Garen Yegparian
BY GAREN YEGPARIAN
February focuses attention on Black history since it is designated for that celebration. As a result, the soaring rhetoric of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. gets heard. And that set my thoughts in motion this year.
The similarities between the Armenian experience under Ottoman rule and that of Africans in the U.S. is surprisingly similar, analogous.
The biggest similarity to my mind is the indignity heaped upon both groups. Long-term second class citizenship is one of the degrading conditions borne. Armenians, as Christians in an empire rule by Islamic precepts effectively had no rights, outside of s very small segment that constituted a financial elite in the capital or who were traders. Our word was not equal to that of a Moslem in the courts. Our women, children, and property could be stolen on some the whim of a local Kurdish or Turkish tribal leader or potentate, and we might even be murdered, with no effective recourse in law. Effectively, we were no more than serfs. Periodically, we were forced to convert or die. Our tongues were cut off if we spoke Armenian. We were slowly being decimated in our own homeland.
Blacks in America lived through Jim Crow segregation. Schools were black or white, and supposedly “separate but equalâ€
