Independence Day “Apartheid”

There is a small community in the United States, made up of less than 600,000 people — more than live in the state of Wyoming — that celebrates each Fourth of July with a huge fireworks display despite the fact that they are second-class citizens. In fact, until 1961, these .5 million people could not even elect the president of their country. Even more surreal is that until 1973, their local government was governed by just three people. Two of them were personally appointed by the president and then ratified by the Senate; the third was elected by the Army Corp of Engineers. This poor community had neither a voice nor a vote throughout the entire process.

Today, at least, they can elect their local authorities, but each and every elected official that they choose, and every action taken by those officials, must be approved by Congress. If, for example, the local authorities want a regional train to connect to the airport, and Congress says “no,” there is no train, as happened three years ago. Speaking of Congress, these .5 million people cannot even elect a representative to the legislature.

It’s a small ”homeland” or ”Bantu State,” like those in which the former apartheid South Africa corralled the black population while trying to create the impression that they were really independent entities.

It constitutes flagrant discrimination against a sophisticated locality that, for example, has the second highest ratio of theater seats per capita after New York, and several of the best museums and galleries in the art world. Among the famous personalities born and raised in this community are musicians Duke Ellington and Marvin Gaye, former Vice President Al Gore and billionaire and philanthropist Warren Buffet. The community, despite its small geographical area, hosts 17 universities and 10 post-graduate academic institutions, among them two of the best schools of International Relations in the U.S., according to rankings in the Foreign Policy Review. It is also extremely multi-cultural; for example, some 12 percent of its inhabitants are legal resident foreigners.

But this community also suffers from some serious problems. Its homicide rate, for example, is three times that of Mexico City, despite the fact that crime has plummeted in the past decade (in large part because many criminals were crack cocaine addicts who overdosed). Close to 3 percent of its residents are HIV seropositive, triple what U.S. health authorities consider to be a severe and widespread epidemic. Its members are often despised and brutally attacked by a large part of the country’s population, in particular by people like former President George W. Bush, who proudly insulted these folks. To inhabitants of the largest city in the U.S., New York, this small community is ”provincial.” To the conservatives, it is a leftist hotbed — a definition closer to reality, since this small community always votes Democratic.

It is precisely for that reason, and in a fit of contempt for what are supposedly the principles of the United States, that the Republicans have denied this community their representation in Congress: It would increase the Democrats’ representation in the legislature. The argument is similar to that used in the past, when this community could not elect its leaders because the majority of the population was black. This community is not on a remote island in the Pacific, like Samoa or Guam (which also have colonial status), but it is Washington, the capital of the United States! A capital that, on the Fourth of July, remains under colonial rule. How much longer will this go on?