Whites want to secede from white America
26th November 2012 · 0 Comments
By Askia Muhammad
Contributing Writer
WASHINGTON (Special to the NNPA from The Final Call) — Even as Caribbean nations Jamaica and Barbados have expanded their countries’ investigations into the legitimate claims for reparations due to the African descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, on November 7 in the United States, the day after President Barack Obama was re-elected, the White House’s website received a petition asking the administration to allow Louisiana to secede from the Union. It was the first of several to follow.
Another citizen-authored petition was quickly filed by Texas, and similar petitions from 18 other states began arriving November 9, bringing the early total to 20. Most, but not all were from states which participated in the 19th-Century treasonous secession in which 11 Confederate States of America fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history in a futile attempt to maintain chattel slavery.
In addition to Louisiana and Texas, petitions have been submitted since the 2012 elections from Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Florida, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, New York, Arkansas, Michigan, and Tennessee. Three states—Georgia, Missouri and South Carolina are each represented by two competing petitions, according to reports by Examiner.com, and The Daily Caller.
The government allows one month from the day the petitions were submitted to obtain 25,000 signatures in order for the Obama administration to consider the request.
If 25,000 people sign the various petition on time, it will “require a response” from the Obama administration, according to published rules of the White House’s online “We the People” program. The Louisiana petition collected more than 12,300 signatures in four days. The Texas had 15,400 supporters by November 11.
The Texas petition reads in part: “The U.S. continues to suffer economic difficulties stemming from the federal government’s neglect to reform domestic and foreign spending. The citizens of the U.S. suffer from blatant abuses of their rights such as the NDAA, the TSA, etc.
“Given that the state of Texas maintains a balanced budget and is the 15th-largest economy in the world, it is practically feasible for Texas to withdraw from the union, and to do so would protect its citizens’ standard of living and re-secure their rights and liberties in accordance with the original ideas and beliefs of our founding fathers which are no longer being reflected by the federal government.”
The Louisiana petition consisted of excerpts from the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” one portion read, “that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new Government.”
These various petitions come from disgruntled white voters in response to the re-election of President Obama, the first Black U.S. president, but they ignore a number of realities. The Constitutional “job description”—as it were—of the president’s duties or powers has not been rewritten since the 22nd Amendment was ratified on Feb. 27, 1951 almost four years after it was proposed in March 1947.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected Presi?dent shall be elected to the office of the President more than once,” that amendment says in part. Otherwise, the duties and power of President Obama are officially the same as those of his 43 white predecessors, including many of whom were actually slave owners.
Ironically the most glaring missing component from these efforts to withdraw from what has been “white America” since the Constitution was officially ratified on June 21, 1788, into new even whiter secessionist enclaves, is the plight and just demands of the descendants of the Black slaves who were written into the Constitution as less than human.
The “Three-Fifths Compromise” was an agreement between Southern and Northern states reached during the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention of 1787 in which three-fifths of the enumerated population of enslaved Africans in slave-holding states would be counted for representation regarding both the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the House of Representatives.
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery, should more appropriately be called “the Holocaust of Enslavement” and together they constitute “a crime against humanity” according to the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America—N’COBRA. Founded in September 1987, N’COBRA is a national organization which seeks financial compensation for the descendants of former slaves in the United States.
Each year since N’COBRA’s founding Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), former Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has introduced H.R.-40—as in “40 acres and a mule”—legislation concerning reparations.
His resolution would require the federal government: “To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against Afri?can Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”
The justification for such a measure is clear, according to N’COBRA. “Millions of Africans were brutalized, murdered, raped and tortured. They were torn from their families in Africa, kidnapped and lost family and community associations. African peoples in the United States and the prior colonies were denied the right to maintain their language, spiritual practices and normal family relations, always under the threat of being torn from newly-created families at the whim of the ‘slave owner.’
“Chattel slavery … was followed by 100 years of government-led and supported denial of equal and humane treatment including Black Codes, convict lease, sharecropping, peonage, and Jim Crow practices of separate and unequal accommodations. African descendants continue to be denied rights of self-determination, inheritance, and full participation in the United States government and society.
“The laws and practices in the United States continue to treat African peoples in a manner similar to slavery—maintaining dual systems in virtually every area of life including punishment, health care, education and wealth, maintaining the myths of white superiority and African and African descendants’ inferiority,” the organization states on its website at N’COBRA.org.
But the longest standing, and arguably most deserving Black claim for a separate jurisdiction outside the United States authority for people now living in this country was made in 1959 by the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, when he authored “What The Muslims Want: What the Muslims Believe,” a declaration of the official program of the Nation of Islam in North America.
“We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own–either on this continent or elsewhere,” reads point No. 4 of the Muslim Program.
“We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the next 20 to 25 years—until we are able to produce and supply our own needs.
“Since we cannot get along with them in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.”
This article was originally published in the November 26, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper
