His Holiness Pope John Paul II
The Vatican
Vatican City, Italy
Your Holiness:
I am convinced; we live in a time unlike any other. Surveying human history, such advances as fire, the circle, mathematics, optics, etc., enabled Galileo to extend Copernicus' vision of a lawful universe and destroy linear flat earth science. The Christian Church fought his views and mercilessly suppressed freedom of thought; it branded adherents of Galileo as heretics. As certain thoughts become ascendant, behaviors changed to accommodate these new perspectives. Such was the case with slavery. Your Holiness, the Christian Church took an antithetical position to Christ's teachings, when it blessed slavery, then profited from it. Valuing blacks less than human, the Church encouraged European institutions to structure their societies around white supremacy.
A new millennium and still the Christian Church remains in denial about its responsibility for the world's acceptance of slavery systems that value black as less than white. Denial is a form of avoidance. It works identically in individuals, institutions and societies. First postulated by George Orwell in 1984, doublethink is one of the mind's mechanisms for handling dissonant information. History shows, in blessing slavery and profiting from it, the Church hid its true motives behind the rationale that basically said: Black Africans are subhuman heathens beyond the pale of God's protection. Enslavement is necessary to make them Christians. Slavery is the merciful act of forcing blacks into the service of Christ, thereby gaining God's blessing for the unholy enterprise.
This elaborate avoidance fantasy is hypocrisy, commonly known as doublethink. Sigmund Freud postulated such processes take place in the subconscious. Typically, societies, institutions and individuals cloak motives like greed under feel-good terms like "active self-defense, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, segregation, faith-based and stem cell compassionate conservatism." Clinicians, like religious leaders and politicians, share these avoidance constructs. Their subconscious filters out dissonant information, so they can then act as though they did not experience the events. This was the Church mind-set Galileo faced after proving the earth was not the center of the universe.
Slave descendants share Galileo's fate. America's Initial Report to the United Nations Committee on Eliminating Racial Discrimination admits slave descendants today suffer racial discrimination. The Bush administration denies any responsibility for the human rights atrocity. Its denials fly in the face of American law. Slavery and segregation were legal forms of discrimination based on the US Constitution Article 1 Section 2: the 3/5ths Compromise. Legal discrimination locked slave descendants into their present socioeconomic and political status. Like the Christian Church and Europe, America values blacks as less than Jews. America gave $25 million as holocaust reparations to the victims of Nazism, even though America says it had nothing to do with killing European Jews. America is also the primary financial and military backer of Israel, the Jewish State on the West Bank. Slave descendants pray the Church does not find an accord with America, like it did with Adolf Hitler and Nazism, and support America's vehement denials of responsibility for legally enslaving, raping, lynching and massacring millions of black Africans and their descendants.
Your Holiness, as Galileo, Dot M. Smith has found scientific evidence that proves institutionalized racism exists in America today. Using US Department of Labor data, she identified a stable relationship between income and race. That stable relationship is black income (x) equals .60 or 60% of white(y) income. Historically, the ratio x/y, fluctuated along the very narrow interval of .5 to .65, as though guided by law. Irrefutably like E = mc˛, x = .6y, mirroring the 3/5 Compromise value for black human capital mandated in Article 1 Section 2 of the US Constitution. The welfare loss or difference in income is identified as z = y-x. Z averages .4y; it measures the black economic welfare loss in terms of earnings and goods and services. Using Labor Department statistics, which cover the last half of this century, we can measure the extent of black American welfare loss. This is the basis of blacks' claims for reparations for what happens today, based on the law, rather than some distant slave history. Compensation is necessary to ameliorate current racial discrimination. Unlike Galileo, skin color is the determining factor here, which is my point, Your Holiness.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) is leading a delegation to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, Xenophobia, Racial Discrimination and Related Intolerance (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa August 31- September 7, 2001. She has partitioned the Bush administration to speak on behalf of slave descendants. To date, Bush has refused to recognize her as an official spokesperson. Adding insults to injury, Bush is threatening to boycott the conference, if blacks are allowed to formally address WCAR about racism in America and reparations. Without Palestinians present to argue their case at previous conferences, America got agreement to ignore Palestinian grievances by refusing to "equate Zionism with racism." Bush's demand that WCAR accept only America's denials, without challenges, is designed to cover-up present day institutionalized racism, while gaining international approval of its racial discrimination against blacks.
Poets for Peace, a consortium of Atlanta artists, have called for an "International Speak Out" on August 16, 2001 to demand blacks in the Diaspora be allowed to tell their story in their words. They are asking everyone to send e-mails in support of Rep. McKinney's efforts. Specifically, we need to present reports on the massacres in 1921 in Greenwood OK and 1923 in Rosewood, FL, the 1948 Walton County, Georgia lynching of George and May Murray Dorsey and Robert and Dorothy Malcolm, along with Emmett Till and many others found in James Allen's research, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. The evidence supports our claims of modern day genocide. This conference is the first opportunity, since the Christian Church blessed slavery, for slave descendants and others in the Diaspora to address institutionalized racism. The world will be giving America a bye, not on its 400-year history of slavery, but its present day racism, if WCAR refuses to allow slave descendants a voice.
Your Holiness, you spoke out forcefully to President Bush against abortion, stem cell research and cloning humans. You sought protection for potential life not yet in this world. One hundred thirty-eight years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, slave descendants in America and across the Diaspora ask you, Holy Father, to speak out against racism and genocide in America. Your Holiness, our claims (fama) exposes conservatives (diffamatus), who deny the past, but are re-segregating America today. Your indispensable voice (Inquisitio) can urge millions of Christians around the world (Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus) to support our plea for freedom, justice and equality. No one spoke out for Galileo and the world remained in darkness for another one hundred fifty years. Blacks in American still live under the Societas Perfecta and we ask Your Holiness to intercede on our behalf. Speaking now can begin to seal the breach the Christian Church opened when it departed from the teachings of Christ and blessed slavery. This act created the festering divide separating humans based on color, this communiqué is an effort to heal it. These are truly times unlike any other!
Most Respectfully,
John Burl Smith