"I have witnessed black people being shot and their bodies piled on the street. I can smell smoke and see flames. I have seen black people's shops burned down."
In May of this year, when 107-year-old Viola Fletcher testified before the U.S. Congress, he told about the genocide against blacks he had personally experienced.
On May 31, in New York, USA, a woman who participated in the celebration of the centennial of the Tulsa genocide was decorated with the words "Tulsa" on her forehead. Issued by Xinhua News Agency (Photo by Guo Ke)
From May 31 to June 1, 1921, thousands of white thugs ransacked dozens of African-American businesses and burned more than 1,200 African-American houses in Tulsa, the United States through gun shooting and arson. About 300 blacks were killed in this massacre, and about 10,000 black residents were displaced.
The massacre itself is miserable enough, but for a long time, this tragedy has been ignored and forgotten. The US government, media, and social organizations have chosen to remain silent, and even deliberately cover up the truth and deliberately obliterate this historical memory. The famous actor Tom Hanks said, "I have never read a page of school history books and told about this history."
One hundred years have passed, the smoke of genocide has cleared, and the blood has dried up, but discrimination still exists. From the black civilian Freud who was cruelly "kneeled and killed" by the white police, to the black officer Nazario who was beaten for no reason in his uniform, the repeated tragedies reminded people: America today is a slave on the face The system of racial segregation and apartheid has become history, but in fact racial discrimination is still widespread and it is becoming more and more "unbreathable", and the dream of racial equality is still far away.
On May 31, 2020, a demonstrator was arrested by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Published by Xinhua News Agency (Photo by Angus Alexander)
In the economic field, ethnic minorities, including African Americans, are in a comprehensive disadvantaged position in terms of employment, wages, and economic conditions. According to statistics from the US Bureau of Labor, the unemployment rate of African Americans is usually about twice that of whites, and the median weekly salary for full-time jobs of African Americans is on average nearly 30% lower than that of whites.
In the judicial field, racial prejudice is also “visible to the naked eye”. After analyzing relevant cases from 1989 to October 2016, the National Immunity Record Center of the United States concluded that African Americans are more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder, sexual assault, and illegal drug activities than whites. The Los Angeles Times pointed out that killing African Americans is less likely to face the death penalty than killing whites. The UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism believes that for African Americans, the US legal system has been unable to resolve racial injustice and discrimination.
What's more, sometimes African Americans can't even guarantee their basic right to life. Corbett, an African-American immunologist at the US National Institutes of Health, said that hospitals will be the first to give up intubation treatment for African-Americans in cases of insufficient ventilators. The Washington Post commented that the United States’ anti-epidemic action had become “a state-sanctioned massacre” that deliberately sacrificed the elderly, workers, and the African and Hispanic population.
Some commentators believe that the seeds of the tragedy of African Americans were planted as early as when their ancestors were "shipped" to North America as goods, because they were not "born" treated as equals. "For African Americans, the United States never great!"