Posted by winnetka1 on 7/24/2020 12:06:00 PM (view original):
An Excerpt...
“But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. “They have been taught to labor,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. “They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves.”
Not exactly. Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, “Never again.” But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”
Thanks for posting this.
So, here are two examples from the world of baseball - and of racial inequality and terrorism:
I am reading a book about the 1969 Mets called "They said it couldn't be done" by Wayne Coffey.
Example 1: Tommy Agee's family in Alabama had to hide out for some days once because when Tommy's sisters notice some white boys stealing grapes from off their property and said something about it, the boys returned with their father who was armed with a shotgun and threatened to kill the whole Agee family.
Example 2. Ed Charles and his brothers and sisters came home from Church one Sunday on the Florida coast and found that one of their toys had been stolen. Turns out it was robbed by some white kids. They confront them about it, same thing happens, the white kids' father threatens them with a gun. Charles' father scolds them "you realize you could have been lynched for that?" and the family has to move away to another town to be safe.
Later, Ed left home to move in with a friend to escape his violent father. His father sees him one day on the street, brings him to the police as a runaway and while in a jail cell, Charles hears the cops demand sexual favors from a Black woman who is in a nearby cell, and beat her brutally when she refuses, until she relents.
This is what went on endlessly, across the South, and probably not only the South for 400 hundred years, and worse. Cleon Jones' great-grandparents were among the enslaved people illegally (since the slave trade had been banned already in 1804) brought over from Africa in 1860 in the last slave ship that arrived before the Civil War started.
That is just the stories of three players on one historic team.
A state of terrorism existed over the lives of 1 American in 7 for four centuries, and that does not count Native Americans, and many other groups.
But I would also emphasize a different point: that the state of terrorism over non-White Americans has been exercised not mainly out of racism - that racism is very real and serves to justify the treatment. The purpose of the treatment is control of the labor force and that means that part of the purpose of racial inequality has also always been to control white working class people as well, though their, our, treatment has always been mild by comparison (speaking of communities, not every individual experience). The majority of Europeans who arrived in what became the USA before 1776 arrived as indentured servants. Every ethnic group, from Europe as well as from Mexico, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, has faced discrimination of some sort, though again, there have always been differences of degree and even qualitative differences - the Europeans were indentured, after 7 years they were free, the African enslaved.
Why? To separate us, to divide us, to rule over us all and exploit us and prevent our unity against those who would exploit us all.
Think about it: it is not ONLY African Americans that lack good school systems, tuition-free universities, public and universal health care, union representation as the norm, legal job security (in most jobs in Italy, and nearly all in the more progressive Eurpoean countries are protected for life and firing requires showing cause and wrongdoing in a court of law, employers can't just fire you), tenant protection from evictions, payroll protection by their governments in the face of Covid-19 and the shutdowns, so that unemployment does not skyrocket, elected employee representatives on the boards of directors of companies (as is the rule in most of northern Europe) and so on. It is also White Americans, who if privileged relative to African Americans, Hispanics and others, are instead deprived of these basic rights, because of the racial inequality that has worked so successfully to divide us for so long.
It is time to end it, and to provide all Americans with a real new deal of the cards, a new social contract, and with the things that people in other highly developed economic societies, in other democracies, including the one where I live, which is hardly a 21st century utopia, take as their birthright.
So, as with Huckleberry Finn not turning in the fugitive slave that he runs into, because he will get in touble whether he does the right thing or the wrong thing, doing what is right and doing what is in all our interest coincide. What could be more American than that?