DEMOCRATIC AMERICA IS BEING TESTED – PART VI
Discrimination has been practiced in Europe since ancient times. It has created the caste system in India. It was, and still is, used as a means or weapon to stay on top. For a long time, it has been seen as ugly and wrong.
White people themselves had fought fiercely against discrimination in Europe. But the struggle was hard and almost impossible to overcome because discrimination had been built into the fabric of societies in Europe and because discrimination was based on wealth and status (another topic worth discussing at another time). Waves of discriminated white moved to the New World, to try to create and build a society supposedly free of discrimination.
Two of the most notable efforts were Thomas Jefferson’s declaration and Abraham Lincoln’s fighting the Civil War.
Jefferson did not just possess an extraordinary insight but was honest and brave. Living in an environment where everyone, his friends and his constituents (he was a politician if you did not know), owned slaves, he had the courage to declare that “all men are created equal”, meaning, unambiguously, that white was just a color like any other color on the skin of a person. With his declaration, he pointed out the irrationality of the claim that white, just like a color on a piece of clothes, was superior to other colors.
Credits should also be given to his colleagues, the Founding Fathers of this country who endorsed his declaration as the new country’s Declaration of Independence, which has been as important as the Constitution of the U.S.A. in creating and building Democracy in America.
Documents about the Civil War recorded Lincoln as saying that he had always seen slavery as unjust. He was even engaged in a devastating war, the American Civil War, against his own race to correct their wrong. Along the way, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation not just abolishing slavery in the U.S. but changing the focus of the Civil War from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves.
(Next, Part VII)
