Racist kneeling on neck of the black

Tehran, June 6, IRNA – This is the history of agony; the image of rebellion against oblivion; the pain the American black community has suffered since the first slave ship docked at the coasts of North America in 1619 AD. The abolition of slavery only contributed to change its legal form to modern slavery. 100 black people were lynched annually only after the Civil War in the United States. The Farsi daily Iran wrote in an article on Saturday: "In 1917, St. Louis, Missouri witnessed the severest violence against the black, because white people considered their economic development as a threat to the white workers. A report to the then president of the United States said, among other things, that in an area of 800 meters long there was blood running for 3 or 4 hours on the ground. They stopped buses and stoned every black from every age and sex… They shot at African-Americans bleeding on the streets." In 2013, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei advised people to read the book "Roots: The Saga of an American Family" by Alex Haley which depicts the life of African-Americans during the slavery period and after that. The late Alireza Farahmand, who translated the book into Farsi, said about it: "The root is the most hidden, the most basic and the most important part of a tree… I think by the word 'root' Alex Haley means all the black community and slaves who were cut from Africa, the beating heart of the earth, and planted in another place. The roots are the black who grew the tree of independence and American economic grandeur to this degree. But the thing is that as the roots went deeper under the ground, the white people went higher and their leaves and branches moved higher and higher. Alas, the founders and gardeners of this tree had no share in the fruits of this fruitful garden." The American police's knee pressing on Floyd's neck became heavier by the plethora of inequalities in economic and social sources and opportunities. Floyd and American protesters are suffocating because the American system has failed yet to create equal opportunities for its citizens, regardless of their race and color. Floyd's lawyer said that the coronavirus epidemic didn’t kill Floyd, but the racism epidemic did. But the facts say that even the pandemic threatens black lives more than others. According to official statistics, African-Americans have a greater share of the deaths caused by COVID-19. Only 30 percent of Chicago's population is black but the 67 percent coronavirus-related death rate among them is 6 times the same rate among the whites. In the same way, African-Americans in Louisiana are more susceptible to death by the coronavirus that white inhabitants of the state. The death rate among the 32 percent black people of this state is 70 percent of the state total. The same discrimination applies when it comes to the distribution of economic sources among Americans. About half of the homeless in the United States are black, while African-Americans constitute only 13 percent of the US population. Despite US President Donald Trump's claim that African-American lives have improved since he came to power, the rate of homeless African-Americans is still at the same level it was two years ago – 52 percent. In fact, the pressure the unequal management system and the uneven social, cultural, and economic system applies on the neck of the black, is far more systematic and fatal that the kneeling of the white police on George Floyd's neck. Some American activists say that violent protests following Floyd's death were a rebellion caused by desperation to reform the discriminative structure which has inserted many fatal epidemics to the lives of American people. The protests against Floyd's death also indicated that the community of Americans of color is still the root that obtained nothing of the fruits in the fruitful garden.