THE TWO AMERICAS

The Two Americas

THE AMERICAN DICHOTOMY

There were two women, one white and the other black. The white woman is wealthy while the black woman is of modest means and had a criminal record. Both women, according to prosecutors broke the law in their respective cases. The white woman was accused, and convicted of offering bribes ($15,000) in order to raise the SAT scores of her daughter while the black woman was convicted for "illegally" voting about three years ago. 

The black woman's action was deemed illegal because she voted while on a court ordered supervisory probation. The black woman claimed she did this in ignorance and the vote was thrown out anyway. But the prosecutor had other ideas. He convinced the judge that the black woman's previous convictions proved she is a potential lawbreaker. The judge obliged and handed the black woman a 5-year prison sentence. Yes, you heard that right, five years in a United States prison for voting inadvertently. A few days ago, the wealthy white woman got a grand total of 14 days in prison for offering bribes to influence the examination results of her child. 

The white woman is actress Felicity Hoffman and the black woman is Crystal Mason. Though Crystal Mason is out of jail on appeal, she spent several months in jail and the conviction affected her family so adversely that their home was on the verge of foreclosure. Crystal now relies on charity to stay financially afloat. The case of the two women represents the two Americas many non-white people, especially blacks have to deal with all their lives. One America works and appears specially made for whites while the other not only does not work for non-whites but also seeks to destroy them. And there are hundreds of such barefaced judicial genocide in the "land of the free and home of the brave" 

WEB Dubois once said, "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line". Whether you are talking of wars, poor education, poor medical facilities, poor infrastructure and ineffective leadership the people who suffer the most are the non-whites of the world. The most obvious contrast in color between people in America is that of blacks and whites. Being black increases the likelihood of getting killed, maimed, incarcerated, disrespected and most importantly criminalized in the eyes of society for the slightest infringement - even an inadvertent one. Innocent blacks; whether adults or kids, men or women, young or old suffer egregious injustices, not just in America but also in the western world. In addition to Crystal's case described above, another black, homeless woman, Tanya Mcdowell was recently sentenced to five years in prison for using a friend's address in documents submitted for her son's school admission. Obviously, the authorities would prefer the kid become a drug mule in the neighbourhood so he can end up in the labour camps called prisons. 

The power relationship between whites and blacks has not changed significantly in the past seven hundred years. When it comes to black lives in a white world, blacks are considered less than human.  A prominent US official once called racism and its attendant oppressiveness an American "birth defect". Cases such as described above are many but only a few are exposed for what they are - an organized institutional racism that is based on fear and pseudoscience. The system is rigged, and trying to get justice while living in the same space with a White Supremacist culture has proven difficult for hundreds of years. If Blacks are obviously not real citizens of the United States it is time to move to where black citizenship is free - Africa.  

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