I was especially attuned to this second chapter, being I am of African decent, but is considered Caribbean. I have always been aware of the KKK and the horror stories that they exude over the south. I was especially amazed at the powerful American figures that supported this organization over its history. The numbers that discussed the KKK’s lynching and violence activities over the years was equally surprising. The truth is that the threat of violence is just as stressful as the act itself, and with these horror stories kept real through word of mouth and sensationalized through Hollywood, the fear continues to be real. The KKK is not the only organization that has ruled successfully through fear. In the mid 80’s, the crips and bloods gangs struck the same fear in their own people in their never ending turf wars over market share for crack cocaine sales.
The gang wars spilled into the streets of Belize and marked an end to a nostalgic nice era of innocence and freedom. When I started high school we could walk 30 blocks to a house party and return on foot after the event, evaluating our escapades for the entire return trip. Soon the freedom to roam ended as fear gripped the different street blocks across the country. Some guys cannot go in some neighborhoods because of who their brother was or what high school they attended. Many parties ended in violence because of this whole idea of personas non gratis. It was the sad end to an era of free movement and partying, but we were reminded of how things have changed every Monday when the injured and beaten missed a few days of school for straying. This fear infiltrated the parents, school official, police and relatives who all chose to like and behave differently as an adjustment to this new danger. In the end, it ushered in the era of harder and more wayward kids who had to literally brave the dangers of the streets to pursue their teenage, hormones driven adventures. Fear can be sniffed by animals and cripples the biggest men. The nuclear era of the cold way ahs demonstrated the level of escalation that the threat of aggression alone can create.
A similar system of fear was promoted under Nazism in the mid 1930. Fear of further economic decline and an unnatural ambition for purity by a charismatic leader created such a circle of fear among Germans in that era that to date they still do not discuss this. The fear caused them to not speak up when their Jewish neighbors disappeared and eventually opened the door for a catastrophe now known as the Holocaust. The Nazi’s use of fear propaganda created a culture where an individual’s worth was repurposed to the equivalence of dogs, and lower animals. There is likely no connection, but just think, drawing lessons from history, how the fear machinery called the KKK could have significantly altered the human rights history of America, were it not for Stetson Kennedy.
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Fear is being used again to gear hatred towards another ethnicity, and now the target that has joined the list are Muslims. Bush and his administration have basically used the random attack on 9/11 to build this fear of any person who is tan with black hair to be labeled as a terrorist. Anytime I go to an international airport I am taken aside for a "random" screening, and I am told to patiently wait for hours as I am screened to pass. Everyone says that history repeats itself, which is true, and we cannot stop this repition unless we have people who can relate to whats going on and expose it to the public so that something can be done. But if the people who can relate to whats going on are not listened too then the saying goes on and will not come to an end in the future. It's not as if everytime I go out I fear that I am going to be racially profiled, but it has happened, and I wanted to point out how this fear of Muslims that Bush has created relates to what we have read in this book.
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