Here’s an admittedly controversial hypothesis: anyone who insists that we owe black Americans absolutely nothing at all in light of the residual effects of slavery, Jim Crow and decades of segregation and discrimination is a racist. Or a bigot. Or maybe both.
The fact that such a statement is inflammatory doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s wrong, or even overstated. Let’s follow a logical sequence.
Most Americans subscribe to the grand idea put forth in our Declaration of Independence that “All men are created equal.” We have to accept that noble sentiment as a given in order to continue this discussion, even though we know full well that it’s hardly a given for many Americans, who at least secretly in their heart of hearts – if not openly – would contend that blacks suffer from a genetic inferiority.
There’s not much we can do for those folks other than to wait patiently for them to die. I am not advocating violence, but merely pointing out that much of the most hateful bigotry in America thankfully disappears each and every day as folks often horribly entrenched in shameful views from the past simply meet their maker.
This passage isn’t for them anyway. It’s doubtful any dyed-in-the-wool racist could be talked off that shameful ledge. But there are almost certainly millions of God-fearing, Constitution embracing, CNN-watching Americans who will insist that we owe blacks nothing whatsoever. And they are wrong.
Starting from that noble “all men are created equal” premise, we find ourselves needing to find a credible explanation for the current plight of so many millions of blacks who are not sharing in the American Dream, or at least not nearly to the level of White America.
No rational person would dispute the hideous statistics: millions of blacks are imprisoned, disproportionately (to an alarming degree) relative to their percentage of the overall population in the United States and millions of others remain at the fringe of our society and economic system. Drugs, the scourge of modern America, white and black, wind up being an even greater curse, relatively speaking, in the black community, even though whites take the prize for total numbers of users. Wretchedly skewed sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine have helped contribute to an incarceration rate for blacks that ought to be regarded as a shameful barometer of a society badly out of whack in its treatment of non-whites. The ghettos that scarred our urban landscape are far better today than they were 35 years ago, but they are far from obliterated and the housing disparity that exists between white and black and other minorities remains for all to see.
Pick any statistics you want: unemployment, college enrollment, gross income, etc., and they all scream that there are still significant disparities between white and black.
How then do we explain it? We can’t hint – even obliquely – that blacks aren’t inherently as intelligent as whites, because that flies in the face of our underlying insistence that “all are created equal.” Vague references to “not being as motivated” don’t wash either, because to postulate that there was some kind of genetic shortcoming (this would be the roundabout way of alluding to laziness) would be clearly racist.
Confronted with finding an explanation of why the American way of life hasn’t worked for so many millions of blacks, environment – and by extension history – become the only answers that bear an semblance of logic. What else is there? Bad luck? Astrology? The WB?
The argument that so many millions of blacks have succeeded in such spectacular fashion – we have a black man in the White House, after all – doesn’t get white America off the hook, either. From President Obama on down, every black person can be justifiably proud of what they have accomplished, for virtually the same reasons that any other American could take pride in their own success, but that doesn’t change the reality for the millions of others left behind.
I defy any rational-thinking American to offer a coherent explanation for the wretched disparities that exist between black and white in this country – even in 2011 – that doesn’t acknowledge the residual effects of the “Big Three.”
Slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. If you want to point out that slavery ended nearly 150 years ago, that Jim Crow’s vile grip was largely loosened many decades after that and segregation was official ditched 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, go ahead, but it doesn’t even remotely invalidate my argument.
(I’ll conclude this essay in the next blog.)
