How Does It Feel When the Perpetrators of Racial Segregation Become the Victims?
By: Sylvia Wohlfarth
Tags: Racism, Jim Crow, United States, Equality, BlackLivesMatter

Not having grown up in the United States and completely overwhelmed by the inhumaneness of inherent and systemic racism, I’ve begun reading up on the history of racial discrimination in the U.S.

At this moment in time, we have the medial “in your face” examples of institutionalised racism and its effects. This has led to an increased awareness here in Europe of individual countries’ own dark history and a stronger voicing of grievances among black European communities.

I have a lot of Nigerian family members, including my brother, living in the U.S. Many married, as my brother did, into Black American families. So, I am particularly interested in hearing their stories especially as most of my relatives live in the southern states where anti-Black laws were entrenched for almost a century.

An eye-opener of a moment for me was when I asked my niece, who was over from Atlanta, Georgia, last year visiting family for the first time in Europe, about her experience of racism in the U.S. I knew from her social media pages that she had many white American friends as well as Black. Her reply:

Of course, I experience micro-aggressions in different spheres of my life but that’s normal, you grow up with it, most times you ignore it. I’m lucky, I can stand up for myself. You know, too, what and where to avoid. For example, I would not want to go to Tennessee on my own. Just imagine your car breaking down in some little town or other. A lot of people hate Blacks there. I’d really be afraid.

I’ve never had to think like this.

I am aware that, to varying degrees, racism is widespread all over the world, but from a personal point of view, I am particularly interested in understanding the historic background to systemic racism in the U.S.

The question I keep asking myself the more I am confronted with accounts of racism and the debilitating effect it has on the psyche of the victims is:

How can a society, or a part of, be so cruel or so blind?

Not surprising, I came across the name, Jim Crow, who I’d always believed was the man who drew up the discriminatory laws on anti-Black racism and which I now know was not a real person but a caricature of a clumsy, dim-witted black slave.

READ: “Jim Crow law | History, Facts, & Examples”

In U.S. history, Jim Crow laws were state and local laws which enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Jim Crow was also the name of a minstrel routine, Jump Jim Crow, performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, and by many imitators. The term became a derogatory taunt for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.

Yes, we have other examples of institutionalised hate systems like Nazi Germany and Hitler’s campaign of terror against the Jewish people (twelve years) and the inhumane South African Apartheid system (forty years) but the Jim Crow laws were in place for almost one hundred years. And we are still seeing their effects in the U.S. today.

As long as there are people still living who experienced these times, either as perpetrators or as victims, or just happened to be alive during this period, this is not simply history.

This is hurting now.

Educated in Nigeria and Ireland, I was rarely exposed to U.S. history and so, had only a sketchy idea of the socio-cultural aspects of it, bar what I watched on tv (westerns and the like). I developed a more critical view during my social anthropological studies becoming very much aware of the unjust treatment of the indigenous people in the countries colonised by European settlers and the like.

I was emotionally upset at being confronted with slavery which also had roots, i.a., in West Africa where I was born. I had my personal moment of shame when I realized the role, too, West African societies had in providing for the demand.

But all in all, I was completely ignorant of the depth of cruelty of racial segregation which was pandemic especially in the southern states of the U.S. Until now.