Transcription
A Black History Reader: 101 Questions You Never Thought to Ask by Dr. Claude Anderson
Part 7 or Chapter 7: Profiling Presidents and Authorities
Question 43: What is the link between U.S. presidents and marijuana/hemp?
In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy Reagan, led a national anti-drug campaign, telling the nation's young people that, in regards to drugs, they should just say no. Today, nearly 40 years later, growing and selling marijuana have the potential to become one of the nation's greatest wealth-building industries. Since President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan departed from the White House, many popular entertainers and athletes have admitted to their recreational use of marijuana, and an increasing number of states have legalized its use and possession. Within the last 25 years, even three American presidents contributed to the growing public acceptance of marijuana by admitting their use of it. Bill Clinton made his public admissions in the 1990s. Barack Obama surprised many people when he confessed in his autobiography and on national television that he had smoked marijuana. In January 2015, Jeb Bush, ex-governor of Florida and brother of ex-President George W. Bush, began to clear away personal debris as he prepared to run for the presidency, telling reporters for the Boston Globe newspaper that he had smoked marijuana.
The public may be accustomed to hearing about entertainers and marijuana, but they ought not to be that surprised about U.S. presidents and other public officials having a relationship with marijuana. There is a long history between them; the only thing that is new is high-level government officials publicly omitting their involvement with this particular drug. Marijuana played a central role in the lives of not only modern U.S. presidents and other public officials but also the nation's founding fathers and other prominent historical figures who were involved with the hemp plant and other drugs for centuries. The hemp plant was a basic raw material used in numerous industries to produce a variety of consumer products. It was prominently grown, especially on southern plantations, and used recreationally and medically as well. Large slavery plantations grew marijuana for consumer items and for use on the plantations.
Acting examples of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who each owned hundreds of slaves, were large hemp plant growers and reputed smokers. Even President Abe Lincoln allegedly used marijuana recreationally as well as for pain relief. The marijuana hemp plant was legal tender used even to pay taxes in colonial society into the mid-1800s. Fibers from the hemp plant were used to make ropes, canvas, twines, strings, paper, and clothes for Black slaves. Various pharmaceutical companies used the liquid to produce medicines. According to the U.S. Census, in 1850, there were 8,327 marijuana plantations. By 1883, marijuana smoking parlors were legally opened in major urban cities; New York City alone had over 500 smoking parlors. By the late 1800s, marijuana and hemp were so popular that cities and towns were named after them: Hempstead, Long Island; Hempstead County, Arkansas; Hempstead, Texas; Hempfield, North Carolina; Hempfield, Pennsylvania; and many other towns and streets bearing the name.
Although Blacks were never the major producers or commercial users of the hemp plant when it was legal, they were stigmatized by the possession and use of the plant after it became illegal. Instead of blaming white owners of large farms that produced the plant, Blacks were blamed for the increased use of marijuana. Between 1910 and the 1930s, public officials in New Orleans charged that marijuana smoking was making Blacks think they were as good as white men. Some members of the white overclass believed marijuana was to blame for the assertiveness of Black activists and the loud laughter of Blacks when whites gave them orders. By the time Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama confessed to their marijuana smoking, it had gained acceptability and was nearly politically correct. With rising acceptability, like the phoenix, marijuana production and use will rise again and become the biggest wealth producer of the 21st century. A number of states and federal institutions began issuing licenses for legally grown marijuana beginning in 2013. However, in all likelihood, just as in previous centuries, Blacks will wind up being consumers of the product rather than producers and will most likely not be the beneficiaries of the wealth it generates.
Question 44: What will be President Barack Obama's greatest and most memorable legacy?
In a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus on September 18, 2016, President Barack Obama told the assembled Black audience, "I would consider it a personal insult and an insult to my legacy if the Black community does not support Hillary Clinton's candidacy so that she can continue my legacy." Donald Trump, however, was elected as the President of the United States of America in a shocking reversal of voting patterns. Black voters gave Donald Trump three times the number of votes they gave the Republican Party in the past 65 years of presidential elections. Black voters who switched their political loyalties from Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party to Donald Trump sent up a distress signal. These Black voters did not want the continuation of President Barack Obama's legacy nor the traditional way Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party have viewed and treated Black Americans. Blacks wanted change in their social and economic conditions—conditions that Obama did not address during his two terms.
Black voters gave Barack Obama nearly 100 percent of their vote in both of his national elections, but the qualifier of the wealth gap between Blacks and whites widened while Obama served as president. Cortland Miloy, a columnist from the Washington Post, in an article on August 2, 2011, lamented, "Blackness sadness." Miloy said, "Black America is crying the blues like no time since the Great Depression. Black households, on average, have lost more than half their worth in just a few short years, and the wealth gap between Blacks and whites is at a historic high." What Miloy neglected to say was that racial disparities widened across the socio-economic spectrum under President Barack Obama's administration. White unemployment dropped while the Black structural unemployment rate remained at nearly 50 percent. The poverty rate for Blacks increased to nearly 37 percent, and their median family incomes declined. Black imprisonment remained above 51 percent, Black student achievement levels and college enrollment dropped, and the FBI continued reporting that approximately 67 percent of the nation's hate crimes are committed against Black Americans.
With social integration and the Black civil rights movements having failed to significantly eradicate racial disparities, a host on the American Herbal Radio Network asked President Obama what his plans were for relieving the suffering and desperate conditions within Black America. President Obama quickly responded, "I can't pass laws that I say I'm going to help the Black folks. I am the president of the entire U.S. What I can do is to make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most in need." These are glorious but misleading statements that show weakness and indifference towards his own people. If his intent was to help all people, then he should have helped Black Americans; all means all.
Furthermore, Obama chose to give special assistance to Hispanics, Arabs, Jews, American Indians, and LGBT individuals without passing laws for them. In the instance of American Indians, the Harvest Institute Freeman Federation filed a lawsuit in 2007 and asked Barack Obama to pass the law but simply to obey the 1866 Indian treaties. A treaty and an agreement between sovereign nations is supposed to be the highest law in the land. The 1866 treaties mandated that Black Indians and those Blacks formerly owned as slaves by Indians be treated exactly as non-Black Native Indians are treated. For eight years, President Obama and his administration ignored the 1866 treaties and the benefits those treaties mandated for Black Indians and Black freedmen, but he used the same laws to settle more than a hundred pending legal lawsuits filed by non-Black Native Indians. Barack Obama made the front page of major newspapers in 2016 as the tribe celebrated their victory and thanked Obama for remembering the promises he had made to them. To Black Americans, he had no promises; therefore, there were no promises to be kept.
Throughout two years of campaigning and eight years of being the most powerful man on Earth, President Obama rolled the racial fence and used flowery rhetoric in the hopes of magically achieving the impossible. He tried to take race out of race matters and racial inequalities. Instead of providing wheelchairs to Blacks historically crippled by mainstream society, President Obama chose to provide wheelchairs to other more socially preferred and less afflicted groups. He left Blacks to hobble on their own. President Obama continued the benign neglect public policies and practices that President Richard Nixon instituted on Black people in 1970. Benign neglect excludes Blacks from public policies by name but gives the public the illusion that they are included within the broad categories of minority, people of color, and diversity. Over the course of the past 50 years, these public policies have transmuted into hateful indifference toward Black people.
President Barack Obama's turn to blind eye toward Black Americans will be the model for all future presidents. In the closing months of his presidency, an increasing number of Blacks, as well as whites, were asking why President Barack Obama had so justly avoided identifying with aiding Blacks. Some speculated that it was because Obama was the first African-American—not Black American—president raised outside of the continental U.S. and not having the experience of Black enslavement or Jim Crow semi-slavery. His family background could be a partial answer. Others speculated that since he had attended Harvard Law School and taught constitutional law, he knew the risk of associating with Blackness yet chose to ignore the principle of electoral politics: quid pro quo—something for something; you vote for me, I owe you. Many Black voters are feeling betrayed, remembering that Obama placed his hand on the Holy Bible and promised to represent, protect, and serve all the people, yet he ignored identification with lower Black voters. He chose instead to identify with the direct resource, not to Blacks, but to lower-income groups such as ethnic immigrants, religious groups, LGBT individuals, and gender minorities.
In reality, there were no incentives for Barack Obama to identify with and represent Black Americans since he did not campaign in Black neighborhoods and promised them nothing for their votes and loyalties. President Barack Obama was a colorblind president who was a master of using soaring rhetoric and supporting symbolic activities that were emotionally gratifying to Black Americans. Therefore, Black Americans must bear some of the blame for the behavior and differences that President Obama exhibited toward his own people. For too long, Black Americans have been satisfied with receiving nothing or just emotional satisfaction when a Black person is elevated into a high position because of their support. Black voters should exercise greater critical thinking and evaluate Black public officials based upon what the officials do or do not do in measurable terms for Black supporters.
President Obama will have two landmark legacies. First, as a president, Barack Obama showed that Black candidates are qualified to hold the highest office in the nation and can be relied upon to do exactly what any white person holding office would do regarding racial matters. Second, Barack Obama will go into the history books as a model for all future white presidents who, in race matters, can say to Black Americans, "If a Black man who was in the White House for eight years did absolutely nothing to help his own people, why then should a white president feel obligated to do anything? If a Black man is colorblind to Blackness, why shouldn't whites also be blind to Blackness?" Such a legacy would be difficult to explain to future generations of Black voters who grew up hearing about the power of the vote and the importance of getting Blacks elected to high levels of government.
Question 45: In 1870, what code of conduct in politics did whites impose on Blacks who sought public office?
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was specifically designed to grant suffrage rights to Black people. The amendment stipulated that the rights of Blacks to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. Blacks assumed that this new law meant that as newly freed slaves, they would have unrestricted opportunities to vote, run for public office, and politically exercise an interest in addressing the needs and aspirations of their own people. The Radical Republicans, who were the congregation of liberals in those days, enacted the laws that freed Blacks and gave them voting rights. However, conservative political forces still needed a subordinate Black labor and consumer class. Southern whites were unwilling to relinquish control of Blacks who were anxious to enter electoral politics.
Blacks got their chance in the late 1860s after the Civil War when southern states had to comply with the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This act required every former Confederate southern state to host a constitutional convention and to craft a state constitution before it could rejoin the United States of America. To ensure that the new state's constitution contained all the post-Civil War constitutional amendments and the 1866 Civil Rights Law, Radical Republicans used their congressional powers to push both Republicans and Blacks to attend the southern constitutional conventions and actively participate in the planning sessions. In South Carolina, which was one of the most conservative southern states, Blacks not only attended and participated in the committees; they constituted the majority of the attending South Carolina constitutional convention.
The participation of Blacks in the state's conventions frightened white conservatives who were already concerned that Radical Republicans were giving Blacks entry to government employment by appointing them to low-level jobs such as clerks, postmen, sheriffs, and school employees at the federal, city, and county levels. There was an even greater concern about Blacks seeking high-level state and federal elected positions. Conservative southerners contrived a plan that enabled them to neutralize Blacks' newly acquired political power and simultaneously conserve employment, income, and power opportunities for whites. With the legal controls of slavery gone, conservatives instituted numerous formal and informal codes of behavior to protect the group-based interests of whites in maintaining the racial status quo.
Conservatives established political codes of conduct, many unwritten, that they imposed on Blacks seeking to be elected or appointed to public office. Some states did formalize their Black political codes of conduct into laws. Whether written or unwritten, those codes have stood as sacred understandings between Blacks and whites for centuries and endure until the present time, especially in southern states. These codes plainly told Blacks the political behaviors from them that whites would consider inappropriate and unacceptable. The three primary elements of the code of conduct, or ground rules for Blacks seeking public office, were:
1. Blacks in high public office could not use their position to publicly encourage support or direct causes to alter Black economic conditions.
2. Blacks in high public office could not encourage Black people to act as a unified group.
3. Blacks in high public office could not advocate holding whites accountable for slavery or ill treatment.
The particulars of the southern behavior codes dictated what whites expected of Blacks when Reconstruction ended in the mid-1870s. The unofficial code of conduct for Blacks in elected politics is visible today in the behavior of Black politicians who try to take race out of matters or try to avoid involvement in a topic altogether. This behavior management tool imposed on Blacks has been in place for 150 years but does not apply to other racial, ethnic, religious, or gender groups of people; it applies only to Blacks. It is inconceivable that white, Asian, Native American, or Jewish elected officials would be instructed to avoid taking public positions on issues of importance to their specific group, fearing the consequences of breaking the code of conduct.
Black election officials today still shy away from using their office or a public platform to address or remove the historical barriers that prevented their people from being self-sufficient and competitive. Expectations of the political code of conduct have become so ingrained in Blacks in general and Black voters in particular that they do not even expect leadership or material support from Blacks in high levels of government or corporate America. As the authentic period of the Black civil rights movement was ending in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a few activist Black elected officials defied the code of conduct. They entered politics for the specific purpose of using their office to improve the socio-economic conditions of Blacks in their jurisdictions. They defied the political code and took public positions on Black issues, worked for the good of the group, treated Blacks as white politicians treated white constituents, and began to deliver benefits to their constituents.
Mayor Howard Washington of Chicago, Illinois; Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit, Michigan; Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, D.C.; and Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, Georgia are some of the mayors who used their positions to ensure Blacks were included in contract, grant, and employment processes. As a result, Blacks in those cities accessed and profited from economic opportunities that had not previously been available to them. Black voters who elected candidates to public office had the right to expect benefits. It is apparent that there is a missing connection between electing a Black person to public office and a Black American receiving proportional social and economic benefits in return for their votes. There is a good chance that Black voters could change the game if they establish a Black code of conduct that rewards or punishes Black elected or appointed officials who become colorblind and can no longer see their people suffering.
Question 46: How have programs like the Great Society and the Freedmen's Bureau subverted their original intent to help Blacks?
The Great Society program of the 1960s and the Freedmen's Bureau, 100 years earlier, were both created to correct Black problems that stemmed back to slavery. These programs are just two instances where solutions to Black problems were distorted and resources redirected to benefit others—non-affected but more preferable groups. The pattern and strategy of diversion have been used throughout the history of this country and are still effective today. It is important to recognize and understand these strategies and patterns.
Examinations of the life cycle of the Great Society program and the Freedmen's Bureau show how well-intentioned programs to help Blacks are diverted to help minorities or everyone. The Great Society program, President Lyndon Johnson's 1964 initiative, was a comprehensive package of social and economic programs created during the midst of the civil rights era in response to the misery Johnson saw in Black communities and requests from the civil rights community. The three billion dollar package deal that passed Congress, however, reflected the country's social construct on race, and the benefits were soon spread broadly to everyone.
The Great Society program contained social and educational components, but the centerpiece was economic opportunity and jobs in both rural and urban areas. Some of the more notable Great Society programs were the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the Peace Corps, Model Cities, Upward Bound, Community Action Programs, the Food Stamp Program, Head Start, Medicare, the Office of Economic Development, and the Regional Development Commissions. Although unevenly distributed, the entire nation has benefited from the Great Society program. In a program designed to correct racial inequalities, Blacks should have received disproportionately higher assistance than whites. If the same function is performed on both sides of an equation, nothing changes.
A disproportionately high share of the funds for economic opportunities, such as business development, went to whites, and the majority of the administrative jobs created in the Great Society program went to poor white communities, especially in the Appalachian Mountains, which received special targeted economic benefits. The benefits Blacks received, especially in urban cities, were primarily in the areas of education, Head Start, Upward Bound, and a number of college study programs. These educational programs disproportionately helped Blacks along with students of all races, but to correct the mild distribution of wealth, Blacks needed economic and business development resources even more than social and educational benefits. Those resources were not directed to them.
The lack of direct economic assistance and Black business development was no accident. The Freedmen's Bureau's history is a proof that history often repeats itself. The pattern of diversion is similar for the Freedmen's Bureau, created at the end of the Civil War in 1865, and the Great Society program of the 1960s. After the Civil War, Radical Republicans—liberals of the day—pushed through civil rights laws as well as the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution to give former slaves rights of citizenship that all non-Blacks already had. These Radical Republicans declared publicly that Black ex-slaves could never be free men if they did not have an economic base and legal protections from their previous white owners.
The Freedmen's Bureau was therefore established to place newly freed slaves in a protected class and to give them the minimal amount of economic resources that they would need to live as free people—40 acres and a mule and 100 bucks. But true self-sufficiency was not to be. Some Blacks acquired a few acres of land on the southeast offshore islands, but the Black masses never received the promised economic stake because of opposition from anti-Black southerners angry over losing the Civil War, their land, and their livelihood, who convinced Congress to corrupt the initial intent of the Freedmen's Bureau by including poor southern whites as well as the old plantation owners as beneficiaries.
The Freedmen's Bureau was initially charged with distributing the land captured during the Civil War to the slaves, along with food, clothing, and a few dollars. The corruption of the Freedmen's Bureau redirected nearly all of these limited resources and land into the hands of the same plantation owners from whom the Union had taken them. The plantation owners, southern citizens, and Confederate soldiers received nearly all of the Freedmen's Bureau's money, clothing, and food that were intended to provide Black ex-slaves an initial economic stake. With the Bureau's funds and resources redirected, the former slaves were forced to survive with no land, food, weapons, tools, animals, education, culture, or institutions. Southern whites depleted the resources of the Freedmen's Bureau once they had the land back. What did they need? Free or cheap labor.
The agency established to lift the burdens of slavery from Blacks did not come close to fulfilling its mission, and the South did not want the slaves to come north. The South then was allowed to implement the Black Codes that mandated, among other things, that ex-slaves must be in possession of a signed job contract at all times or be incarcerated. This created the free or cheap labor supply southern whites needed. The former slaves were often forced to return to work for their old masters or risk being jailed as vagrants. Since Blacks were denied education and could not read, they could not consummate contracts on their own behalf. This fact alone produced the free or cheap Black labor supply that whites needed in domestic service on the old farmlands and justified Blacks being sent to prison farms and road gangs, which were approved vehicles through which whites acquired free Black labor.
The diversion technique used in both the 1960s Great Society program, designed to transition Blacks out of Jim Crow segregation, and the 1860s Freedmen's Bureau, designed to transition Blacks out of slavery, were created to provide access to resources that Blacks had been denied. The main elements of the diversion process were the same in both programs. The main elements of the pattern were:
1. Initially address a horrible problem peculiar to Blacks.
2. Immediately expand the pool of beneficiaries to more preferred groups.
3. Allocate the majority of program resources to those other groups, leaving Blacks again with the least and the same unsolved problems.
Fast forward 100 years from the 1860s at the end of Reconstruction to the 1960s at the end of Jim Crow. Watch how the technique was applied. President Johnson was sympathetic to the demands of Black civil rights organizations for government assistance through the Great Society program. Southern politicians opposed any government assistance to Blacks, just as they had when they opposed and corrupted the Freedmen's Bureau in 1865. Johnson was a strong politician, and his opponents failed to kill off the program, but they watered it down by including and prioritizing poor whites, women, and others over Blacks. Conservative political factions wanted to reduce public attention on racial conflicts and strategically promoted the Great Society program as a war on poverty. Underfunding the program and shifting focus to eradicate poverty among all population groups allowed conservatives to give the pretense that the program would help Blacks, but the substance did not match the rhetoric.
When President Johnson announced his program, he acknowledged the compromises he had to make when he said, "We have created new avenues of opportunities through jobs, education, and expanded access to health care for seniors, the poor, and Americans with disabilities." Blacks received less than half of one percent of the three billion spent on the Great Society program. Blacks got the bill without the thrill of getting tangible benefits. Both the Great Society program and the Freedmen's Bureau were intended to address the specific unique needs of Blacks, which resulted from centuries of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. In those instances where politicians did have the courage to target a problem peculiar to Blacks, there are so many others who worked to ignore the problem or to only offer Black symbolic benefits while the tangible unearned benefits went to groups other than Blacks. It requires vigilance to detect the old sleight-of-hand trick of diverting resources from one group to another.
Question 47: Did Black Americans receive the same economic benefits as whites in Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1930s New Deal?
In President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1932 New Deal program, Black Americans—the people who had suffered the most during the Great Depression—received the least benefits. The stock market crash in 1929 triggered the Great Depression, which stalled economies around the world, closed factories and businesses, and brought hard times to everyone's front door. The nation's general unemployment rate was pushed to 25 percent for whites and was two to three times higher for Blacks. One-third of the nation was ill-fed, ill-housed, and ill-clothed. These conditions propelled Roosevelt, a strong believer in the role and power of the federal government, to campaign for the office of President of the United States.
In his 1930 presidential election campaign, Roosevelt, a Democrat, used rhetoric that gave Blacks the impression that he was sympathetic to their economic needs. Roosevelt's slogan expressed his deep concern for the "forgotten man" and pledged a "New Deal for the people." Black Americans naturally, but erroneously, believed the broad terms "forgotten man" and "the people" either referred to or included them. At that time, the majority of Blacks belonged to the Republican Party, a constitutionalization of their allegiance to Abraham Lincoln. But in the 1932 elections, Blacks abandoned the Republican Party and threw their votes to Roosevelt, who won the election with their support.
Once in office, Roosevelt and his administration designed a New Deal program for the working class and poor. However, as it turned out, Roosevelt's New Deal program did not have Blacks in mind. The New Deal did not address the government and culturally imposed reasons Blacks were so poverty-stricken in the first place and provided them only a few low-level jobs, limited health care services, and minimal welfare benefits. Within a few short years of the implementation of the New Deal, national surveys and social discomfort indicators revealed that in the midst of the Great Depression, economic conditions for Blacks grew worse, and the gap between them and whites grew even wider.
Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was sympathetic to the conditions of Blacks and tried to provide them an entree to her husband. She organized an informal group called the "Black Kitchen Cabinet" to meet with her and advise her on Black issues, which she presented in her own way to the president. By the 1940s, a significant number of Blacks had lost faith in Roosevelt and began to call his New Deal the "Dirty Deal." Blacks had experienced a political lesson that in our competitive race-based society, the social construct on race does not allow equal footing. White privilege is structural, and whether conscious or subconscious, the socio-economic outcomes are formed by race.
Question 48: Does Black America need a World War II-type Marshall Plan?
Black Americans entered the 21st century as an impoverished and politically abandoned people, still suffering from socio-economic pathologies and the legacies of slavery: astronomically high rates of unemployment, homicide, failing schools, incarceration, drug addiction, and dysfunctional families. These issues will be made worse by an apathetic majority society that is fixated on supporting immigrants and class minorities. Black America needs a World War II-type urban Marshall Plan to address its dilemma. Just as this country invested $12 billion and relocated 300,000 European Jews in the late 1940s to aid Germany's recovery, even in the fall of 2016, President Barack Obama's administration continued World War II efforts in support of European Jews and approved $24 million for Holocaust survivors in the U.S. living below the national poverty line.
While this was a generous gesture, no similar level of concern seems to have been made to relieve the distress of the more than 50 percent of Black American families who live on incomes below the national poverty line. 156 years after slavery officially ended, the protracted problems that Blacks endure today in America are similar in nearly every aspect to conditions in Germany following World War II—conditions that were justifications for the aid the U.S. gave to the nations that it had just fought for four years. The U.S. wanted to take whatever measures possible to help Germany develop industries, businesses, and consumer products and return to a normal functioning country; otherwise, there would be no political stability and no assured peace in Germany.
This is the same message that Black Lives Matter marchers have carried across this nation in recent years. Their banners and chants proclaim, "No justice, no peace." The urban centers where Blacks are the majority populations need to be economically redeveloped and industrialized to become politically stable and peaceful. Blacks need industrialization, not gentrification or displacement by immigration. The goals and strategies of the World War II Marshall Plan are good models because, by all accounts, the plan was enormously successful in rebuilding Germany and war-torn Europe. An urban Marshall Plan for Black America should provide federal funds targeted to the majority Black-populated urban centers. Such a national Marshall Plan should primarily focus on economically redeveloping and industrializing those centers for the specific benefit of this nation's historically underserved Black population.
Just as this nation has implemented programs to address problems peculiar to immigrants, women, gays, ethnic groups, and the handicapped, it is time for it to prioritize and fully address the protracted socio-economic dilemmas of the nation's official underclass: Black Americans. Because of their unique historical oppression, Black Americans should not have to queue up with fabricated class minorities for corrective government assistance. The goal of such assistance should be to complete the short-lived efforts begun in the 1960s to correct the historical legacies of slavery. In the summer of 2012, the Harvest Institute report asked President Barack Obama to structure an urban Marshall Plan for Black America. Unfortunately, Obama did not acknowledge nor did he or his staff respond to the request, and Black people in their respective neighborhoods continue to deteriorate.
But where there is life, there is hope. Even though Black Americans are without functional communities, a competitive economy, and another class, an underclass group is one that has faded from the public consciousness and, by the very nature of its socio-economic conditions and political powerlessness, will always struggle for survival. However, Blacks did not become an underclass overnight. An urban Marshall Plan for Black America still holds the potential to reverse deteriorating conditions within Black America and their neighborhoods. The question is: from whence will come the needed measure of national concern or economic assistance?
Question 49: Why is the pattern of Black men killed by white law enforcement personnel so acceptable and so entrenched in society?
For centuries, America has been a killing field for young Black men, especially by white law enforcement. Although a long historical pattern exists, incidents in recent years have been troubling. In nearly every instance, courts and grand juries allow those who profile, beat, or kill young Black men to go unpunished. Why? Because the underclass status of Blacks, which caused them to have unique historical experiences, is codified in this nation's founding documents. The Constitution of the U.S. and the Bill of Rights declare America as a land of exceptionalism, the cradle of democracy, and a nation that values immigrants. Blacks were exceptional too; they were the nation's only non-immigrants. They were valued only as human property, entitled to be treated just like field animals.
The lack of respect for a Black man's life, rights, and contributions became infused into the nation's spirit and codified into the legal and political infrastructure. America's perceptions of Black men were framed by the U.S. Supreme Court's infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. A Black slave declared he was a free person because he had visited and temporarily lived in a free state. The Supreme Court ruled, however, that a Black man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect. This infamous ruling, never reversed in over a hundred and fifty years, has been locked into the culture and collective psyche of American society and passed down from generation to generation of ethnic whites.
The first lesson immigrants learn when they come to this country is that they are prized and valued over native Black Americans. This prevailing attitude impacts every aspect of how our political and law enforcement systems view and treat Blacks. This nation's public policies of benign neglect and political correctness further depreciate the value of the rights of Black Americans. Those policies were constructed to kill off the Black civil rights movement of the 1960s and to make all forms of Blackness invisible. The policy of benign neglect took the focus off of Blacks and, over the course of the next half-century, morphed into political correctness and diversity policies that do not distinguish or aid Blacks.
The views of law enforcement and society in general carry the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, semi-slavery, and the Dred Scott decision. Having relinquished the few concrete gains made during the civil rights movement, Blacks have slid back into a powerless underclass status. Blacks, however, should not be treated as guests in America. This nation was founded on the blood, sweat, and labor of millions of Blacks who were denied their very humanity and the fruits of their labor. The newly fabricated class groups, especially immigrants, inherit unearned benefits, respect, and rights to which Blacks were entitled but never received.
The larger society adds further insult to injury when it participates in public dialogues that give the false impression that all people and groups have contributed equally to the development of this nation. That is a convenient myth. The racial problems between law enforcement and Black men will not abate until this nation addresses the exceptional history and achievements of Black Americans. Police power is freely exercised against Black men who are perceived as obsolete and powerless to do little more than march or riot. The larger society has a responsibility to resolve the long-standing dehumanization of Blacks that is contained in our foundational documents and to erase the emanating legal precedents. The tension between law enforcement and Blacks will never abate as long as whites own and control 98 percent of all the nation's wealth, income, businesses, land, privileges, and all levels of government.
The maldistribution that slavery produced and the cultural effects of the Dred Scott decision must be considered in any serious efforts to analyze the relationships between Blacks and law enforcement. Calls for healing, no matter how sincere, will not correct the problem. Understanding the historical context, however, would be a better beginning point. At least both groups will understand the importance of reversing the holding of Dred Scott and the contribution of the U.S. Constitution to the problem.