Page 104 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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The Impact of U.S. Foreign Policy on the Oromo National Struggle
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refashioned with the changing times to prove the mental inferiority of Blacks and
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other colonized peoples and to rationalize their mistreatment by Whites. Recently,
an infamous book titled The Bell Curve revived “scientific racism” and rehashed nine-
teenth-century arguments of Social Darwinism. We can conclude from the popular
acceptance of this publication that the Black struggle of the mid-twentieth century
did not uproot White racism. Instead it forced racism to go underground. Despite na-
tional liberation movements in general and the African American struggle in particu-
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since the
lar that “made untenable a hierarchy cast in explicitly racial terms,”
mid-twentieth century indirect institutional racism and discrimination remained
strong in the United States.
A racist ideology that hierarchically organizes various peoples based on skin color
and/or cultural attributes to justify colonialism,slavery,genocide,imperialism,and dic-
tatorship corrupts U.S. institutions.According to Hunt,“The idea of a racial hierarchy
proved particularly attractive because it offered a ready and useful conceptual handle
on the world. . . . Rather than having to spend long hours trying—perhaps inclu-
sively—to puzzle out the subtle patterns of other cultures,the elite interested in policy
had at hand in the hierarchy of race a key to reducing other peoples and nations to
ready comprehensible and familiar terms. . . . Races were different and unequal. Some
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were civilized or progressive,others were more barbaric or backward.” The challenge
to this racist ideology mounted by a few White intellectuals and progressives, Black
scholars, and national liberation movements could not overthrow this ideology.There-
fore, racism in different forms continues to influence U.S. policy elites who deal with
the issues of the oppressed racial/ethnonational groups in the United States and the
Third World.The mistreatment of Oromos by U.S. policy elites and the U.S. govern-
ment in siding with Tigrayans clearly shows this reality.As we will see, the racist views
of U.S. foreign policy elites toward the Oromo people are being solidified by the racist
discourse in Ethiopian studies and by U.S. support for racism in Ethiopian society.
Racist Views in Ethiopian Studies and Ethiopian Society
As the names of different African peoples who were enslaved and brought to Amer-
ica were changed to Negro, 53 and as the names of various peoples in America were
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changed to Indian with their colonization and destruction, Oromos were given the
name Galla.The names Negro, Indian, and Galla were the products of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, and they were externally imposed by slavers and colonizers.These
names were invented in the process of removing these peoples from their respective
cultural and historical centers and making them the target of destruction,enslavement,
colonialism, and continued subjugation.The appellation Galla was given to Oromos
as a name of contempt and derogation. It characterized them as slave, pagan, uncivi-
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lized or barbaric, inferior, and ignorant. The name Galla was invented to destroy
Oromoness and to devalue Oromo culture, history, and tradition. John Sorenson as-
serts that “the Oromo were known as the Galla, a term they do not apply to them-
selves and one that carries ‘overtones of race and slavery’ as well as the imputation of
a lack of civilization; according to myth, the Oromo were descendants of ‘a high-born
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Amhara lady and a slave.’” Galla is the name of racist ridicule in academic and pop-
ular discourse.
In Ethiopian discourse,Oromos have been depicted as “somewhat darker”than Amha-
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ras and Tigrayans although it is difficult to differentiate the former from the latter by just