eve of independence, the island supplied France with two-thirds of its imports and exports in the late 18th century. France was also a global colonial empire. On this basis, after independence, even with the colonial era's economic burdens, Haiti should improve for two centuries.

There must be a deeper reason for this. Most people believe that it is also because Haiti has not had any leaders with long-term goals for a long time. Most rulers were greedy dictators who trusted nothing but violence. In 1805, just after Haiti's independence, Dessalines, who had inherited Toussaint's military legacy, crowned himself emperor and established Haiti's first empire. But only a year later, he was assassinated. After him, whichever dictator came to power, to satisfy his desire for enjoyment and to raise money for the military, he was keen to restore the plantation slavery of the colonial era, and the oppression of ordinary blacks was even more brutal than that of the European colonizers.

In recent times, President Hayti changed once every year or two, and only in recent years did he barely achieve a few peaceful handovers. But no president has been able to make sweeping changes to Haitian society. For decades, the only thing each Haitian president has focused on is asking for a little foreign aid. And yet, state governance throughout Haiti remains very poor. In his criticism of Haiti, Ambassador Geng Shuang pointed out that the United Nations has invested at least $8 billion in aid over the last 30 years to help Haiti emerge from the crisis, but it has not worked.

Historically, Haiti's dozens of brutal and incompetent rulers are the direct cause of Haiti's backwardness, but that explanation still doesn't convince me. After all, Haiti has been almost 100 regime changes in over 200 years, and the odds are that these presidents and warlords cannot all be inherently cruel and incompetent contrarians. By comparison, Dominica, to the east of Haiti, also went through a period of successive warlord rule but now has a per capita economy ten times that of Haiti. To explain Haiti's backwardness entirely in terms of the personal qualities of the dictator is still, in effect, to attribute the problem to nebulous luck or ethnic identity. As a materialist, I cannot accept such an answer.

I think the real problem in Haiti is that the revolution was too violent and changed the social system too quickly.

For the revolutionaries, revolting against the colonizers was their only reason for solidarity, and destroying the old system was their only common agenda. Once the colonizers left, and the officers found themselves with complete freedom of action, they did not even know how to deprive steadily as the old rulers had done but would only treat the population as a one-time object of extraction and impose a more brutal and murderous rule.

Haiti inherited only a tiny material heritage and military organization left by the colonizers but wholly abandoned all the historical experience of social organization and started entirely from scratch to create a civilized society while competing economically and militarily with other countries. So within two hundred years, the spectacle and violence of thousands of other countries were repeated, and finally, even the material base was depleted.

Before independence, Haiti was a plantation colony. But to maintain a prosperous colony, it was not enough to have colonists and enslaved Black people but also to have a middle class responsible for managing repression and commercial operations. 89% of Haiti's population was black in 1789. However, in addition to colonial officials and the original plantation owners, tens of thousands of lower-class whites and mestizos ran commerce, organized daily supplies, and provided technical services.

On the eve of the Haitian Revolution, the boundaries between classes and races on the island were apparent, and the confrontation of interests was sharper than in France itself. After the Haitian Revolution, each class suffered heavy losses. After the War of Independence, the 500,000 enslaved Black people were reduced by half, while 40,000 whites were left with only 10,000 of mixed race. 1801 saw Toussaint tricked and killed by the French, leading to violent class and racial retaliation by his successors. By the time the War of Independence was over, the middle class had disappeared mainly, and blacks had lost the agency to inherit the ability to rule in modern Europe. After the French killed Toussaint, subsequent rulers were left to figure out their ruling experience from scratch, as the early chiefs had done thousands of years earlier. Unable to make real compromises or propose progressive ideologies, they often ran into walls left and right and finally worshipped violence nakedly to rebel against the previous rulers and sweep away their political system. For the foreseeable future, Haitian is still a desperate country where human society advances in the middle of constant do-nothing.

Throughout human history, each new era is born only through the destruction of the previous one. But this law is often reduced to a misconception that the overthrow of the old system must be progressing, and some people will even directly turn the entire system of the old society upside down and say that this is a new era. Based on a similar logic, Haiti's first emperor, Defalin, purged the white and mestizo classes and dragged Haiti into more than a century of turmoil.

The root cause of Haiti's backwardness as a country was the overly homogeneous composition of society in the early years of independence, the conflicting goals of the classes capable of exploring a new era, and the enslaved Black people who made up the bulk of the population. Very few sensible leaders could only maintain the balance between the two social groups. But after the French cheated President Toussaint, the trust between the social groups was destroyed by the war, and the society lost its basis of unity. The ability to organize most civilized societies was lost, and it had to regress to the early days of civilization. Even to this day, Haiti is still a failed state.

Telling so much about the reasons for the failure of modern Haiti does not seem to be the same as the original purpose of our course. However, as a materialist, I believe that the core of our course is to be aware of the many ethnic problems in the United States at this stage. However, a clear understanding is insufficient to suggest appropriate ways to change the current situation. For example, just because whites have oppressed blacks for a long time, we cannot just assume that blacks are all inferior and miserable or even demand that all whites repay their ancestors for their exploitation of blacks.

I believe that the complexity of the ethnic issue itself goes far beyond what can be discussed in our course. Even when it comes to a specific ethnic group, such as the Indian issue that we discussed earlier, there is severe exploitation and oppression within the same Indian tribe and between different tribes, as evidenced by the Indian chiefs who oppressed others in Wounded Knee. We cannot simply assume that white people must oppress the Indians and that the Indians must be the oppressed who suffer. Returning to the black issue, we cannot believe that the solution to oppression is anti-oppression and that the answer to the massacre is a reverse massacre. We can see from the history of the development of Haiti as a country rebelling against the colonizers and destroying the old system is not the solution to oppression. How solve the problem of vulnerable minorities requires very much more inquiry.

Emancipated in 1862, why are black Americans still unable to breathe?

The entire film is very in-depth and is, in my opinion, the best discussion of any of the films shown in the course. The point of view of the film is generally that even after the abolition of slavery, American society continued to systematically discriminate against blacks, even as the state used the Thirteenth Amendment to force blacks freed from black slavery into slavery again, but this time as slaves of the state, as capitalist machines. I want to build on the film to discuss my other understandings of this status quo. Abolition alone is irresponsible. Without in-depth exposure to the relevant historical sources, most people would assume that after the Civil War, abolitionist blacks were given valuable freedom and were able to improve their quality of life significantly.

However, before and after the Civil War, some Southerners blamed Lincoln for the fact that blacks were not doing well after being freed and that their standard of living had declined. This was true, after all, the industrial level of America was still deficient at that time, and the bottom workers had such a hard time that it was even more unfriendly to the newly added black labor force.

Contrary to what most people think, black labor was less intense in the South than in the North, and the death rate was relatively low. While Southern Negroes still had tobacco to chew and sugar cane wine to drink during the farming season, free Northern Negroes entered the factories just like the European working class and would be exploited to death within a few years.

The American literary masterpiece "Gone with the Wind" is very mild about slavery. The book argues that the North was not responsible for the abolition of enslaved people alone, but it also led to a surge in social crime. The book portrays Southern families who kept black slaves year-round, some of whom were not low-status inside their homes and were not oppressed to any great extent.

Of course, I will not defend slavery because I refuse to choose between two devils. In the eyes of capitalists, blacks are tools. In the eyes of enslavers, blacks are property. The former lived like no human being, and the latter were not appropriately treated as human beings themselves.

After the Civil War, African-Americans were emancipated, and this emancipation was only from the commodity back to the oppressed proletariat. 1868 saw the enfranchisement of blacks, and 1870 saw the right to vote for men. However, after Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson, a Southerner, took over as president and let the white supremacists in the Southern states off the hook with a segregation policy, collectively known as the Jim Crow laws. The following 100 years of segregation forever caused blacks to lose the starting line in economic, educational, and social consciousness.

To this day, many people don't look at the process, only the results, so whenever it comes to blacks, there are always racists who like to excite and criticize blacks for not trying themselves and not blaming others, that where there are blacks, there is a crime, they don't study and don't do their jobs properly. However, it is conceivable that this is never an ethnic problem for blacks. There is still a long way to go for each to live freely and equally in the human world.

Why has the problem of racial discrimination in the police system not been solved?

One thing that struck me was that after the Black Lives Matter movement happened in 2020, many American conservative foreign media were defending American police. Even many Chinese self-publishers were speaking out, saying that black people. However, they only makeup thirteen percent of the U.S. population, have a high crime rate and create fifty-two percent of all crimes, so they deserve to be violently enforced. But if American police worked according to the logic of the conservative media, the shooting rate would be directly correlated with the violent crime rate.

However, statistics show that the homicide rate of American police and the violent crime rate is mainly unrelated. The main influencing factor is whether or not protests of restrained violence are accepted. Moreover, as mentioned in the film, prospective studies have been done in the United States. Tests on police officers have proven that when confronted with black targets, officers are more inclined to shoot and have shorter reaction times. More seriously, the judiciary tends to impose heavier sentences on blacks after arrest.

Why does the problem of racial discrimination in the police system remain unresolved? I believe that American police officers do whatever they want because the interest groups created by police unions are too big and have kidnapped American politics.

American police organizations declare themselves to be the pillars of society and have several union systems within their system that rely on acquaintance society to defend their interests. These police unions not only provide various social services to their members' families but also go to Congress to lobby for spending budgets. But there is no shortage of money in the police system. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, total judicial spending in the United States in 2015 was 226.1 billion dollars. That's nearly twice as much as China's military spending that year. In addition, the Bureau of Justice Statistics ignores the budget for the police system, which maintains law and order. Some have estimated that the U.S. spends about 500 billion dollars yearly on police and prisons, almost as much as the U.S. military. Many police officers are paid more than 200,000 dollars to patrol places with little danger. If they give a little of their income to support the unions, the unions can put together a lot of money to influence policy. In other words, the police union system is a classic feudalist group. Whenever violent law enforcement causes social unrest, the government tries to push for police reform. Still, due to union resistance, it only ends up removing the officers involved from their jobs. Even after some police officers were fired, the guild could find a way to get him into another department within the police system again. From these examples, the police are one of the most stubborn interest groups in the United States, much like the dockers and doctors.

In addition, the U.S. has a high gun ownership rate, and police should be more dangerous in their daily work than in China, so can this explain part of their privileges? If the high gun ownership rate causes danger, it is only suitable that American police should be against universal gun ownership. But most American police officers are Trump fans and never feel that the proliferation of guns is a problem. The United States has previously done authoritative surveys of police officers, asking whether the crime would be reduced if civilian possession of magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition were banned. However, ninety-five percent of police officers agreed that magazines had nothing to do with crime, and another ninety percent believed that having armed citizens at the shooting scene would reduce casualties from wounded shootings. So the American police is a feudal interest group, even has been similar to the warlords. The real victims of gun ownership by American citizens can only be civilians.

Although there are many shootings in the United States, there are very few interracial shootings. Blacks kill blacks, whites kill whites, and most whites who die from guns commit suicide. But blacks who die from bullets are homicides, so blacks are most supportive of getting into guns. From this comparison, rather than encouraging citizens to rebel against the government, allowing guns under U.S. law is designed to give police officers a reason to abuse violence and, incidentally, to cover up the problem of racial discrimination in the police system.

Why is Your Face so Red?

Hello everyone, today I would like to answer a question asked by a classmate.

On September 27th, I participated in a group discussion for the first time in the course. One of the students in the group asked curiously: Are you a little nervous? Why is your face so red?

Thanks to his concern, his question made me ponder. In fact, I have been asked the same question by countless people.

Hi, Eren. Why is your face so red?

At the very beginning, I was embarrassed by this question.

As a newcomer to middle school, I had very low self-esteem. I was always worried that giving the answer to the question would make my classmates feel contempt for me. I just had to tell them I was more nervous, so my face was redder.

However, this is not the case. I was born in a small city called Barkam on the western plateau of Sichuan. The redness on my face is plateau redness, which is my ancestors, my ethnicity, and my hometown, engraved on my body throughout my life.

Barkam is 2200 meters above sea level, and the weather is cold all year round. It is a small, simple city, so small that there are no skyscrapers, no playgrounds, and only in 2011 did it get a movie theater. However, many Tibetan, Qiang, Hui, and Han ethnic groups gather in this small city, and I am a Qiang person.

Until I entered middle school, I was not ashamed of which ethnicity I belonged to or where I came from. However, my family told me to mention less about my hometown and never to say that I am a minority. I was taken aback, and after school started, I seemed to understand some of the reasons why.

When I was in elementary school, I did not study English, but I did study Tibetan. And the Chinese I learned was not called Yuwen but Guowen. My Chinese and English were abysmal when I first entered middle school. Whenever I stumbled over my poor English, there seemed to be countless eyes annotating me. They asked me, "Where are you from, and why are you so bad at English?"

So much so that I felt susceptible about my hometown and identity with my mouth shut. And when people asked me curiously, Why is your face so red? I was always worried that it would reveal my identity and ethnicity, so I was always vague.

In short, I was ashamed of my hometown and my ethnicity.

Things changed when I entered high school. There was a call for travel articles about Northwest Sichuan in my campus magazine. I was excited to write an essay about my hometown memories but then submit it anonymously. I was always worried that my classmates would know where I was from. Still, I was very excited but apprehensive about submitting my article. Surprisingly, my article was well received. I even wanted to proudly say that this article is written by myself, and it's about my dearest hometown. However, I didn't, I still felt shy in my bones, yet I had a powerful voice inside. I wanted to speak loudly about my hometown and my ethnicity.

When I went to college, I was once again confronted with the curiosity of my roommate. Where are you from, and why are you so red in the face. This time, I plucked up my courage, I came from the western Sichuan plateau, and the redness on my face was plateau redness. Surprisingly, they were interested and happy to discuss their hometowns with me. It turns out that everyone's hometown has a fascinating story, and they are so different from each other. It turns out that everyone has his own identity, though they may not necessarily be an ethnic minority.

I felt that the shy corners of my heart were melted away and replaced by gratitude and pride in my hometown.

Today, people still ask me, "Why is your face so red?"

This time, I no longer feel shy. I will happily say that this is the plateau redness, the mark left imprinted on my body by my hometown.

Yes, this is the permanent mark that my hometown carved on the face of her distant children. One day several years from now, when I am far away from home, the redness of my face will also be the mark that proves where I came from.

I firmly believe that one day in the future, when I cross the pacific ocean and attend an academic oral report on the other side of our planet, some researchers will ask me this:

Oh, my little research scientist, your research and oral report are profound. But why are you feeling so nervous? We all see your face went red throughout the presentation.

I will be proud to say, Thanks for your appreciation. However, sir, I am not nervous. I am a Chinese who feels proud of his motherland and hometown, and the red blush on my cheeks is plateau redness, which is the imprint of my dearest hometown on her distant children. And I would be proud and grateful for it all my life.

临别项脊轩

项脊轩，吾旧居也。室仅丈余，然可容咸家三人，安栖数十载... 根据记忆里母亲经常与我所言，她在九十年代末与父亲结婚后几年，工作便从汶川迁至马尔康，而后全家便居住在这座川西北的小城。我先是在这儿出生，而后在这儿度过了童年，直到 12 岁念中学之前离开。其后至今，通共驻留不足百日。虽为故乡，却总觉得相去甚远... 2020 年 8 月，我匆匆离开北京与项脊轩道别，然而疫情反复，回家 9 日后便匆匆离去，而这似乎却已是永别... 此文写于 2022 年 3 月 14 日，父母告知我他们计划将项脊轩出售，以供给我在海外的学业与生活所需。我深感惭愧，然而对故乡模糊的记忆却让我想不起太多，遂对着一些旧时的照片写作此文。川西北，虽不至苦寒，然全年天色清冷，海拔甚高。中国古语言，一方水土养一方人，与我而言，故乡予我的不仅有深入骨髓的川人之性情火热与羌民之粗犷豪爽，还有一生镌刻在我面庞的高原红。正是如此，在中学时代，我在人群中的合照总是无奈的格外显眼，其一是我动作总是格外夸张粗放，其二是面庞的高原红在一众面色白润的合照者当中，总是格外出众。与我而言，高原红是从小刻在我面庞的印记。在很长的一段时间，我都觉得这样与众不同的面容总让我与同学不同，骨子里会觉得有几分羞涩。加之在成都，乃至全国，故乡总是出了名的落后贫困，周围来自成都本地或者其川东盆地的其他同学提到故乡时总是带有几分鄙夷，更让我为自己的与众不同而感到羞涩。就连母亲来成都陪伴我的时候，偶尔也会给我说到我的脸白了一些，更像一个成都的小孩了，初中时可能还会为此感到高兴。于是中学时，我总为面庞的高原红感到几分羞愧，就如同儿时的文学作品里的那些孩童，会因为裤子上的补丁而不敢起身回答老师的提问；又好比龙应台笔下的父亲，开着货运面包车送龙应台去台大授课时会远远地停在校外，苦涩地说这不是送教授的车。然而，过了很久之后，我逐渐意识到，这是故乡刻在她远方的孩子面庞永久的印记。尽管那时候我只是莫名感到有一天我会走出国门，然而我却坚信，直到若干年后的一天，当我远渡重洋，面庞的高原红也会是证明我来自哪里的印记。甚至我还为这个想法在一次英文奖学金答辩中谈到： I firmly believe that one day in the future, when I cross the pacific ocean and attend an academic report on the other side of our planet, some researchers will ask me like this: "Oh, Mr. Zhao, your presentation is really eloquent.

https://zhaochenyang20.github.io/2022/03/31/%E5%87%BA%E5%9B%BD/%E9%A1%B9%E8%84%8A%E8%BD%A9%E5%BF%97/

I am not your Nigger

This week's documentary is more lyrical than the previous ones. Some of the statements are moving.

The fifth and final chapter, "I Am Not A Nigger," elucidates the modern-day condition of Black America by tying the strands of the previous four chapters together. In the closing scene, Baldwin asserts, "I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive, so I'm forced to be an optimist. But the future of the Negro in this country is precisely as bright or dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people whether they will face and deal with and embrace this stranger whom they have accused so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary to have a 'nigger' in the first place. Because I am not a nigger, I am a man! But if you think I'm a nigger, you need him. And the white population of this country has got to ask itself—North and South, because it's one country, and for a Negro there is no difference between the North and the South. It's just a difference in the way they castrate you, but the fact of the castration is the American fact—If I am not the nigger here, and you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the country's future depends on whether it can ask itself that question."

The First Black President

And what I most want to discuss is Baldwin's expectations for the first black president.

"It's conceivable that in 40 years in America, we might have a Negro president." He makes clear the absurdity and bitterness with which many Black Americans received the remark: "Black people have been here all along, for the entire 400 years since European colonisation began. They were kidnapped, brought to America against their will, and subjugated into subhuman, slave-labourer conditions. And yet they must wait 40 more years to have a remote chance of being permitted into the highest office in the land?"

Unfortunately, Baldwin's expectations have been fulfilled more than five years after the end of Obama's term. However. There are still so many rivers to cross.

America's Racial Problems Have Not Melted Away

In 1961, the year of Obama's birth, there existed in the American South a system of racial apartheid that separated the races from the cradle to the grave. In some states, even Obama's conception involving an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas would have been a criminal offence.

When demonstrators assembled in August 1963 to hear Martin Luther King deliver the, I Have a Dream Speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Few would have thought that a black man would one day take the oath of office at the other end of the National Mall.

Likewise, how many of the protesters bludgeoned by white policemen on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965 would have dared to imagine that, 50 years later, they would cross that same bridge hand in hand with the country's first black president?

But a black man ran the White House more than half a century later.

2009, Barack Obama sealed his racial legacy the moment he sealed victory in the 2008 election - a black man would occupy a White House built by enslaved people, a history-defying and history-making achievement.

Yet racial firsts achieved by Barack Hussein Obama can present a distorted view of history and convey a misleading sense of progress. By their very nature, they are a singular achievement, a milestone indicative of black advance rather than a destination point.

Hollywood did not become colourblind the moment in 1964 that Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win the best actor at the Academy Awards any more than discrimination ended in the justice system when Thurgood Marshall first donned the billowing robes of a Supreme Court jurist. America's racial problems have not melted away merely because Obama has spent eight years in the White House. Far from it.

I think there are two main problems.

Obama did not meet the expectations of the people.

Achieving anything on the racial front that surpassed becoming the country's first black president was always going to be daunting. So indeed, the insurmountable problem for Obama was that he reached the mountaintop on day one of his presidency.

Obama did not win the election because he was a black man. It was indeed because America facing an economic crisis and embroiled in two unpopular wars was crying out for change. But, His triumph was misinterpreted as national atonement for the original sin of slavery and segregation. Public opinion surveys highlight what the public expects from race problems. Not long after Obama took office in 2009, a New York Times/CBS News poll suggested two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. During the 2017 summer's racial turbulence, that poll found a complete reversal. Now 69% of Americans assessed race relations to be mostly wrong.

Obama has failed to bring his excellent rhetorical skills to bear on the American dilemma of the ongoing black struggle but prioritised the LGBT community's campaign for equality.

But while he was happy to cloak himself in the mantle of America's first black president, he did not set out to pursue a black presidency. He did not want his years in office to be defined by his skin colour.

Thus, Obama's optimistic racism has not met the American public's expectations.

He Did Not Have A Conventional Black Upbringing

Why has Obama always been overly optimistic about the race? From my point of view, it is because he did not have a conventional black upbringing.

Obama spent his formative years in Hawaii, America's most racially integrated state, and the whites he encountered, namely his mother and grandparents, were doting and loving.

Obama was not the victim of discrimination in the same way as a black kid growing up in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, or even New York or Illinois. As a result, he may have underestimated the forces that would seek to paralyse his presidency and impede racial advance more broadly.