Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said the political divide in the United States reminds him of Rwanda before the genocide happened.
He made the comparison of the United States’ political climate and the events before the Rwandan genocide while speaking at the predominantly Black, Covenant Missionary Baptist Church in Florida City, Fla., on Sunday. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) also accompanied him on the stop during his campaign for re-election to the Senate.
The Senator’s wife, apparently, has close ties to Rwandan First Lady Jeannette Kagame. In his rousing, yet, misguided speech, Senator Nelson stated: “When a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won’t have anything to do with each other … that jealousy turns into hate. And we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, it turned into a genocide. A million-people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what’s happening here.”
His intent, albeit well-meaning, is not a fundamentally sound analogy. The Rwandan genocide was due to an internal civil war but the war wasn’t created by Rwandans. It was perpetuated by them.
Assessing the genocide superficially, 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered within only 100 days by Hutu extremists in 1994.
Essentially, the Hutu and Tutsis are the same people who were categorized as different by European colonization, the Belgians to be specific. They both derive from Bantu-speaking people. They shared the same religion, culture and language. Belgian-influence separated the two by nonexistent physical characteristics like nose width, lighter skin and height.
This divide by white supremacy facilitated what was basically murderous infighting between brothers.
What’s happening in the United States is not the same on any level. Blacks in this country are not the same as whites — not ethnically or racially. And they’ve never been the ruling class. There has not been racial equality between the two groups. Just, seemingly, dramatic shifts in Black-white relations. Under the current “leadership,” racist white terrorists are becoming bolder in their attacks and even murders of innocent Black people.
And now that hatred is spilling over into areas where whites are now being directly affected. The United States’ political climate has never not been volatile. It was just placed on the back burner because innocent white people weren’t victims of racially or ethnically-motivated attacks.
Knowing the histories of Rwanda and the United States, Senator Nelson’s rationale is illogical. And in him speaking to a Black congregation, let’s hope that he wasn’t saying that now the political climate is tumultuous because of the white supremacist who killed 11 non-Black people in a synagogue as they worshipped.
And this is not to diminish the horrific act which happened in Pittsburgh by any means.
If Americans and Senator Nelson are being honest, brutality and murder at the hands of white terrorists have been the order of the day for Blacks since the inception of slavery.
