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December 15 - December 19, 2020
in the twenty-first century, Michael Brown’s school district had been on probation for fifteen years, annually accruing only 10 out of 140 points on the state’s accreditation scale.
White rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies. It wreaks havoc subtly, almost imperceptibly. Too imperceptibly, certainly, for a nation consistently drawn to the spectacular—to what it can see.
The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement.
“Indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
And as Reconstruction wore on, the U.S. Supreme Court also stepped in to halt the progress that so many had hoped and worked for.
The reigning leaders of the Confederacy, who had rightfully expected to be tried and hung as traitors, now were not only poised to sail back into power in the federal government but also, given Johnson’s amnesty, allowed to regain control of their states and, as a consequence, of the millions of newly emancipated and landless black people there.
Indeed, such was Mississippi’s obstinacy that it delayed ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment until 2013.
What?!?!?
If the Negro would just stay in his place, he wrote, and quit demanding to exercise every last little right “which the law gives him,” then there would be peace in Detroit. “I shall go further,” Smith then added. “I believe that any colored person who endangers life and property, simply to gratify his personal pride, is an enemy of his race as well as an incitant of riot and murder.”
During World War II, the federal government estimated that it would have taken, in 2014 dollars, $1.2 trillion to equalize the schools in America.
Even as late as 1960, more than 98 percent of Mississippi’s black adults were not registered to vote.49
In this reworking of history, “black parents were to blame for the interruption of their children’s education, since blacks had chosen integration over education” and had joined “the federal courts and the NAACP as the aggressors.”104
Whereas at one point, “about 40% of the world’s scientists and engineers resided in the U.S.,” according to Rodney C. Adkins, senior vice president of IBM, “that number [had] shrunk to about 15%” by 2012.
Since the days of enslavement, African Americans have fought to gain access to quality education. Education can be transformative. It reshapes the health outcomes of a people; it breaks the cycle of poverty; it improves housing conditions; it raises the standard of living. Perhaps, most meaningfully, educational attainment significantly increases voter participation.135 In short, education strengthens a democracy.
African Americans weren’t the only ones who took a hit. The states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health.
The insistence on destroying Brown, and thus the viability of America’s schools and the quality of education children receive regardless of where they live, has resulted in “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession” for wide swaths of the American public.141
Patrick Buchanan, adviser to Richard Nixon and presidential candidate himself would explain decades later: “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”
Disgusting
The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although “resentful of black progress” and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the “kind of upstanding white citizen[s]” who were “positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.
By 1966, 85 percent of whites were certain that “the pace of civil rights progress was too fast.”22
Almost fifteen years after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Mississippi, ever recalcitrant, had yet to desegregate its public school system.
When, on July 3, 1969, the federal court ordered the state to implement Brown by that fall, Nixon’s attorney general, as well as his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, convinced the judges to reverse the decision because “time was too short and the administrative problems too difficult to accomplish … before the beginning of the 1969–1970 school year.”
If Texas had a rational basis for its property tax system, the justices concluded, then the mechanism met judicial standards, despite producing a 975 percent disparity in school funding between white and minority children in Texas.
He was equally unimpressed with Texas’ tendency to parade before the justices stories of children who had excelled despite living in under-resourced districts as some sort of proof that funding was irrelevant. That a child could excel even when “forced to attend an underfunded school with poorer physical facilities, less experienced teachers, larger classes,” and a number of other deficits compared with “a school with substantially more funds,” Marshall barked, “is to the credit of the child not the State.”
The exception is not the rule
In a 1981 interview, GOP consultant Lee Atwater explained the inner logic of, as one commentator noted, “racism with plausible deniability.”77 “You start out in 1954,” Atwater laid out, “by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.
...more
just at the moment when the postindustrial economy made an undergraduate degree more important than ever, fifteen thousand fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been enrolled in the mid-1970s (although the high school graduation numbers were by now significantly higher).
More than 50 percent of the growth in employment for black workers in the United States between 1960 to 1976, in fact, was in the public sector.
There was just one problem. There was no drug crisis in 1982. Marijuana use was down; heroin and hallucinogens use had leveled off, even first-time cocaine use was bottoming out.
I don't know about this one..
Reagan’s “moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers” was now ready to saturate the United States with cocaine.
self-created drug crisis
i get it now
Between 1986 and 1987, 76 percent of the articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times dealing with crack referenced African Americans either directly or through code words—urban, inner city, etc. Whites were mentioned only one third of the time.131 The message was clear: the black “plague” was coming.132
Joe Moore, a pig farmer, was sentenced to 99 years for selling two hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine to the undercover narcotics agent. Kizzie White received twenty-five years, while her husband, William “Cash” Love, landed 434 years for possessing an ounce of cocaine.
were actually drug kingpins.155 What was discovered, however, was judicial misconduct running rampant in the war on drugs in Tulia, Texas, with a clear racial bias.
Disfranchisement, permanent bans on jury service, and legal discrimination in employment, housing, and education—despite the civil rights legislation of the 1960s—are now all burdens carried by those who have been incarcerated. That burden has been disproportionately shouldered by the black community, which, although only 13 percent of the nation’s population, makes up 45 percent of those incarcerated.161
According to Human Rights Watch, “the proportion of blacks in prison populations exceeds the proportion among state residents in every single state.”
In fact, “in twenty states, the percent[age] of blacks incarcerated is at least five times greater than their share of resident population.”163
One party official, while offering assurances that racism wasn’t the driving motivation, admitted, “It’s simply that the Republican Party gave up a long time ago ever believing that anything they did would get minorities to vote for them.”
Black respectability or “appropriate” behavior doesn’t seem to matter. If anything, black achievement, black aspirations, and black success are construed as direct threats. Obama’s presidency made that clear. Aspirations and the achievement of these aspirations provide no protection. Not even to the God-fearing.
Similar to George Wallace’s run for the presidency in 1968, Trump’s supporters bristled at the thought that public policies would provide any help to African Americans and were certain that blacks were getting much more than they deserved from the government while the “average American” was getting much less.
Americans, shaken out of their complacency that democracy will just run on its very own, are now taking ownership of this nation, of what it means—inclusively—to be in the United States.
