“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” ― Frederick Douglass
In a community of the oppressed, it is a sin to discuss oppression without discussing the oppressor. To be oppressed is to be a victim. And to be an oppressor you must be the abuser. But for myself as a black man who has taken the time to study the world a bit closer, I have questions that I have never gotten answers too and realizations I had to find outside of the main culture. Psychology, mass manipulation through media, ideological indoctrination for political gain. Is it possible that Black America has been played into a fetishized role in American society? In this article I would like to examine the possibility of this, given the relative sensitivity and exposition of political speech, it seems like a critical moment for black American’s to look around and ask ourselves.
Who’s been really looking out for us?
Let me start from a few assumptions and try to work through them.
The reason black America struggles is due to systemic racism.
White supremacy is on the rise and is attempting to silence black folks and marginalize them.
Capitalism was set up to keep black American’s as cattle people and oppressed their economic opportunities.
Slavery and Jim Crow today still impact and subtly move policy to disenfranchise black folks.
Ideas In Reality
Systematic racism is one of the powerful arguments for black plight. It is so relevant and persists so easily because the premises is seductive enough to move people to claim it without any evidence or analysis. White America has been on the front lines against the oppression of black people since the founding of America. Does that sound like a contradiction?
To those influenced by the ideas of systematic racism, white supremacy, and microaggressions this sounds like a non-starter. But facts out way these points. The majority of men who died for the abolition of slavery were poor white men. The majority of congressmen who voted for legislation to end slavery, give blacks the vote, and the creation of the welfare state in the 60s were white men. So to claim oppression by whites as a group is a fallacy that throws in the face the centuries of white abolitionists, activists, congresspersons, and Presidents that have risked their lives for the freedom of black people.
Ideas are the linchpin of policy, and to win out ideas you must have solid footing.
Capital & Welfare
To begin a discussion about Welfare there are a few assertions that need to be made. If blacks are poor (which statistically they are) and if blacks are the victims and abusers in the majority of crime (which they are) but have received more government benefits in the 20th and 21st century than any other ethnic minority I believe it’s fair to ask the question — has the “Great Society” promised in the late 60s through welfare and affirmative action come to reality?
I would say no. A resounding no. A no so based in fact and truth it is disgusting and shameful that I should feel a pinch of fear to type the words I do. Am I supposed to be proud of the majority of black women having children are out of wedlock? Or that the stats for black youth to be prone to violence and traumatic situations? Should I turn my head and say that it is Donald Trump’s fault that the rate of murder in Chicago under Barack Obama did not go down to levels that won’t make mothers in Chicago weep every weekend for another funeral? I cannot do the moral backflips to make myself swallow this pill.
The school is on fire and the children are still inside.
As a younger man, when I thought of the problems of the black community my first inclination would be systemic racism and police brutality. I would like to decipher long police videos attempting to prove (as if I needed any more evidence in my mind) that this problem was keeping us in a fixate point of poverty and disillusionment with American culture, capitalism, and the political system. It hits me like a ton of bricks. I know so many African American men who discuss the lack of nutriment from their fathers. Every rapper has a line.
When blackness is paramount. The idea that the collective (community) can raise the child becomes a necessity. With the home broken, the lonely one is passed around from hand to hand blessing it with a little more knowledge and a bit more grit. But if the community is nowhere to be found? If the collective is as - if not more - dysfunctional than the individual?
I was lucky. I didn’t have to suffer from the community as Jay Z did. Or any of my friends growing up in Detroit. I didn’t see only 2 options growing up. But I was in such a privileged state I could take a different route. I was depressed, so I saw no options. I saw the world as an oppressive, greedy, crony capitalist system that was designed to strip money from the black community and line the pockets of racist whites and complicit Jews funding the entire thing. Hell — I would be willing to throw black conservatives under the bus as race traitors attempting to please the white man. House Niggers attempting to please a white master that would never truly accept them because no matter how hard they tried to clean the blackness from their skin the white man would always see through the game, and keep them below.
Costs & Complicity
But what is the cost of Black lives to the white progressives who launched this attempted Great Society? Nothing. Nothing at all. Famously, President Lyndon B. Johnson — The president who passed and pushed these laws as a moral good — claimed that passing the welfare laws would quote - “have those niggers voting democrat for 200 years.”
60 years later, after all the pain from the black community has not gone down but ramped up It’s a powerful idea that still riddles me with questions. The black community votes 90% Democrat. The black community has been destroyed by policies put in place by Democrat-run Congress and Democrat-run Presidents. How can the ideology so dominant in my lifetime staged and pushed by the first black President be against the actual progress of black Americans?
The truth lies in policies and results.
- Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996
- Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
Just to name a few. The black family wasn’t destroyed by Slavery. An idea I believed was true for many years out of a logic of — If you were enslaved and had children the children would be separated and the wife would be taken from the man. The numbers dispute this. And even if this is true, the family was put back together somehow. That’s right. Those poor and helpless blacks under Jim Crow in the south and a racist America in the 1950s had babies out of wedlock around 30%. Way below the numbers today that hover around ~75%.
Is it possible good intentions lead to bad outcomes? It’s not only possible it has happened and it will continue to happen. When Bernie Sanders comes on the breakfast club and proclaims that he voted for the crime bill of 94, the many men and women in that room should of went at him with vigor about the statistical “surprises” that persist past these well-intentioned “solutions”.
But the ideas presented above shall be parroted as sticking points of Trump, Conservativism, and something I like to call Uncle Tom Syndrome. Diversity boards, affirmative action, and the first black President did not stop blacks from murdering each other in Chicago. It’s a sick and twisted metamorphous of words and thought as the problem shifts away from actual death, family destruction, lack of religion, and incredibly persistent fear of capitalism and embracement of Marxism that brings many to the conclusion that blacks are a lost people.
And the White progressives? The ones who institute the laws over blacks, claim to support our culture and look not at the death stats, birth and abortion ratios, or painful stats on black IQ. They focus on the fact that 90% of blacks voted Democrat and how to continue to push the narrative that “victimized” blacks represent the normal, status quo experience caused by an oppressive American Government bound to destroy them by redlining.
Progressive Protests & Black Deaths
But who runs the teacher unions that destroy black communities with terrible public schools? When the teachers won’t teach at the public schools do we blame the whites for having different private schools they can afford? Why have these problems persisted? Mostly, whites that are not perpetuating the lie that the government hasn’t helped black people at all are blamed. If you are white and claim that the government specifically targets social programs for blacks, even when it hurts everyone involved besides administrators and lobbyists. How can you not want to keep sending your tax dollars to the failing school, in the murder capitals of America, infested by drugs and gang life that has done the opposite for black progress?
We need to stop pretending as if the world is against blacks and start waking up to the realization that liberal policies have not helped blacks at all.
They push that in fact, white supremacy is alive and well, feeding off the teet of Donald Trump and the rise of American Nationalism as a direct threat to black progress. Ironically, the thing white progressive fail to understand in this new ideology of victimhood and systematic oppression. That no matter how hard the white progressives attempt to push the narrative to please black “leaders” they can not escape the ideology. If white supremacy and victimhood are truths. That white people are evil and it is their white skin that gives them this superpower over blacks. There is no escape for white progressives to escape from the evilness radiating from their white skin. If identity politics is correct, the whites supporting it aren’t only supporting the downfall and hatred for their ancestors that freed the slaves, but also their children and grandchildren I’m sure they have and will tell that black people are systematically oppressed by whites.
And the narrative, the push, the parties message is that if you are not with us you are against us. I do not think it is in the best interest for blacks to be courted. But I believe it is in our best interest to recognize the truth. The school is on fire. All the kids are inside. And the one who lit the match is throwing oil on it claiming they’re putting it out. The economy, the culture, the faith, and the identity was stripped from Slaves as they made their way to the New World throughout the slave trade. These tenets of black culture have dipped and swayed throughout our history in the America’s. But what has been true this entire time, is the fight for liberty wasn’t lost. It feels as if Martin Luther King Jr didn’t happen. That the fight wasn’t won even when we lost him. To Dr. King, dignity was the cornerstone to the message of liberty. Now Victimhood is the cornerstone to raising taxes to supply the state with more power and more control over the education, birth, and political ideology of blacks.
The school is on fire. Can we be brave enough to acknowledge it and put it out?
“New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof asserts that there is ‘overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequality in the 21st century’ and he mentions ‘the lingering effects of slavery’. If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end fo slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state.” — Thomas Sowell, Creators.com