by JESSE JACKSON, SENIOR
PHOTO/Diana Rodriguez
We are nearly two decades into the 21st century. African nations are lumped together as “s…hole countries” by the President of the free world. KKK members no longer need the cover of the night or their hoods as they chant “blood and soil” in the main streets of America, laying an exclusive claim to American soil by Aryan blood.
The rising tide of racism is borne out of a recycled old belief that black and brown people are genetically inferior. In 2009, a Harvard PhD dissertation by Jason Richwine asserted, “the average IQ of immigrants in the United States is substantially lower than that of the white native population… Selecting high-IQ immigrants would ameliorate these problems.” Richwine is the co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s immigration report that serves as an operational manual for President Trump’s immigration agenda. Get rid of immigrants from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador and bring more from Norway.
Europe’s rising far right movement is borne out of the same doctrine. The negative impact of the growing racism and anti-people of colour rhetoric is not limited to keeping people of colour off American and European soils.
The insinuation that immigrants of colour are unskilled has fuelled a broader racist narrative that they are innately inferior. This is far more dangerous than people realise because international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank (WB) that are financed by Europe and America become reluctant executioners of the racist agenda.
In 2015, the WB declared that the management performance of an Ethiopian national (Yonas Biru) was beyond the natural capability of a black man and retroactively degraded it. It defended its decision before its administrative tribunal, even after its official diversity report branded it as a “blatant and virulent case of racism” and the WB Senior Advisor for Racial Equality filed an amicus brief condemning it as “profoundly beyond the pale.”
Ben Carson, the only African American member of President Trump’s cabinet, attributed the failure to redress the injustice to “World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s lack of humanity.” Armstrong Williams, an African American Trump surrogate, published an Op-ed in The Hill, affirming the WB “disenfranchised” Biru of his record because it “deems his record too good to be true for a black man.”
Pastor Steve Parson, a member of the Advisory Board for National Diversity Coalition for Trump, published an open letter to President Trump, confirming that the WB stripped Biru of his record because it is “too-good-to-be-true for a black man.” He pleaded with the President to intervene, stating: “Dr. Kim’s lack of humanity that Dr. Carson decried should not be tolerated. Justice and humanity demand swift action.”
The Pastor’s plea fell on deaf ears. In an era where “blood and soil” is resurrected from the ashes of Nazi Germany and baptised with the unholy waters of the tabloid science of racial intelligence quotient (IQ), people of colour are the first to be pushed outside the realm of justice and humanity.
Though the injustice Biru endured makes a compelling tale in and of itself, there are two bigger issues that have made it a cause célèbre. First, it lays bare the institutional contours of global racism. Second, it shows that international board meetings are “rubber-stamping” formalities to legitimise decisions that have already been made through confidential memos and telephone calls.
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