White Refugees and White Settlement: Strategies for Success

I'm clear that the Syrian refugee crisis we are talking about, like the other refugee crises we aren't talking about, is purely man-made. There are man-made refugee crises in Africa, where Western and Chinese capital seek to exploit resources and get the peoples of that land driven off the lands of their ancestors.

Why aren't these peoples being welcomed into Europe? Why isn't German chancellor Angela Merkel speaking on the behalf of Africa?

In the case of Syria, a rapidly escalating bombing campaign by the United States, then Russia, and now escalated by France, are driving the Syrian population from their homes. (Interestingly, coalitions are discussed, NATO considered, but once again the United Nations is sidelined for obvious reasons that the bombing is a war crime)

Africans in the North American diaspora would be justified to be wary of this influx of Syrians into the US, not on religious hysterical grounds or concerns about "terrorism." For good or bad, Islam is as known in the African diaspora as Christianity: unlike Europe, African piety for monotheism or traditional pantheism doesn't extend to Crusades and holocausts. And as far as terrorism, Africans in the diaspora are more likely to be terrorized by domestic white police officers than ISIL. The national police state is our terror.

Our wariness comes from a cursory look at immigration policy in the United States, a white-settler nation-state that basically ceased the acceptance of masses Africans with the end of the slave trade in the mid-1800's until the late 1960's.

Before the Civil War, and especially after, the United States, like much of Latin America and the Caribbean, opened its arms solely to European immigration, some of which, like the Irish, were virtually refugees given the British government's pogrom against them. The goal was to whiten the population.

These newer waves of white immigrants served their purpose. They were always placed quickly in positions above the First Nation and African populations, who arguably have been here for many more generations.

The post-US Civil War white immigrant learned very quickly where their place was in a white settlement. They learned quickly what the white man's Negro fantasy meant and to keep clear of that side of town ... unless you were trying to exploit them with a liquor store or a nail salon.

With few, notable exceptions, these white immigrants did not stand in solidarity with the conditions of First Nations and Africans. They aspired to be Kennedys, Carnegies, Rockefellers.

In the early 1960's, then-US attorney general Robert Kennedy had the audacity to tell writers James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry that he could foresee a Negro US president in fifty years.

Baldwin left this meeting incredulous that a white man who's family had just arrived on these stolen lands, been permitted to exploit the wealth of it, could lecture people who had been here since the early 1600's.

But this is always the pattern. The African and First Nation are kept on the bottom, while the newcomers afforded an opportunity to flourish on our backs.

The Statue of Liberty was never meant for Africans.

Our white friends and their right-wing brothers like to fall back on some version of a narrative that speaks to the newcomer's work ethic. They never realize it but this is as offensive as what Kennedy said. White people rarely speak to basics like how I as an African am perceived applying for a job I never get, let alone a business loan I never qualify for.

They won't talk about the structural racism that lifts some boats and sinks others.

I don't expect anything different with the Syrian refugee. I would not put it passed the racist institutions of this nation that they would welcome these non-African immigrants, whom by the way the US Census Bureau designates as "white" for the same reasons they did for the hundred years after the US Civil War. To keep, goes the motto, the Negro in his place.

This is why I have been clear from the start. End the causes of the refugee crises in all the global South. End the wars. The bombings. The drone-assassinations. The occupations and puppet generals-turned-presidents.That will address the refugee problem.

The United States as a white-settler nation-state with white-settler institutions is a tougher conundrum that history shows requires a more rigorous, militant response.