Millions Of People Of Color Endure Grueling Thousand Mile Trek In Effort To Enter Systemically Racist White Supremacist Hellhole

December 28, 2023 Francis Menton 

The United States: As you know, it is a systemically racist, white supremacist hellhole. It is filled with structures and barriers intended to oppress people of color and make them suffer. Or at least, you know those things if you read the usual sources from left-wing institutions and journalists. I’ll give you several examples in a moment.

But then, how to explain the undeniable fact that millions of people of color are enduring almost unimaginable hardships every day in the effort to reach and then gain entry to this hellhole. The most recent example is on the front page of today’s New York Times. The headline is “Blinken Seeks Mexico’s Help To Slow Surge”; but the accompanying photo — occupying most of the front page above the fold — is particularly revealing. A caravan of thousands of people is shown surging forward toward the U.S. border, with nearly every single visible face having a noticeably dark complexion. The photo in the online version of the article is not the identical one found in the print edition (although the photographer given credit, Juan Manuel Blanco, is the same), but the visual impression of a sea of dark faces is the same. Here is the photo in the online version of the piece:

Hasn’t anyone informed these people that in the U.S. people of color are systemically and structurally oppressed and exploited? Surely they must have access to information from top international institutions and journalism outlets as to the true conditions. Here are a few examples that you would think they would be hard pressed to miss:

• From the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, September 28, 2023: “Systemic racism pervades US police and justice systems, UN Mechanism on Racial Justice in Law Enforcement says in new report urging reform. Systemic racism against people of African descent pervades America’s police forces and criminal justice system, and US authorities must urgently step up efforts to reform them. . . . “In all the cities we went to, we heard dozens of heart-breaking testimonies on how victims do not get justice or redress. This is not new, and it’s unacceptable,” said Tracie Keesee, an expert member of the Mechanism. . . .”
• From PBS, April 12, 2022, covering a then-just-released Report from the National Urban League on alleged systemic racism: The National Urban League released its annual report on the State of Black America on Tuesday, and its findings are grim. . . . “[T]his institutional disparity based on race seems to be built into American society,” National Urban League President Marc Morial said in an interview.
• From the New England Journal of Medicine, February 25, 2021: How Structural Racism Works — Racist Policies as a Root Cause of U.S. Racial Health Inequities. . . . [There is a] growing recognition that racism has a structural basis and is embedded in long-standing social policy. This framing is captured by the term “structural racism.” . . . [R]acism is not simply the result of private prejudices held by individuals, but is also produced and reproduced by laws, rules, and practices, sanctioned and even implemented by various levels of government, and embedded in the economic system as well as in cultural and societal norms. 
•  From the National Education Association (largest K-12 teachers’ union), December 2020: White Supremacy Culture is a form of racism centered upon the belief that white people are superior to people of other racial backgrounds and that whites should politically, economically, and socially dominate non-whites. . . . [The term] also describes a political ideology and systemic oppression that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial white domination. . . . Characteristics of white supremacy that manifest in organizational culture, and are used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the full group.

And aren’t these people coming from places with socialist governments where equality and social justice prevail? An organization called WOLA has collected statistics for the country of origin of the migrants encountered at the Southern border in fiscal years 2020, 2021, and 2022. For the most recent year (2022), the six leading countries are Mexico (808,339), Guatemala (231,565), Cuba (220,908), Honduras (213,023), Venezuela (187,716) and Nicaragua (163,876). At least four (Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua) of those have been explicitly socialist in orientation for years if not decades. Cuba, a country of only about 11 million people, and controlled by the Castro regime since 1960, seems to be losing some 2% of its population every year to attempts to enter the U.S. Mexico, where the left-wing AMLO took over in 2018 from previous center-right presidents, has seen its U.S. border crossers surge from 297,711 as recently as 2020 to the more than 800,000 last year. Their people are voting with their feet.

Perhaps the people of color in these countries know something about the economic situation they will encounter in the U.S. that institutions like the UN, PBS and the NEA can’t seem to see.