Disrupting people's day to day lives is how all good protests go though. Look at the sit-ins ruining lunch for white eaters int he 50s and 60s.The walk-outs that took up all the time of the police and disrupted traffic in the South. Look at Cesar Chavez and the UFW's protests ruining the ability of people to eat grapes and other produces in his era. Good protests disrupt the lives of others so they are forced to notice. Even the Tienanmen Square incident messed with the flow of things. No on ever got anything by sitting quietly in the corner.
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Institutional Racism: The continued war on Black America
- Thread starter Amir0x
- Start date
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Yes because it is wrong, and horribly wrong, to afixiate a stereotype to someone for any reason.
No different than religious people judging others.
Laying down in a mall where people are simply there to shop and take care of their own lives is not the place to go protest racism. It's no different than the preacher that stands in the middle of a crown and raises his bible in the air expecting people to suddenly turn and listen to him.
We're not in the 50s and 60s anymore.
Rosa Parks protested racism by staying in her seat...rightfully so. We're not in that era anymore. So lying down in a mall is not the same as Rosa Parks' sitting in her seat on the bus.
Go to city hall. Lay down there, force the law makers to take action. The mall is a waste of time.
Shaming people for slightly inconveniencing you only proves their point. You're placing your minor annoyance above the issue they're speaking out about, trivializing it in a very arrogant and self-centered manner. That's more than 'disagreeing', it's contempt.
Gotdatmoney
Member
Protest is about getting attention, you don't protest in ways that make it easy for people to ignore your cause, that's just not effective. Some dude strapped in a mall exercising his right to protest and bring attention to his cause is doing it the best way he sees fit. Daily citizens are people to, protesters are daily citizens, they are not separate bodies. Some people having their daily lives interrupted in the name of bringing fucking attention to systemic racism is not a big deal. It's this type of middling "I don't give a fuck about you or your cause as long as I don't need to give it attention" mentality about this issue that is inherently racist. The status quo is advantageous to you so you don't have to give a fuck. And you want the oppressed people to protest in a way that makes it easy for you to maintain that status quo and ignore their plight. That is a racist mentality and I'm not telling you you can't have it. I'm saying it's not compatible with the position that you believe in protest as a means of change and want these people to get their rights and freedoms. I'm just telling it like it is, I don't care whether you like it or not.
Racism these days isn't about burning flags and hating niggers, it's about denying minorities the ability to catch up. It's about ignoring their plight and condemning it when it inconveniences you. It's about supporting inherently racists systems. It's about telling the oppressed the proper way to react to their oppression. I'm not here to change your mind, I'm here to learn and also help give information so we can all grow our views. But what you are advocating is a systemically racist view point. It has nothing to do with being different, it has everything to do with the fact that you're not going to tell me why it isn't bias because you can't and don't want to admit it is.
Even if not in the 50s and 60s, the 2014 Umbrella Protests in Hong Kong received a great amount of attention and support due to how much they disrupted the city. The same for Brazil's recent World Cup and transit price increase protests. And the current protests of the 43 killed students is also quite disruptive in Mexico. Even the anti-government protests in places like Russia are all about spectacle. Getting people to know about your cause, the common person, is important.
CesspoolofHatred
Member
We're always going to be in that era at LEAST as long as the people who were alive back then continue to be alive today. It wasn't that long ago, you wanna try and pretend that it's ancient history?
Yes, you're very much comfortable in your privilege. I know its cool to you, as you don't have to realistically deal with the subject at hand. All of the protests in america due to black people being shot all the time, are meaningful. How and why is what you choose not to understand. Due to the privilege, you don't have to. You choose to criticize them.
None of the responses to you are like mob mentality, its like someone making a ridiculous statement and being called out for it. Over and over and over. Because of privilege you don't even have to realistically discuss it outside of just posting absurd comments, and feigning surprise at reactions.
You can always disagree. Just like you can always sound like someone who lacks empathy and wants to wag a finger at people protesting due to inconveniencing others. There is nothing in any of your posts worth responding to.
Luckily, quite a lot of people understand what needs to be done. Harvard and other medical students nation wide, have also participated in laying down protests. All types of people have. Its as if these great minds can grasp something not found within you. Shocking.
Anything possible, is what needs to be done. There aren't rules for trying to get back human rights, effectively, without inconveniencing anyone. And usually the people trying to make the rules are part of the problem. At this point, you're a non issue. Engaging with someone who has made the statements you have will be fruitless. Hopefully things will continue to move forward as they have been. And more and more people will contribute to trying to resolve the issues in the country. I don't expect that the support of Stormfront is essential to the goals at hand. There will always be holdouts during a time like this.
Right.
If he is wrong that Second Amendment rights weren't dreamed up out of fear of black uprisings, it should be trivial to provide historical support for that. It should be trivial to find evidence that gun control laws have historically been supported by ostensibly anti-gun control groups when the question has been one of black ownership of guns. These are supportable statements, if you care to do so.
If you don't care to do so, there's no point in bothering responding with asides about the ignorant or people not worth responding to. It just contributes to a poor signal-to-noise ratio in a thread.
I'm not pretending anything.
If I was passionate about making a change to something, I'd seek the source that makes the change.
Back when I was in college, I played ice hockey. The city owned the ice that we played on. We leased the ice from them. Many times they cancelled our games without notice just so they could use the arena for some other event that would generate them more money. They didn't give one shit about ice hockey as a sport. Did we gather outside the arena and prevent people from going to the other events? No.
We went straight to the city hall and went to the city council meetings and countlessly spoke to them. We even managed to get a few council members to side with us. We gathered people from the town to come and tell their stories of their ice skating sessions with their families. This one father cried at the podium saying, "if you take the ice away from us, you will take the one thing my son and I share together."
Now while we did all of that, unfortunately the city took the ice away all together because it was costing them too much money to keep it running.
So, back to my point, people who want to make changes, go directly to the source of it. We're not in some third-world country where going out in the streets to disrupt the everyday lives of citizens is going to invoke change.
Don't like cops? Go to the police station, protest there. Don't like your city government? Go to the steps of City Hall, protest there.
soundahfekz
Member
Racism is dead guys, this shit inconveniences me!
You need the will of the people to promote and initiate change. This requires the attention of those content with the status quo (especially when they make up the majority voting population). To garner such attention requires (ideally peaceful) disruption. This is and has always been human nature. Barring some expedited evolution, we'll never be so progressive that we subvert this.
Who gives a shit if joe schmoe is late for work, or if it takes jane longer to checkout at bath and body works when one group of people are getting imprisoned and cut down disproportionately compared to others. 200 Jane and Joe Schmoe's will be inconvenienced. 50 may turn on the news to see what caused their inconvenience. maybe 20 will be affected enough to be empathetic. A few may seek to promote change. Those few will influence many others in their daily interaction, who may possibly see things different when someone who looks like them has found a way to identify with those who are oppressed.
But you're saying fuck all that because of minor inconveniences. THAT's the definition of white privilege.
Massive Duck. C.M.
Banned
I understand and appreciate that, but how many hundreds of times are people expected to try to inform someone who comes in with their fingers in their ears? We can link to outside articles, book recommendations, even other threads here, sometimes within the same day but it's always the same people.
I do admit it's my fault for engaging, though.
Gotdatmoney
Member
I still agree Mumei. If you're not able to formulate your point without just throwing out one liners there is no point in commenting. This is a thread for discussion, it's not a thread to point fingers at whoever isn't going to conform to a view point many of us hold.
I'm sure my statement pissed off TTUVAPOR but I also explained why his viewpoint has elements of racism in it. I'm here to contribute and discuss, he doesn't have to agree and change his mind however. That's not the goal of a discussion.
CesspoolofHatred
Member
And what happens when they don't listen to you? Or if they try to hamper your voice, using methods like voter ID laws (poor idea, and in execution they're basically the modern equivalent of a poll tax)?
That's the point of protesting: to grab peoples' attention, and possibly add their voices to yours. Sure, they may be disruptive, but I challenge you to tell me about a successful protest that WASN'T disruptive.
And I noticed that you dismissed part of a post that talked about "walk-outs", saying we're not in the 50s and 60s anymore.
Note everything after that. That occurred AFTER the 50s and 60s. The basics of protests haven't changed as much as you think they have.
I suspect you don't care about that, though.
The problem to overcome is the apathy of the public at large. If something isn't an issue for them, and it remains out of their view where they don't have to think about it, then they won't ever feel compelled to do or think anything about it. It's not the end of the world to have one's daily routine disrupted for a moment while they're confronted with the injustices massive segments of the population face. In fact, it's what gets people talking - and even if they start off annoyed, at least they are talking at all. If you can't get over the minor inconvenience of having to wait to shop, and you place that above the concerns of the people demonstrating, then you've proven their point - that people are being too apathetic and refuse to seriously address issues that may not directly concern them.
This is also a myth as I understand. Recently a study found that all races have deadbeat fathers to a similar degree
Liu Kang Baking A Pie
Member
We are still in that era. This is still the Civil Rights Movement. It doesn't just end because people want it to be over. Black issues are still ignored and dismissed by America.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Statistics here are the type of thing White America needs to grasp just how insane it is for Black America. Black America doesn't need them, though, they live it. As you say, from your own experiences, there's no need for numbers charted on a graph... if you walk down and get beaten by cops for no reason, the anger is going to bubble to the surface. It's injustice!
Watching Fox News discuss any issue of race is infuriating. Probably best not to
Your OP made me what to cry, because it's what I try to explain to some people at work, but it just doesn't seem to get through. What I learned is that, it doesn't get through because deep down they want or like it this way.
It lowers the competition when it comes to jobs and their children's jobs in the future. Sort of like how many white baseball players in the 20s, 30s, and 40s didn't want black people playing baseball in the MLB.
Had to read this book for a class last semester
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Very good look at how drug laws affect minority communities.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1595586431/?tag=neogaf0e-20
Very good look at how drug laws affect minority communities.
mckmas8808
Mckmaster uses MasterCard to buy Slave drives
Except most of these stats have been spoken on by VOX. I know this because most of these I've read on VOX's articles.
Shake Appeal
Member
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/03/whitewashing-second-amendment
The Second Amendment was, in large part, a bone thrown to those who were worried they wouldn't be able to maintain control over their slaves. America's gun culture is founded on white supremacists' fear of losing power, not brave frontiersmans' fear of British power.
Note: This doesn't mean that you are "racist" as you understand racism. My broader point is that integral parts of "what it means to be American" for many people in this country stem directly from white supremacy. So changing their attitudes requires them to first acknowledge that their personal politics are historically, and perhaps even inseparably, racist.
xKilltheMx
Member
Posting to follow this beautiful thread.
ShinMaruku
Member
I am heartened to see a topic like this, because I think it's just shocking to people who will never see these things, have no concerns like how I have. Think I can go into a shop and hold a gun? Nope people would make assumptions and it will end up very badly for me.
cyclonekruse
Member
I think it's because this topic is piggybacking on current events, which are on many people's minds right now. That's what encouraged me to do it, because I read threads and get into discussions in them and daily have to convince people just how bad things are.
So I thought now is the right time when everyone's attention is on the subject to really show just what we're dealing with.
I read Mumei's posts though, they're great
Shake Appeal
Member
This is literally the thrust of the Second Amendment as it was debated and construed at the time. It was entirely a compromise between Federalists and those brave, slave-owning Fathers (no need to capitalize these men, smart as they were) who worried that this new government would potentially, in an underhand way, disarm the militias they used to patrol their slaves and stop insurrections before they started. That is the crux of the debate, and it is documented. The Second Amendment was a promise that James Madison -- himself a slave-owner -- made to Virginia slave-owners to get them to ratify the Constitution. He kept his promise.
You are right that framers of the Constitution wanted to be able to have armed, trained men to call on if their new country was invaded. But the Second Amendment, as appended to the Constitution, is precisely designed to weaken those framers' power -- in order to protect the institution of slavery in the South.
So, in the aftermath of the Shay's rebellion where an army had to be called up to put down a revolt - which caused panic and fear in the capital and nation because they thought their newly formed government was about to be toppled by an armed insurrection - the founders, many of whom were concerned about demagoguery and mob rule, approved of a Constitutional Right to combat the possible tyranny of their newly created government? Basically ensuring Demoagoguery and mob rule if those insurrectionists were victorious?
Moreover, Article 4 section 4 of the Constitution makes armed insurrection a treasonous offense punishable by death
How does it make sense that the rationale for the second amendment was a check against government tyranny while the founders made armed insurrection a treasonable offense?
Due to the newness and instability of the government, its ruinous financial state, experiences of the Shay's Rebellion, possible slave uprisings, and many founders fear of a standing army, it makes A LOT more sense that this was a measure to ensure domestic peace and stability by protecting state militias.
cyclonekruse
Member
I would say a standing army is precisely the sort of thing that the Founding Fathers thought would limit the people's ability to govern themselves:
Noah Webster said:
I grant that it's a delicate balancing act to promote, on one hand, the ability for people to resist tyrannical rule but also, on the other hand, a stable nation-state. Allowing insurrections to happen willy-nilly would be disastrous. But they also feared the notion of a government that wasn't kept in check by its citizenry. It's hard to argue that the Founding Fathers didn't believe in the right of insurrection, at least to some degree, since rebelling is precisely what they just did.
So, they appear to have done what they could on both fronts. They allayed fears that the (federal) government would become too controlling by codifying the right to bear arms and for states to have militias. In doing so, they also made the nation more stable. As a bonus, they drastically cut down on the cost of defense by having citizens pay for their own arms and munitions rather than having the cash-strapped (as you mentioned) government foot the bill.
Many founders being afraid of standing armies does not mean that they wanted to arm citizens and the militia as a check against government tyranny. That sort of thinking removes all historical context, values, and beliefs of the period, and turns the founders into something similar to the French Jacobins, which they clearly were not.
As for the quote, he seems to be referencing rule by military dictatorship, not rule by republican democracy. As for his claim of militia being superior, well, militias sucked in the revolutionary war and sucked in the war of 1812. No one who fought in those wars thought the militia were remotely competent for anything but policing duty or putting down an insurrection.
Not to mention that Webster was not involved in creating the Consitution, bill of rights, and never held political office.
George Washington quote:
diggmcbadass
Member
I was merely pointing out that the prison statistics are horrible for everyone. Obviously fixing it would benefit blacks and hispanics a lot more, but the fact remains that the system overall is putting too many people in prison compared to any other nation of equal wealth. The racial bias is of course a huge problem, and fixing the legal system can't be done without also fixing this.
cyclonekruse
Member
Standing armies seemed to have been seen as instruments for government tyranny. That's one of the reasons that several founders wanted to ensure that the power of force remained primarily with the militia (i.e. the people) rather than with the government.
Tench Coxe said:
Alexander Hamilton said:
That said, I don't necessarily disagree that these militias weren't a realistic match to more disciplined armies, despite some people's apparent proclamations to the contrary. And I especially don't think that militias today could contend with the might of the U.S. Army. But what I think is a separate issue to what the original drafters and debaters of the 2nd Amendment thought.
ryutaro's mama
Member
MLK: "Something something a more convenient season something."
cyclonekruse
Member
Well, yes, I would imagine that someone who just fought for the new government's existence wouldn't want it to be dismantled so easily. That's entirely understandable. But at the same time, people who just fought to overthrow what they saw to be a tyrannical government also believed insurrection was a defensible option to protect liberty (at least if things got bad enough). If they didn't believe that, they wouldn't have rebelled.Piecake said:
Here's my (admittedly armchair) take. Early framers/debaters where ideologically committed to the right of insurrection. As evidenced by the fact that they just fought the Brits and some of their quotes (like the ones above). But at the same time they wanted a stable country. As evidenced by the quelling of several rebellions and other quotes. Ensuring that states had the right to form and maintain armed militias comprised of everyday citizens worked on both fronts. Because the militias were "the people" rather than part of the government, it gave assurance to those who were afraid of government control (especially through the force of a standing army), while also establishing a mechanism for maintaining stability. The 2nd Amendment was a calculated, political move.
I know think we might actually mostly agree, but are just discussing it in different terms (which is probably my mistake).
I think the founders saw the the 2nd amendment as a check if the government literally becomes a tyrannical and despotic government that uses the military to enforce undemocratic laws and measures on the popular. Basically, they can rise up if the government no longer is a republican democracy
Maybe I am mistaken, but I think some people take that view to think the founders included the second amendment so that people could oppose measures that they disagree with and they consider undemocratic or republican, even though the form of government is still a republican democracy. That, I think is ridiculous.
cyclonekruse
Member
I think we're in agreement here. The issue is that some people seem to think small things are "tyranny." When in reality, the founders would just say "that's your elected government at work."
GameGuru59
Banned
Amendment II said:
The Second Amendment is in the context of a militia. Analyzing the text, we can see that the militia is to be "well regulated." The purpose of the militia is to secure the free state. "The people" refers to the "the people" generally and at large. It does not refer to a right to bear all types of arms, by all people, at all times. It means that citizens may bear arms in the context of general ownership and responsible use. The ancient axiom that "the Constitution is not a suicide pact" applies- especially in light of the words "well regulated" being present in the sentence. This has always been the interpretation of the Second Amendment, until 2008. And even that new opinion by Scalia applies strict limits to the right. The only reason we don't have strict gun regulation now is because of the NRA. See the link below for details.
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/02/nras_constitutional_fraud_the_truth_behind_the_right_to_bear_arms/
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
Thanks for this OP. I thought I had a grasp on how bad it was for black Americans but it's way worse than I even thought. That stat that one in three black men will be put in prison is horrendous.
Just as a caveat, this is just an overview of the things I could think of by the time I stopped rambling at two in the morning (damn you, Ami!). I'm sure there's something important that I'll forget to mention, and Lord knows there's more I don't know about yet.
I'm currently reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877, so out of inspiration I'll start ... just before there. The point that I made - that the gaps in wealth and imprisonment are not the product of individual choices so much as they are public policy and individual - isn't a story that starts in the twentieth century. It has to start with slavery. And while it is a truism that a slave is unpaid, the fact of the matter is that American chattel slavery made the textile-based industrial revolution possible, by providing nearly 90% of the cotton at their peak. It was American slaves whose individual production rate near quadrupled to match the increases of production at British textile mills. It was American slaves who were responsible for 60% of the value of all U.S. exports on the eve of the Civil War. And slaves weren't blind to this; from Foner:
In fact, there were many slaves who believed that there would be division of land, because of arguments like this and because of experiences during the war such as Sherman's Field Order 15, which set aside the Sea Islands and a portion of the rice coast south of Charleston for the exclusive settlement of blacks. The freedmen believed that the land was theirs; Sherman said later that it was intended to be temporary. When the freedmen were finally told that they had to vacate the land, and were asked if they could "lay aside their bitter feelings, and to become reconciled to their old masters," the committee of freedmen responded:
And indeed, they saw things clearly. So, we have former slaves who have received none of the fruits of generations of labor without which this country would not have been possible. These same former slaves collectively have very little money with which to purchase land, even at depressed Reconstruction era prices, and this is such a cash poor region in the first place, and even good wages for agricultural work leaves workers desperately poor. The solution that worked for both sides at the time - though far better for the former masters - was sharecropping. But whatever the merits of sharecropping, its actual effect was to leave millions of black people in a state of debt peonage. By 1935, 77 percent of black farmers were landless (and half of white farmers, too). If you're interested in a lyrical, on-the-ground view of what life was like in the South at the turn of the twentieth-century, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk is the place to start.
In spite of all of the obstacles arrayed against them achieving tenant farming, let alone ownership, black people still succeeded in acquiring land. By 1910, black farmers held title to approximately 16 million acres of land, and by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. This was the peak, and though there was a precipitous drop to 681,790 by 1940, this was attributable in part to ordinary causes. And yet. Between 1940 and 1974, the number of black farms dropped far more precipitously - by 93 percent - to 45,594. By 1997, it had dropped to a mere 18,000 black farmers who collectively owned less than 3 million acres - and if black farmers had left agriculture at the same rate as white farmers since 1920, there would still be 300,000 left. What's more, it was quite evident that this was not the result of ordinary market forces, but deliberate racial discrimination on the part of the USDA and the Farmers Home Administration. A Government Accountability Office report found that in 1994, 94 percent of all county committees had no minority or female representation, and had nearly 500 complaints, half of which were more than two years old. This was accomplished by preventing minority representation on county committees, by delaying, refusing, or preventing black loan applications; by giving enough black farmers enough rope to hang themselves financially, and then not the additional loans they would need to allow them to take advantage the opportunities they'd been presented with - in effect forcing them to sell to white farmers. There's extensive documentation of this discrimination, and the near total destruction of the black farmer is a product of that same obsessive Reconstruction-era desire to see black people as a landless, dependent class.
Of course, during the 1910s, a great many black people were traveling to the North. This is the Great Migration, when six million African Americans left the rural South for the North between 1910 and 1960. This did not go particularly well; read Douglass Massey's American Apartheid for first for an overview of the rioting and violence that took place. For illustrative purposes: Between 1917 and 1921, a black home was bombed every two weeks in Chicago. In additional to extralegal attempts at erecting new racial barriers, there were numerous methods through white-controlled institutions. As a measure of their success, I'd like to note at the outset that in the North before the migration, dissimilarity indices averaged 59.9 - and by 1940 this was 89.2. This means that 89.2 percent of African Americans would have to move in order to create complete (100%) integration (which as it turns out isn't what black people or white people say they want, but black people are interested in considerably more integration than white people have been willing to countenance). I also hasten to note the Taeubers' study, who found that contrary to the myths that white Northerners had told themselves about how the black migrants differed from the Northern-born black people, migrants post-World War II “were not of lower socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population. Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Not only that, but they were also more likely to be married and to remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, less likely to head single-parent households than Northern-born blacks, and more likely to be employed. The fault for the creation of the ghetto cannot be laid at the feet of black people who lacked the education, the desire to work, and the middle-class values necessary for them to succeed and integrate into the mainstream of Northern cities.
In 1917, at the same time that those bombings were happening, in response to the "invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes", the Chicago Real Estate Board resolved to confine such sales to blocks immediately adjoining areas which already contained black residents, in effect keeping black homeowners in a contiguous area. While this was blocked by the Supreme Court, CREB then organized (voluntary) block clubs in white neighborhoods to ensure that no homes were sold to black buyers; the National Association of Real Estate Boards adopted CREB's policies in 1924. This is what created a dual housing market in the U.S.; this is why out of 120,000 new homes built between 1946 and 1953 in metropolitan Philadelphia, only 347 were open to blacks. This is also what kept black people in ghettos which were incomparable to the experiences of other ethnic or racial minorities. For instance, in 1933 only half of the Italians in Chicago lived in "Little Italys", and only 3 percent of Chicago's Irish people lived in the Irish ghetto - but 93 percent of Chicago's black population lived in the black ghetto. What's more, the segregation experienced by those European immigrants tended to decrease as they became Americanized and as they became "White." This was not possible for black people, and there's something of a transference of permanent anti-immigrant stereotypes onto black people.
In addition to the policies and tactics chosen by CREB in order to create a unified bulwark against black entrance into white neighborhoods, they also had the support of the Federal Housing Administration through the practice of redlining, which indicated that whole communities would not receive insurance for their loans. This did not only affect black people, but people who lived near black people, including integrated communities. This was a direct and powerful incentive for white homeowners to strongly resist integration into their communities, and it helped to cause home values of those who were living near the color-line to depreciate. Prospective black buyers had no options but to buy from whites on the margins; they had emigrated in their millions from the South, and yet they were being crowded into tiny ghettos due to the refusal of whites to countenance their entrance into their neighborhoods and a lack of new homes being built. In Chicago, where similar conditions existed as in Philadelphia, this allowed unscrupulous contract-sellers to charge black people four to five times the value of the home, while the contract-seller kept the deed, and the buyer could be evicted upon missing a single payment and the equity would be kept by the contract-seller. This was not an accident; contract-sellers turned this into a racket of selling, evicting, and re-selling. You might be able to guess the long-term effects of this on the properties and the communities, let alone on the ability of black people to accumulate capital:
And so the public ended up paying for the results of preying on black buyers who were locked out of the legitimate housing market.
Segregation was not an accident anywhere in the United States. It was both explicit public policy and private practice for many years, long after it was officially illegal, and there is good argument to make that it remains implicit public policy. As the Kerner Report so succinctly put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”
In effect, we created a two tier housing market - one in which black people were legally vulnerable (in fact it was argued that the protections of the law weren't meant to protect them) to the depredations of ne'er-do-wells offering contract sales at inflated prices - and 85 percent of black people who purchased homes in Chicago in the early 1960s did so on contract. They didn't possess other options. This is in addition to the effects of slavery, no reparations, the post-Reconstruction object of keeping black people as landless and dependent as possible, and the history of dispossession of the black farmer beginning in the 1940s.
In addition to this, Southern Dixiecrats worked hard in order to maintain white supremacy in the South in the midst of New Deal programs. They accomplished this through a variety of tactics. They sought to leave out as many African Americans as possible, by using provisions that were racially laden. For instance, by not including farmworkers or maids (60 percent of the black labor force in the 1960s, and nearly 75 percent in the South), they effectively blocked an enormous number of black people from benefiting from laws that set minimum wages, regulated hours of work, and from Social Security in the 1950s. They also insisted that the administration of those same laws, such as support for veterans (e.g. GI Bill) or assistance to the poor would be handled locally, by officials who were deeply hostile to black equality and worked to shield white supremacy. And they worked hard to prevent Congress from ever attaching anti-discrimination provisions to social welfare programs. Collectively, this meant that, as the NAACP said of the Social Security Act bill, these social welfare programs were like "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." You can see the effects of blocking enormous numbers of black people from participation in welfare, in Social Security, in the GI Bill, in the prevention of homeownership, and in forcing emigrants into ghettoes which were quickly destroyed by overcrowding, poor upkeep, constant turnover, incipient poverty, in a passage of a speech Lyndon Johnson made in 1965 at Howard University:
And these facts cannot be written off as ancient history. Just last year a study on the racial wealth gap by Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that it had increased by $152,000 in twenty-five years, which represented a near tripling of the previous difference. And contra inaccurate and uninformed stereotypes, the study authors write that, “Our analysis found little evidence to support common perceptions about what underlies the ability to build wealth, including the notion that personal attributes and behavioral choices are key pieces of the equation. Instead, the evidence points to policy and the configuration of both opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday life.”
And if anyone is interested in additional details, context, or just really wants to feel angry at how awful people can be:
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877
The Half Has Never Been Told
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights
I'm currently reading Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863 - 1877, so out of inspiration I'll start ... just before there. The point that I made - that the gaps in wealth and imprisonment are not the product of individual choices so much as they are public policy and individual - isn't a story that starts in the twentieth century. It has to start with slavery. And while it is a truism that a slave is unpaid, the fact of the matter is that American chattel slavery made the textile-based industrial revolution possible, by providing nearly 90% of the cotton at their peak. It was American slaves whose individual production rate near quadrupled to match the increases of production at British textile mills. It was American slaves who were responsible for 60% of the value of all U.S. exports on the eve of the Civil War. And slaves weren't blind to this; from Foner:
We has a right to the land where we are located. For why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land. . . . And den didn't we clear the land, and raise de crops, ob corn, ob cotton, ob tobacco, ob rice, ob sugar, ob everything. And den didn't dem large cities in the North grow up on de cotton and de sugars and de rice dat we made? . . . I say dey has grown rich, and my people is poor.
In fact, there were many slaves who believed that there would be division of land, because of arguments like this and because of experiences during the war such as Sherman's Field Order 15, which set aside the Sea Islands and a portion of the rice coast south of Charleston for the exclusive settlement of blacks. The freedmen believed that the land was theirs; Sherman said later that it was intended to be temporary. When the freedmen were finally told that they had to vacate the land, and were asked if they could "lay aside their bitter feelings, and to become reconciled to their old masters," the committee of freedmen responded:
General, we wants Homesteads, we were promised Homesteads by the government. If it does not carry out its promises its agents made us, if the government haveing concluded to befriend its late enemies and to neglect to observe the principles of common faith between its self and us its allies in the war you said was over, now takes away from them all right to the soil they stand upon save such as they can get by again working for your late and their all time enemies . . . we are left in a more unpleasant condition than our former . . . You will see this is not the condition of really freemen.
You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. You only lost your right arm in war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own - that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?
You ask us to forgive the land owners of our island. You only lost your right arm in war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree and gave me 39 lashes and who stripped and flogged my mother and my sister and who will not let me stay in his empty hut except I will do his planting and be satisfied with his price and who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not have anything to do with him if I had land of my own - that man, I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?
And indeed, they saw things clearly. So, we have former slaves who have received none of the fruits of generations of labor without which this country would not have been possible. These same former slaves collectively have very little money with which to purchase land, even at depressed Reconstruction era prices, and this is such a cash poor region in the first place, and even good wages for agricultural work leaves workers desperately poor. The solution that worked for both sides at the time - though far better for the former masters - was sharecropping. But whatever the merits of sharecropping, its actual effect was to leave millions of black people in a state of debt peonage. By 1935, 77 percent of black farmers were landless (and half of white farmers, too). If you're interested in a lyrical, on-the-ground view of what life was like in the South at the turn of the twentieth-century, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk is the place to start.
In spite of all of the obstacles arrayed against them achieving tenant farming, let alone ownership, black people still succeeded in acquiring land. By 1910, black farmers held title to approximately 16 million acres of land, and by 1920 there were 925,000 black farms in the country. This was the peak, and though there was a precipitous drop to 681,790 by 1940, this was attributable in part to ordinary causes. And yet. Between 1940 and 1974, the number of black farms dropped far more precipitously - by 93 percent - to 45,594. By 1997, it had dropped to a mere 18,000 black farmers who collectively owned less than 3 million acres - and if black farmers had left agriculture at the same rate as white farmers since 1920, there would still be 300,000 left. What's more, it was quite evident that this was not the result of ordinary market forces, but deliberate racial discrimination on the part of the USDA and the Farmers Home Administration. A Government Accountability Office report found that in 1994, 94 percent of all county committees had no minority or female representation, and had nearly 500 complaints, half of which were more than two years old. This was accomplished by preventing minority representation on county committees, by delaying, refusing, or preventing black loan applications; by giving enough black farmers enough rope to hang themselves financially, and then not the additional loans they would need to allow them to take advantage the opportunities they'd been presented with - in effect forcing them to sell to white farmers. There's extensive documentation of this discrimination, and the near total destruction of the black farmer is a product of that same obsessive Reconstruction-era desire to see black people as a landless, dependent class.
Of course, during the 1910s, a great many black people were traveling to the North. This is the Great Migration, when six million African Americans left the rural South for the North between 1910 and 1960. This did not go particularly well; read Douglass Massey's American Apartheid for first for an overview of the rioting and violence that took place. For illustrative purposes: Between 1917 and 1921, a black home was bombed every two weeks in Chicago. In additional to extralegal attempts at erecting new racial barriers, there were numerous methods through white-controlled institutions. As a measure of their success, I'd like to note at the outset that in the North before the migration, dissimilarity indices averaged 59.9 - and by 1940 this was 89.2. This means that 89.2 percent of African Americans would have to move in order to create complete (100%) integration (which as it turns out isn't what black people or white people say they want, but black people are interested in considerably more integration than white people have been willing to countenance). I also hasten to note the Taeubers' study, who found that contrary to the myths that white Northerners had told themselves about how the black migrants differed from the Northern-born black people, migrants post-World War II “were not of lower socioeconomic status than the resident Negro population. Indeed, in educational attainment, Negro in-migrants to northern cities were equal to or slightly higher than the resident white population.” Not only that, but they were also more likely to be married and to remain married, less likely to bear children out of wedlock, less likely to head single-parent households than Northern-born blacks, and more likely to be employed. The fault for the creation of the ghetto cannot be laid at the feet of black people who lacked the education, the desire to work, and the middle-class values necessary for them to succeed and integrate into the mainstream of Northern cities.
In 1917, at the same time that those bombings were happening, in response to the "invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes", the Chicago Real Estate Board resolved to confine such sales to blocks immediately adjoining areas which already contained black residents, in effect keeping black homeowners in a contiguous area. While this was blocked by the Supreme Court, CREB then organized (voluntary) block clubs in white neighborhoods to ensure that no homes were sold to black buyers; the National Association of Real Estate Boards adopted CREB's policies in 1924. This is what created a dual housing market in the U.S.; this is why out of 120,000 new homes built between 1946 and 1953 in metropolitan Philadelphia, only 347 were open to blacks. This is also what kept black people in ghettos which were incomparable to the experiences of other ethnic or racial minorities. For instance, in 1933 only half of the Italians in Chicago lived in "Little Italys", and only 3 percent of Chicago's Irish people lived in the Irish ghetto - but 93 percent of Chicago's black population lived in the black ghetto. What's more, the segregation experienced by those European immigrants tended to decrease as they became Americanized and as they became "White." This was not possible for black people, and there's something of a transference of permanent anti-immigrant stereotypes onto black people.
In addition to the policies and tactics chosen by CREB in order to create a unified bulwark against black entrance into white neighborhoods, they also had the support of the Federal Housing Administration through the practice of redlining, which indicated that whole communities would not receive insurance for their loans. This did not only affect black people, but people who lived near black people, including integrated communities. This was a direct and powerful incentive for white homeowners to strongly resist integration into their communities, and it helped to cause home values of those who were living near the color-line to depreciate. Prospective black buyers had no options but to buy from whites on the margins; they had emigrated in their millions from the South, and yet they were being crowded into tiny ghettos due to the refusal of whites to countenance their entrance into their neighborhoods and a lack of new homes being built. In Chicago, where similar conditions existed as in Philadelphia, this allowed unscrupulous contract-sellers to charge black people four to five times the value of the home, while the contract-seller kept the deed, and the buyer could be evicted upon missing a single payment and the equity would be kept by the contract-seller. This was not an accident; contract-sellers turned this into a racket of selling, evicting, and re-selling. You might be able to guess the long-term effects of this on the properties and the communities, let alone on the ability of black people to accumulate capital:
By the late 1960s, the system began to falter. Buildings were in such a sorry state that buyers were increasingly likely to put $100 down, make a few months of high payments, and then, overwhelmed by the avalanche of expenses necessary to make their new homes livable, abandon the properties. Without steady contract payments, Lawndale's contract sellers had no intention of continuing to pay their own mortgages.
Instead, they defaulted on their loans, dumping hundreds of crumbling, overmortgaged buildings back onto the lending institutions. Since the near-ruined buildings were now worth only a fraction of the original loans, the institutions essentially lost their loan money, amounting to millions of dollars. These losses pushed First Mutual to the point of collapse. Desperate to recoup something, the company offered the buildings for sale, at "rock bottom prices," to whoever would take them.
The scavengers who gathered to buy were often the same men who had dumped them in the first place. In one day alone, Moe Forman turned six slums over to First Mutual; five of the six ended up back in his hands, with Gil Balin as copartner. Al Berland dumped approximately sixty buildings onto First Mutual and then repurchased them at a fraction of their former worth.
By 1968, First Mutual was out of business, and 659 of its defaulted mortgages--worth $7.8 million--landed with the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), the governmental agency that insured savings and loan deposits. Many of these debts had been owed by Lawndale's worst contract sellers. They included $756,920 in delinquent mortgages owed by Berke, $280,000 by Berland, $502,323 by Forman's F & F Investment company, $28,945 by Forman himself, and $241,658 by Fushanis's estate.”
Instead, they defaulted on their loans, dumping hundreds of crumbling, overmortgaged buildings back onto the lending institutions. Since the near-ruined buildings were now worth only a fraction of the original loans, the institutions essentially lost their loan money, amounting to millions of dollars. These losses pushed First Mutual to the point of collapse. Desperate to recoup something, the company offered the buildings for sale, at "rock bottom prices," to whoever would take them.
The scavengers who gathered to buy were often the same men who had dumped them in the first place. In one day alone, Moe Forman turned six slums over to First Mutual; five of the six ended up back in his hands, with Gil Balin as copartner. Al Berland dumped approximately sixty buildings onto First Mutual and then repurchased them at a fraction of their former worth.
By 1968, First Mutual was out of business, and 659 of its defaulted mortgages--worth $7.8 million--landed with the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), the governmental agency that insured savings and loan deposits. Many of these debts had been owed by Lawndale's worst contract sellers. They included $756,920 in delinquent mortgages owed by Berke, $280,000 by Berland, $502,323 by Forman's F & F Investment company, $28,945 by Forman himself, and $241,658 by Fushanis's estate.”
And so the public ended up paying for the results of preying on black buyers who were locked out of the legitimate housing market.
Segregation was not an accident anywhere in the United States. It was both explicit public policy and private practice for many years, long after it was officially illegal, and there is good argument to make that it remains implicit public policy. As the Kerner Report so succinctly put it: “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.”
In effect, we created a two tier housing market - one in which black people were legally vulnerable (in fact it was argued that the protections of the law weren't meant to protect them) to the depredations of ne'er-do-wells offering contract sales at inflated prices - and 85 percent of black people who purchased homes in Chicago in the early 1960s did so on contract. They didn't possess other options. This is in addition to the effects of slavery, no reparations, the post-Reconstruction object of keeping black people as landless and dependent as possible, and the history of dispossession of the black farmer beginning in the 1940s.
In addition to this, Southern Dixiecrats worked hard in order to maintain white supremacy in the South in the midst of New Deal programs. They accomplished this through a variety of tactics. They sought to leave out as many African Americans as possible, by using provisions that were racially laden. For instance, by not including farmworkers or maids (60 percent of the black labor force in the 1960s, and nearly 75 percent in the South), they effectively blocked an enormous number of black people from benefiting from laws that set minimum wages, regulated hours of work, and from Social Security in the 1950s. They also insisted that the administration of those same laws, such as support for veterans (e.g. GI Bill) or assistance to the poor would be handled locally, by officials who were deeply hostile to black equality and worked to shield white supremacy. And they worked hard to prevent Congress from ever attaching anti-discrimination provisions to social welfare programs. Collectively, this meant that, as the NAACP said of the Social Security Act bill, these social welfare programs were like "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through." You can see the effects of blocking enormous numbers of black people from participation in welfare, in Social Security, in the GI Bill, in the prevention of homeownership, and in forcing emigrants into ghettoes which were quickly destroyed by overcrowding, poor upkeep, constant turnover, incipient poverty, in a passage of a speech Lyndon Johnson made in 1965 at Howard University:
“Here are some of the facts of this American failure.
Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.
In 1948 the 8 percent unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23 percent, as against 13 percent for whites unemployed.
Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped from 57 percent to 53 percent.
In the years 1955 through 1957, 22 percent of experienced Negro workers were out of work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963 that proportion had soared to 29 percent.
Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decreased 27 percent while the number of poorer nonwhite families decreased only 3 percent.
The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent greater than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 percent greater.
Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.”
Thirty-five years ago the rate of unemployment for Negroes and whites was about the same. Tonight the Negro rate is twice as high.
In 1948 the 8 percent unemployment rate for Negro teenage boys was actually less than that of whites. By last year that rate had grown to 23 percent, as against 13 percent for whites unemployed.
Between 1949 and 1959, the income of Negro men relative to white men declined in every section of this country. From 1952 to 1963 the median income of Negro families compared to white actually dropped from 57 percent to 53 percent.
In the years 1955 through 1957, 22 percent of experienced Negro workers were out of work at some time during the year. In 1961 through 1963 that proportion had soared to 29 percent.
Since 1947 the number of white families living in poverty has decreased 27 percent while the number of poorer nonwhite families decreased only 3 percent.
The infant mortality of nonwhites in 1940 was 70 percent greater than whites. Twenty-two years later it was 90 percent greater.
Moreover, the isolation of Negro from white communities is increasing, rather than decreasing as Negroes crowd into the central cities and become a city within a city.”
And these facts cannot be written off as ancient history. Just last year a study on the racial wealth gap by Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy found that it had increased by $152,000 in twenty-five years, which represented a near tripling of the previous difference. And contra inaccurate and uninformed stereotypes, the study authors write that, “Our analysis found little evidence to support common perceptions about what underlies the ability to build wealth, including the notion that personal attributes and behavioral choices are key pieces of the equation. Instead, the evidence points to policy and the configuration of both opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday life.”
And if anyone is interested in additional details, context, or just really wants to feel angry at how awful people can be:
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863 - 1877
The Half Has Never Been Told
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights
If there are typos or weird editorial errors, I blame fatigue, being too lazy to proofread a post this long, and Amir0x
NYCmetsfan
Banned
Mumei with a great post. The most important line being:
It what I've come to realize is by and large segregation is still the goal. Integration or at least true equality and Integration is still not truly desired by the majority of white americans. When they speak of equality its blacks becoming part of white america, not an acceptance by whites of black america.
It what I've come to realize is by and large segregation is still the goal. Integration or at least true equality and Integration is still not truly desired by the majority of white americans. When they speak of equality its blacks becoming part of white america, not an acceptance by whites of black america.
Foxy Fox 39
Banned
Cannot wait to read Mumei's post. Always good stuff
Yoshi
Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
A STATISTICAL PRIMER
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● 60% of people in prison are ethnic minorities; 1 in 10 Black males in their 30s are incarcerated
There's something I need to ask regarding this statistic: Is there an enormous amount of wrong sentences against black men or are really about one third of all black men in the US criminals? Because this would seem outrageous, even if you take into account that they may get more severe sentences than white men, if about a third of some part of a population ends up as a criminal, that's a disaster.
It's combination of racial profiling, to the war on drugs, to the amount of prejudice and bias present in every step of the legal system. From arrest to sentencing, minorities are treated unfairly and sentenced unfairly, black America being the group suffering the most by it. What that leads people to simply assume is that crime is inherent to race and as such the circle of bullshit continues to spin.
There's a combination of reasons. When black men are jailed, it's usually for non-violent drug offences - black people are much more likely to be profiled and targeted by police. Plus, due to racial disparities in wealth, black people are much more likely to need to depend on court-ordered public defenders, which often don't provide adequate service. And that's not even going into racial and prejudicial bias. There are factors at essentially every step along the way that result in black people being much more likely to be incarcerated.
ryutaro's mama
Member
Don't forget the overwhelming assumption of guilt by juries.
Shake Appeal
Member
The New York Times, of all venues, had a pretty good piece about how deeply segregated Missouri schools are, including the dead-last school district from which Michael Brown came.
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