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Water cooler for "coloreds" in Oklahoma (1939) |
I recently received a comment on my blog expressing the belief that the real problem plaguing black Americans is lack of personal responsibility. Here is an excerpt from his comment
...I think the real problems facing the black community today are laziness, an unwillingness to accept responsibility for your own livelihoods, and an unwillingness to obey the law. If black people would sit down, shut up and pay attention in the schools they already have instead of gang banging and trying to get all the girls knocked up, maybe more than 50% of them would graduate. If they were looking for a job instead of a handout, maybe they would have the job skills necessary to carry them through life, and if the would find ways to improve their own lot in life instead of looking for people to blame and abuse for their misfortunes, maybe they would earn their way out of it.
You can read the entire comment here.
The Ghetto Intellectual writes back.
Worse than animals, more dignified than our oppressors
We can all agree that oppression was/is not limited to black Americans. But, as anonymous #2 points out, there was one monumental difference in the oppression that Africans in the "New World" faced. Africans had absolutely no rights for most of our existence in North America. For much of our history in the USA (1619-1865), we were traded and inventoried like animals, brutalized and raped by savage white people, including a number of the so-called Founding Fathers.
Actually, we were treated worse than animals, but we always insisted on our dignity.
Besides the Native Americans, no other group in America faced this sort of violence (the Native people were virtually annihilated). There was a brief period in 13 colonies, roughly running from 1619 to 1640s, when enslaved Africans and indentured Europeans more-or-less suffered the same lot. In fact a sizable number of Europeans, like Africans generally, were involuntary immigrants. Poor Africans and Europeans even rebelled together. After a major uprising known as the Bacon Rebellion, elite propertied Europeans gradually instituted laws that put a wedge between poor blacks and poors whites. Slavery, over time, became a permanent condition of Africans only and "race" (white supremacy) trumped class; poor whites began to cast their lot with the white ruling class. By the close of the 17th century this process of near-exclusive black oppression was complete. Although most whites did not own slaves, by the close of the 17th century they all endorsed and brutally enforced white supremacy in the colonies.
Post-Reconstruction
After a brief "lull" during Reconstruction, African Americans were basically sent back into slavery. The KKK was established, blacks were lynched by the thousands, burned alive in front of large festive white audiences. The legal sanctions were just as horrific--Black Codes, Jim Crow, so-called "vagrancy laws" and so on. The ravaged carcasses of black victims, sometimes horribly burned, were brandished on postcards and the body parts of the victims were routinely displayed in local shops. In fact the plight of blacks during post-Reconstruction was so severe that historians call it the "nadir" (low point) of US race relations. In other words our plight was as bad as and arguably worse than slavery ("worse" in the sense that, as slaves, whites had a stronger "incentive" to spare our lives). Another important shift happens at this time--plantation slavery was transformed into prison slavery managed by the same white supremacist system.
All groups have challenges? A brutal irony
No other group in America besides the indigenous population has faced the levels of oppression that black Americans face. One could argue that the crushing poverty on Native American reservations is worse than what African Americans face. I am willing to concede that point. But then your argument seems to be that Native Americans are not nearly as vocal as African Americans, that they happily accept their plight, that they deserve no form on restitution for their ongoing oppression. That strikes me as "nonsensical" (your word).
In every instance that black Americans have asserted their right to be free, self determining, and self reliant, they have been violently opposed by the US government: the assault on Tulsa and other so-called race riots, redlining, Jim Crow, and most recently, the "war on drugs" (actually a war on black Americans) are all example of white resistance to black freedom. While there is still a sizable, but shrinking black middle class, the constant government-sanctioned attacks on our efforts to assert our human right to be free and self-determining has led, ironically, to a sub-set of black Americans who are forced into dependency on the very system that oppresses them (this is not very different to how Mexicans risk their lives fleeing to the United States because economic conditions created the US foreign policy in the first instance).
Conclusion
Last, it is important to note that the legal apparatus supporting white supremacy was not fully lifted until the early 1970s with passage of the Equal Employment and Opportunity Act. Thus, from 1619 to the 1970s, black American under-class citizenship was sanctioned by law. That is an astonishing fact that few Americans know and still fewer fully comprehend its implications. Despite centuries of white brutality, black Americans continue to insist on their humanity, to break barriers, to achieve against seemingly impossible odds. But it will take centuries more to undue the damage caused by white racial violence. Sadly, as your note indicates, many white people are so psychologically damaged by the pathology of white privilege and the many generations of white denial that this nation can't even begin to address this problem comprehensively. I remain optimistic and inspired by the courage and vision of African Americans like young Justin Hudson and progressive people of all colors generally. GI
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