For black Americans, 239 years of terrorism

The United States is obsessed with terrorism these days. In a Pew Research survey, Americans ranked defending the U.S. against terrorism as the top policy priority for their federal government, ranking it even above the economy. At home, they have built a bureaucracy second only to the Pentagon for homeland security. Abroad, the U.S. stumbles about bombing and assassinating terrorists while inadvertently creating more than they kill. All this is aimed at evil foreigners who "hate us for our values."

Meanwhile a form of homegrown terrorism, as old as America itself, persists. Since the first day of the nation's history, black Americans have been subjected to terror to keep them in their place.

Slavery was, of course, maintained by terror. The threat of the lash, or worse, kept slaves obedient to masters. After the civil war ended, slavery was replaced by a brutal system of segregation, often little more than slavery by another name, enforced by a variety of methods, legal and otherwise, the most infamous being lynching. Segregation has now formally ended, but terror continues to lurk in the background.

In South Carolina, for example, subject of the horrific attack last week that took nine lives, is the home of 19 hate groups, including neo-nazi and white supremacist organizations and chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. South Carolina has no law against hate crimes. The Confederate flag, the banner behind which the South fought to maintain slavery, flies in front of the South Carolina State House. When hate-mongering is tolerated and the symbols of oppression are flaunted by the state's leaders, it isn't hard for impressionable young men to justify their perverted passions.

These are not, I assume, the values that Americans insist the foreign evil-doers hate them for. Indeed they are more closely-related to the values of the evil-doers. If Americans are to obsess about defending themselves from terrorists, they might focus on the form that lives entirely in their homeland, the one born from racism, and free their black citizens from the oldest and most intransigent terrorism afflicting their nation.