Blaxit - The Darker the Skin, the Less Accepted You Are in the United States

 

Trump’s “fine people” marching in Charlottesville

Protest against “I can’t breath” murder of George Floyd 

One of my closest friends, a highly educated patent attorney who born in Tehran who speaks three languages without any accent (Farsi, English and German), a US citizen, finally elected to move most of his legal practice to Germany. Why? Eschewing a flashy lifestyle (he is quite successful), he drove an older car. As a person of color, over the years, he tells me he was pulled over 38 times for no good reason here in Los Angeles. The officers seldom believed that he was a fully licensed attorney, even when he produced his bar admission card. He still maintains a very successful international patent law practice, but most of his time is spent in Munich, which he describes as much more tolerant and more of a democracy than blue, multicultural Los Angeles.

Sad, but as MAGA has risen to define an entire political party, racial and cultural discrimination, which has always been an American problem, has gotten so much worse. And as Kate Linthicum, writing for the October 10th Los Angeles Times tells us, an increasing number of people of color, particularly African-Americans who can trace their American lineage back hundreds of years, are emigrating to nations all over the world, from Latin America and Asia, some even to Africa. The pattern of Black writers, artists and performers moving overseas - Paris has always been a favorite - is nothing new, but since the MAGA movement has stood tall as White Christian nationalists embrace white supremacy, the emigration of gifted and educated Black Americans has increased considerably.

“There are no official statistics on how many have left the country. But academics say it may be one of the most significant emigrations of African Americans since the first half of last century, when many Black artists decamped to Europe… The late writer James Baldwin, who was part of that earlier wave, said he moved to France in 1948 ‘with the theory that nothing worse would happen to me there than had already happened to me here.’

“Seven decades later, the U.S. is still grappling with racism, with Black people twice as likely as white people to be killed by police and Black workers earning less on the dollar than their white counterparts. In Florida, a new law forces teachers to downplay the impact of slavery, and across the country, far-right activists are seeking bans on books touching on Black history.” Linthicum. That ugly American proclivity is hardly relegated to Black Americans. As Asian-Americans found themselves under attack, unprovoked and often brutal, as Black churches were fire-bombed or attacked by white extremists armed with AR-15s, as Latinos were referred to by Donald Trump when early in his initial candidacy as border-crossers who were criminals “bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists,” it became ok to shoot them and ask questions later. Racism, often disguised with other words, was legitimized.

But for Americans, black by skin tone, who have been in the country far longer than most other ethnic groups, this exodus should make most White Americans take a closer look at what we have become. And as I point out in my recent Extremists’ Basic Tool: Vilification and Dehumanization of Chosen Targets blog, this rising tendency to attack and demean people of color or people of minority faiths is an unhealthy trend not just for the targets of the resulting discrimination but even for those who represent that class of White Christian traditionalists.

Simply put, democracy cannot work where people are divided into privileged and unprivileged groups - with vastly different rights and access to opportunities - based on their basic ethnic, religious beliefs and/or biological traits. This acceptance of strata of privilege, while raising barriers to upward mobility, is about as un-American as you can get. Yet the practitioners of this profoundly class-driven demarcation refer to themselves as “patriots” and real “anti-woke” Americans.

The trickle has become a flood. “Americans of all races have been leaving the U.S. thanks to the pandemic shift to remote work. But for Black Americans, many of whom were distraught over the political and racial divisions the pandemic years highlighted, the decision to move abroad is about more than just saving money or having an adventure.

“‘It gave people time to question,’ said Chrishan Wright, who launched a podcast in 2020 that documented her move to Lisbon. She now works as a relocation consultant and is helping about a dozen families restart in Portugal. They are mostly Black professionals with children, she said, in search of ‘a better quality of life without the emotional and psychological strain.’” Linthicum.

We’re truly not sending our worst to other countries; our best are leaving because life in a racist environment has become intolerable: “Filmmaker Jameelah Nuriddin was locked down in Los Angeles during the pandemic, watching as the nation convulsed in protest over the murder of George Floyd, when she had an epiphany: ‘America does not deserve me.’

“As a Black woman, Nuriddin always tried to work twice as hard as those around her, thinking: ‘If I’m smart enough, pretty enough, successful enough ... then finally people will treat me as a human being.’… But as she grieved yet another unarmed Black man killed by police, she decided she was done trying to prove herself to a society that she felt would never really love her back.

“So Nuriddin, 39, packed her bags and left… She ended up in Costa Rica, in an idyllic beach town on the Caribbean coast that has become a hub for hundreds of Black expatriates fed up with life in the United States.” Linthicum. Our diversity, a lettuce bowl that generated a cultural mix which elevated and accelerated invention and creativity, is what made America great, an economic powerhouse like no other. What are we when all that matters in that lettuce bowl is one giant indiscriminate leaf? Who are we today? And who are the real “patriots”?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the march to autocracy and eventual decay is built on the quicksand of bias, discrimination and blame.