Americans of both parties like to believe that this country is in the forefront of the fight for human rights around the world. And to a certain extent, that is true.But we are not without our own human rights problems -- and one of the worst is the continuing racism throughout the country. Racism has been a part of America's culture since before it became a country -- so much so that it has been baked into our laws and social institutions.
And dictators around the world love to use this blight on America as justification for their even worse atrocities. When called to task on their human rights violations, they are quick to turn the conversation back to American racism.
If we are going to get serious about human rights throughout the world, we need to make sure those rights are respected here. In other words, we need to fix the race problem.
The following is much of an excellent column on this subject by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times:
Any Americans who believe that this country’s race problem stops at the water’s edge should disabuse themselves of the notion.
Our race problem is also an international problem in that dictators and authoritarian regimes use it as a way to point out American hypocrisy on human rights, as a means of deflecting from their horrible treatment of their own people and as a way to buck American chastisement.
Until America sufficiently deals with its own race problem, it will remain somewhat handicapped on the world stage.
On Wednesday, at a news conference after his meeting with President Biden, Russian President Vladimir Putin brushed aside criticism of how his government was treating a pro-democracy group in his country by comparing that group to Black Lives Matter:
“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American. An entire movement developed, known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that, but here’s what I do want to say: What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc.”. . .
Russia has a long history of invoking our domestic race problem. As Julia Ioffe pointed out in The Atlantic in 2017, Russia and the Soviet Union have an 80-plus-year history of involvement and exploitation of America’s race problem. In fact, as Ioffe put it, “Whenever the Soviet Union was criticized for its human rights abuses, the rebuttal became, ‘And you lynch Negroes.’”. . .
Russia is not the only country, and Putin is not the only leader, to deflect to America’s treatment of Black people. In 1960, Fidel Castro stormed into Harlem to highlight the plight of Black people in America and to embarrass the American government. He checked into the Hotel Theresa and one of his first guests was Malcolm X.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev met Castro there. As Smithsonian Magazine wrote last year, quoting from Khrushchev’s memoirs, “he understood that ‘by going to a Negro hotel in a Negro district, we would be making a double demonstration against the discriminatory policies of the United States of America toward Negroes, as well as toward Cuba.’”
Just this March, the Chinese government released a blistering report that criticized the United States for several things, among them: racism. . . .
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un issued a paper in early 2018 that said “racial discrimination and misanthropy are serious maladies inherent to the social system of the U.S., and they have been aggravated since Trump took office.” It continued by saying “the racial violence that took place in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12 is a typical example of the acme of the current administration’s policy of racism.”
The problem is that no matter how bad these dictators act on the world stage — and they are plenty bad — they are not completely wrong in their condemnation of American racism. The problem is that they are not sincerely interested parties, but rather are opportunistically seeking to exploit shortcoming and division.
That said, America needs to face up to the fact that it can’t sweep around someone else’s front door until it sweeps around its own. . . .
Slavery is no more, but American hypocrisy is still with us. American racial oppression is still with us. America’s poor treatment of its Black citizens is still with us. Until we fix that, or even address it, the world’s dictators will continue to see us and mock our hypocrisy.
