Transcription
A Black History Reader: 101 Questions You Never Thought to Ask by Dr. Claude Anderson
Chapter 6: Politics of Race
Question 33: Which ethnic or racial group in America has a proven record of being the most patriotic?
Patriotism is a devoted love, support, loyalty, and defense of one's country. It is ironic that after 24 generations of suffering—slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and being neglected by public policies—Black Americans have a proven and unchallengeable track record of patriotism that stands head and shoulders above any ethnic, racial, or religious group. They have proven themselves to be the oldest and most patriotic group in a number of ways.
First, Blacks were the unpaid labor engine that drove the socio-economic development of this nation. They were the unpaid labor class that cleared the land, raised the crops, and built the roads, bridges, canals, and public buildings. Their blood, sweat, tears, and overworked bodies forever connected them to this land.
The second reason Blacks are the most patriotic group is that over 99 percent of them in America are direct descendants of slaves, which means they were here building and fighting for this nation before 99 percent of the Europeans, Asians, Hispanics, and other descendants ever arrived in this country.
The third reason Blacks are the most patriotic group is that they are the only population group that has fought in every military engagement and major war in defense of this country since it was founded. Crispus Attucks, a Black man, was the first to die in the Revolutionary War of Independence. Today, in the 21st century, Blacks make up a large portion of the military.
Fourth, most notably, of all the major racial and ethnic groups in America, Black Americans are probably the only group whose countries of origin have not engaged the United States in war. Through the centuries, the U.S. has engaged in wars with Spain, England, France, Canada, Germany, China, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Korea, Japan, Italy, Russia, the islands of the Pacific, Vietnam, American Indians, and a host of Middle Eastern countries. It has never been in a declared war with a Black African country. What other racial or ethnic group can make this claim?
Ironically, ethnic groups from all the countries the U.S. has fought throughout history can easily migrate into the U.S. and immediately rank higher in social acceptability than native Black Americans. During the Revolutionary War, World War I, and World War II, Black Americans lobbied the government for the right to fight and die for the country that enslaved and Jim Crow segregated them. Unlike immigrants who legally and illegally entered the country, Black soldiers who returned home from combat in foreign lands still had to fight to be accepted as true Americans. Unlike others, Blacks did not voluntarily migrate to America, but they cherish the U.S. with all of its flaws and blemishes because, with all of its flaws, it is the country that their labor built. America is the only home they have known.
Black Americans are models of what a truly patriotic group ought to be. White Southerners, as a class, are disqualified because their attack on the Union triggered the Civil War and made them the nation's first terrorists. Their continued affection for Dixie, denial of constitutional rights to Black citizens, and rhetoric of political secession represent continued anti-American behavior, not patriotism.
Question 34: Did the Blacks build their own towns in an effort to escape the terrorism of whites?
One of the first lessons that free Blacks and runaway slaves learned centuries ago, but experienced a memory lapse during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, was that they could fare better in their own communities with their own people. From the inception of slavery in the early 1600s, like Native Indians, runaway Blacks built their own separate communities, which they called maroon towns. The word "maroons" referred to a class of Blacks who preferred their independent living separate from whites who sought to enslave them.
During slavery and Jim Crow segregation, whites did not like the idea of Blacks living independently and would routinely search out and destroy Black maroon towns and other Black settlements. After World War I, whites often became envious of the towns Blacks built and the successful businesses operating inside. After emancipation, newly freed Blacks tried different tactics to escape white hate and institutionalized racism. Wherever Blacks went in search of peace, whites would shatter it.
The most frequent pattern was for Blacks to migrate to the North and West to build towns, villages, and settlements that Blacks could live in and control. The sites of many of those old Black towns and villages are some of today's most notable residential and business areas, such as Seneca Village in New York (a part of Central Park), the Five Points District (now Wall Street) in New York, and Freedman's Village in Virginia (presently the southern end of Arlington National Cemetery).
Allen's Worth is now a state park in California. Rosewood, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Wilmington, North Carolina were burned; Blacks were killed, and their homes and businesses were destroyed. There were numerous lesser-known all-Black towns defined as generally residential areas with populations of at least a thousand, of which 95 percent were classified as Black.
It is difficult to establish the dates the towns were built; however, it appears there were four distinct periods during which those towns evolved: the pre-Civil War period, the post-Civil War period, the Great Post-World War migration period, and the post-World War II period. Although there are too many all-Black towns to name here, a sampling includes Nicodemus in Kansas, Bowling in Oklahoma, Mound Bayou in Mississippi, Brooklyn in Illinois, Longside in New Jersey, Robins in Illinois, Fairmont Heights in Maryland, Glen Arden in Maryland, Lincoln Heights in Ohio, Urban Crest in Ohio, Kenlock in Missouri, Grambling in Louisiana, North Shreveport in Louisiana, Richmond Heights in Florida, Sam's Town in Louisiana, Griddenwood in Alabama, Gifford in Florida, Pleasantville in Virginia, Saratoga in Virginia, Lloyd's Place in Virginia, Bennettsville in South Carolina, and Edensville in Florida.
A reign of terror followed them. Ironically, whites killed Blacks and destroyed Black towns because they did not want Blacks living too close to them, and whites killed and destroyed Black homes because they didn't want Blacks to migrate too far away from them. Whites have always been emotionally conflicted about their proximity to Blacks.
As per the Diversity Act of 1705 Slave Code, whites seemed to want Blacks close enough so they could be monitored on a continuous basis.
Question 35: Were Blacks legally or symbolically emancipated from their institutionalized enslavement?
Considering the fact that in the 21st century, Blacks are still treated as a socio-economic underclass and political outgroup, the real legal status of Blacks in America is unclear. History reveals that since the founding of this country, there were numerous emancipation proclamations that proposed to end slavery and set Blacks free; however, none in fact did.
The nation's first emancipation proclamation was proposed by Lord Dunmore, the British royal governor of Virginia, in November 1775, on the eve of the American Revolutionary War. Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any slave who would take up arms against the colonies and fight with the British troops. Three months later, fearful of the harm and armed and angry slaves would bring to European white colonists, Lord Dunmore reconsidered and redrew his emancipation proclamations to free Blacks.
Nearly a century later, in 1852, a second emancipation proclamation was drafted in response to Nat Turner's slave revolt. Turner's slave revolt shook the nation, especially the Southern slaveholding states. Frightened by the successful slave revolt in Haiti and Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia, many Southern slaveholders indicated a willingness to end Black enslavement and resettle Black slaves into Africa, Texas, or the Caribbean Islands. Shortly thereafter, the mere thought of over 4 million angry armed Blacks in the street quickly galvanized Virginia legislation to offer what constituted a third emancipation proclamation that proposed simply to abolish slavery. Ironically, nearly half of Virginia legislators voted to abolish slavery in Virginia, the birthplace of Black American slavery. They came just a few votes short of ending slavery and preventing the Civil War that followed a few years later.
On January 1, 1863, after the Civil War had begun, President Abraham Lincoln reluctantly offered the well-known fourth emancipation proclamation that did not free a single Black slave. Even though it was symbolic, it gave Blacks some sense of hope, which they recalled annually on Juneteenth Day. Contrary to what so many Blacks believe, Abraham Lincoln signed the well-known emancipation proclamations in an effort to save the Union, not out of love and compassion for Black slaves. Lincoln's proclamation was a propaganda ploy to lift the spirits of the tired Union troops as well as to exploit the Blacks.
The proclamation announced that all persons held as slaves within any state in rebellion against the United States were henceforth and forever free. President Lincoln had no control over the rebellious Southern states and no constitutional authority to abolish slavery in loyal states. Consequently, Black slaves actually had to wait until the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution before they gained some quasi-freedom.
A fifth emancipation proclamation was proposed by the Southern Confederacy in the closing months of the Civil War. Some of its prominent leaders wanted to use their emancipation proclamations to recruit Black slaves to fight the Civil War on behalf of the South. General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the presidents of the Southern Confederacy, announced in their emancipation proclamation a willingness to free the slaves in exchange for official recognition from the North that the South was an independent and sovereign territory. The North refused. Even so, the Southern Confederacy finally decided to set Blacks free, but by then it was too late; the war was over, and the Southern Confederacy had lost.
Five different emancipation proclamations were proposed, but none of them actually ended slavery. Each of the above five proclamations was issued for a specific purpose of the issuer, but none ever went into effect nor ended slavery. The proclamations excited Blacks but did not free them. This is the reason the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was necessary. Even then, the freedom offered was tenuous, qualified, and led by Jim Crow semi-slavery.
Question 36: Blacks have experienced segregation and integration. Which should they choose?
Blacks should not choose either segregation or integration. Although segregation has some positive socio-economic advantages for Blacks, neither strategy was designed to make Blacks fully independent, self-sufficient, or socio-economically competitive in America. To achieve these missing conditions, Blacks should establish communities that use them as a platform for ethno-aggregation—a powernomics term for pooling together resources. Ethno-aggregation is a proven model used by ethnic, racial, religious, and cultural groups to strengthen and self-empower their groups.
Ethno-aggregation is different from segregation and integration. Segregation benefited Blacks because it forced them into communities where they had to live, work, and play together. They built businesses, employed each other, and circulated money within their communities. However, Blacks abandoned the base of the functioning communities that they had begun to construct during the hundred years of Jim Crow segregation.
Factors that kept Blacks marginal during segregation were both tangible and intangible. During segregation, Blacks had a physical community, a sense of community, and a code of conduct. What they lacked was sufficient wealth, an independent Black political party, and a competitive group self-interest. The Black holes and other Southern laws deprived Blacks of these essential resources.
During slavery and Jim Crow segregation, the primary purpose of slavery was to redistribute nearly 100 percent of the nation's wealth, land, business rights, resources, privileges, and political assets into the hands of the dominant white society. To overcome the lack of resources imposed on them by slavery and segregation, Blacks must play as a team and pool all their assets to reverse the negative impact of centuries of those destructive systems. Blacks cannot compete while owning only one-half of one percent of anything of value in the richest nation on earth.
More than 60 years after the Civil Rights Movement marched Blacks towards racial integration, history has proven that it has been a tragic failure. Social integration did not correct the legacies of slavery nor make Blacks a more competitive group in a nation where power and wealth follow the numbers. The integration process requires Blacks to become scattered minorities—unwanted guests—within a dominant white society, while whites are required only to give Blacks limited access to their communities, institutions, and businesses.
Blacks voluntarily divested themselves of their culture, history, speech patterns, material resources, religion, schools, business communities, music, sports teams, group identity, racial unity, and, most importantly, their group self-interest. This diversity made Black Americans vulnerable, dependent, and more non-competitive than they have been since slavery. Integration scattered Blacks and destroyed their sense of community, peoplehood, unity, and economic foundation upon which they could have built competitive and self-sufficient communities.
Integration did not provide Blacks with economic resources in the form of land, businesses, industries, and inheritable wealth. Integration offered immeasurable opportunities to get along, cooperate, be acceptable, and be physically close to whites in what they had and what they owned. But social integration has certain rules: Blacks had to give up all that was given to them as Black in order to integrate. They had to give up their unity, their togetherness, their schools, and their professional businesses.
Classes of doctors, lawyers, dentists, plumbers, and carpenters lost their exclusive customer base. Integration stripped from Blacks the few resources they had managed to accumulate during segregation. Blacks exchanged the few tangibles they had accumulated for symbolism, like street names (Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Rosa Parks Avenue) and placements of a few Blacks in high positions in white corporations.
Blacks were encouraged to subordinate all forms of Blackness under politically correct public policies. In his book, "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," Randall Robinson quotes former President Bill Clinton, who commented on the willingness of Blacks to accept symbolism as political payment. President Clinton said, "The Black people love me. I don't really know why, but all they seem to care about are the symbolic things like cabinet appointments."
When Blacks accepted integration, they gave up Blackness, disappeared into a multicultural diversity, and still did not get the resources they needed. Blacks got sidetracked, attracted, and bamboozled. There was a disconnect between the problem they needed to solve and the solution they chose. There was little connection between whites' rights and resources.
Blacks had legal rights awarded to them in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. When Blacks chose integration, whites began acquiring the cultural and physical assets that Blacks were abandoning or made accessible to whites. These substantive laws took Blacks backward because they received little in return after centuries of institutional slavery and Jim Crow segregation.
The question ought not to have been whether they preferred segregation or integration. That question is never put before Asians, Arabs, Jews, Hispanics, or American Indians. Blacks should have publicly proclaimed that they did not want either social or political processes. The foundations upon which Black Americans should now build their communities is the powernomics principle of ethno-aggregation, which means pooling group resources—whether monetary, political, population, or votes—and then playing as a team.
Once Blacks gather together their group-based resources, the group should build vertically to control all of those resources from the bottom to the top of the process. As Blacks try to build new communities, they must remember two things: to make deliberate self-interest group choices and to avoid past mistakes. When Blacks marched from segregation to integration, it was a horizontal move that failed to empower them. Power comes from moving vertically and controlling all the steps from the bottom to the top of a political economic hierarchy.
Blacks have struggled to get out of the ditch they are in, but they lurch from one philosophy to another with faint measurable goals. Before undertaking any marches, demonstrations, or campaigns, the purpose, goals, and tangible benefits that the race hopes to achieve ought to be clearly formulated and stated with measurable milestones. In the Civil Rights Movement, this was rarely done; its integration goals were intangible and non-measurable.
What indicators would Blacks use to measure social integration, freedom, equality, and equal opportunity achievements when these are all terms that are intangible in definition and are not quantifiable? Measurable milestones would include, for instance, a decrease in the number of unemployed and imprisoned Blacks, an increase in the number of Black businesses in vertical industries (which would mean an increase in Black manufacturers and suppliers), and an increase in Black-owned trade schools and magnet schools established in Black communities.
In an effort to avoid repeating the failures of social integration, it is critically important that Blacks have a national plan for socio-economic movement with goals, milestones, and timetables if they are going to rebuild Black businesses and communities. A coordinating Black organization or network must identify the most appropriate cities, sources of capital, kinds of businesses and industries, professional personnel, marketing strategies, domestic and international partnerships, investors, and dependable suppliers of consumer products and raw materials.
Blacks can build functional businesses and communities, and they can do it again. This time, perhaps there will be less resistance from whites and other ethnic groups, especially if the Black businesses are located within marked and closed Black business districts. The overall goal of building a new Black community should be to make them self-sufficient and competitive.
Segregation might have been forced upon Blacks by Jim Crow laws and public policies, but in response, Blacks built and maintained their own communities, institutions, and professional class of leadership. They were producers as well as consumers and owned ten times more businesses per 100,000 Blacks than they do today. Most importantly, they supported, protected, bought from each other, and played as a team. Having tried both segregation and integration, it is time for Black Americans to try ethno-aggregation.
Question 37: Are Blacks too race conscious?
Blacks are not too race conscious; in reality, they are not race conscious enough. As demonstrated by their dodged pursuit of social integration over the past 50 years, while the rest of America was balkanizing along ethnic and racial lines, today an increasing number of Black Americans are employing Blacks to rebuild Black communities and spend their money with Black merchants. Clearly, the mere fact that Black Americans have to be encouraged to do what whites and other ethnic groups do instinctively indicates that Blacks are not race conscious enough to have a self-interest that puts their own people first.
Unlike whites, who identify and unite around their whiteness, Blacks lack a sense of oneness and solidarity that is needed for group-based socio-economic empowerment. Blacks have had short spurts of race consciousness in which they tried to come together to pool their resources in their own best interest, but those periods did not last long, and Blacks rarely played as a team long enough to prosper.
During 360 years of slavery, Blacks could neither move nor assemble freely or unsupervised. It was difficult, at best, for Blacks to develop a sense of unity when they lived in monitored cabins on scattered farms and plantations throughout the Southern states. Slave drivers and plantation overseers conditioned Blacks to see life and the world through the eyes of white society in general and the white slaveholders in particular. Without protection of the law, many Blacks tried to protect themselves by professing love for their masters and all forms of whiteness.
Just as it is in present-day society, slaves were conditioned to believe that by advancing the interests of the master or white society, they were advancing the interests of the slave collectively or themselves as individuals. During the post-Civil War period, millions of newly freed Black people, for the first time, focused on being Black and coming together in a sense of oneness. They could see the world through the eyes of Black consciousness instead of through the eyes of the slaveholder's whiteness.
They began transforming their lives from usable property into exceptional human beings with special gifts. They used their new sense of group oneness to build Black churches, schools, businesses, newspapers, social organizations, banks, insurance companies, funeral homes, burial associations, broom factories, mattress factories, movie theaters, factories for Black hair care products, and independent communities.
An unintended result of Jim Crow segregation was that it forced Blacks to do what they should have done normally. They owned and operated more businesses during segregation than they have under the illusion of social integration. During the 20 years between 1915 and 1935, race consciousness emerged again. Aggressive Black visionaries like W.E.B. Du Bois called for Black politics, Marcus Garvey for Black economics, Carter G. Woodson for Black culture and Black education, Elijah Muhammad for Islam in a Black nation, and the Harlem Renaissance celebrated Black artists and entertainment.
The sense of Black race consciousness was prevalent and profound, but it was short-lived. When the Great Depression ended in the late 1930s, institutionalized Blacks—i.e., civil rights leaders, ministers, and newspaper owners—felt there was too much Blackness or race consciousness and called for Black America to seek inclusion in mainstream society. They urged the visionary Black leaders and their respective organizations to shift their focus from race consciousness to universality—another name for social integration.
The march away from race consciousness and towards social integration progressed into the 1960 Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement, led by institutionalized Black leaders, clashed with younger Blacks who organized the Black Power Movement and demanded more Black consciousness. The Black Civil Rights Movement pushed for social integration, garnering more attention, acceptance, and respect within mainstream society because whites felt more threatened by the Black Power Movement.
In response to white anxiety and Black consciousness, the government intervened and destroyed the Black Power Movement by dismantling its activities and criminalizing its leadership. A few years into the Civil Rights Movement, Black leadership abandoned Black race consciousness and pledged their commitment to public policies of political correctness involving immigrants, women, and various other fabricated minorities.
Did Black leaders truly believe that whites would voluntarily give up their own race consciousness, sense of oneness, and whiteness together? Racism is a team sport, which means a group must play as a team or risk losing by default. Civil rights leaders, ministers, and elected public officials soon abandoned all forms of exclusive Blackness. They joined mainstream white society and focused on fabricated classes, minority diversity, and open-door immigration policy.
They allowed white society to capture and corrupt the Civil Rights Movement, perverting its language and goals to use Dr. King's concept of a colorblind society to erase racism and demonize all forms of Black consciousness. Just like during slavery, whites were more at ease with Blacks who were colorblind and accepted the racial status quo.
Slavery and Jim Crow semi-slavery in the United States did more than rob Blacks of their individual dignity; it robbed them of their social cohesiveness and pride and discouraged cooperative behavior. Race consciousness is essential for self-sufficiency, but there are no mainstream incentives or rewards.
Question 38: Should Blacks form and support their own independent national political party?
Most definitely, Blacks should form and support their own independent national political party. Voting is based on the core premise of quid pro quo, which means something for something. The delivery of the group's block votes should give the group the leverage to demand benefits to improve the lives of group members. Blacks should cast their votes only to support a candidate that has promised benefits specific to their group. They ought not to support anybody or anything that does not socially or economically advance their group collectively.
Whites have preferred shifting political parties according to what is best for their group self-interest. After the Civil War, Blacks flocked to the Republican Party, and whites left and joined the Democratic Party. In the 1940s, President Truman integrated the military, and Senator Strom Thurmond led the exit of whites out of the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. More whites left the Democratic Party when President Kennedy was elected because he was pro-integration and pro-Black.
Whites choose political party affiliation based upon what is best for them. Blacks tend to stay loyal to political parties even if they receive nothing in exchange for their support. Neither national political party—Republican nor Democrat—has delivered specific material benefits to Black Americans in the last 150 years. Some might say, "But Lincoln freed the slaves." Freeing the slaves was incidental to Lincoln's desire to reunite the nation; freedom for slaves was a collateral benefit.
Political party affiliation is a diversion and a straw man; it is not the real issue. From the 1500s to the late 1860s, nearly 5 million enslaved Blacks did not belong to any party. From the 1860s to the late 1940s, approximately 20 million Blacks belonged to the Republican Party and were Jim Crow segregated. From the 1950s to 2016, 44 million Blacks belonged primarily to the Democratic Party, and they remain beneath a public policy of benign neglect. They are ignored, displaced, and treated with hateful indifference.
National party affiliation does not make a difference in the way that Blacks are treated. Some suggest that there are benefits to Blacks uplifting their allegiance between the two national parties; however, that does not strengthen Black groups. As a group, they are already playing on minority status. The white majority vote, combined with white ethnic immigrants, outnumbers Black voters 9 to 1, which implies a low chance of Blacks winning or being considered. Whites do not need the Black vote to achieve a voting majority to approve whatever it is they want.
The only way Black voters can be recognized and respected as a powerful voting bloc is to form a national independent Black political party. According to the prominent principles, the way for Blacks to acquire greater voting power would be to:
1. Withdraw from both the Democratic and Republican parties.
2. Run no candidates for public office.
3. Proclaim a willingness to vote as a solid national bloc for any political party or its candidates, regardless of color, that promises and delivers the most benefits to Black Americans.
The mere possibility that the Black vote might be in play would require candidates to court them with promises and follow-through. The idea that 44 million Blacks might vote as a bloc would make it difficult for any political party or candidate to ignore Black voters or take them for granted.
In Chapter 7 of "Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America," I discuss the importance of Blacks having a national political party and explain that the two major parties do not need or respect Black voters. They only use Black voters to shift the boundaries in close major elections. Democrats feel Black voters have no place to go and no leader to take them there, so they ignore and take them for granted.
Arthur Tom Wicker, a retired white political columnist for The New York Times, echoed my position in his book "The Tragic Failure of Racial Integration in America." Wicker said both political parties are relying on, indebted to, and protected by powerful corporate interests. The Republicans are devoted primarily to serving the immediate wishes of the mostly white middle class. The Democrats are the "me too" party, with neither the power nor the vision nor the political courage to advance the interests of poor African Americans.
After Blacks make a declaration of political independence and form their own national Black political party, they must learn to carefully articulate and then demand measurable benefits and use their leverage to reward and punish politicians. They must go out of their political rut, and if a candidate does not say their group name—which is Black, not minorities, poor people, or everybody—then they should not give that candidate their vote.
Should Blacks form an independent political party? The answer is in the line from a popular song from the 1940s: "Mama may have, Daddy may have, but God bless the child that got his own."
Question 39: Did the slave codes of 1705 intentionally inflict psychological damage on Black people?
The slave codes were laws that severely restricted slave behavior and were intended to prevent slave uprisings and rebellions. The slave codes imposed harsh physical punishments on the slaves. The Black man was a particular target. Black men were the natural guardians of the race and the family, but the success of slavery depended on the ability of the slaveholders to crush and control the Black man.
Slavery was successful because slaveholders developed effective techniques to control the behavior of a male slave—techniques that would affect his children and their children for generations to come. The slave codes formalized these control techniques but left much room for creativity. The Black man was totally helpless before his white master, who used the psychology of harsh physical punishment to encourage the Black man to submit to slavery, to break his independent will, and to shape his attitude.
The slave owners did this by demeaning the man in front of his family so that it was clear that the Black man could not protect them, that he was totally helpless before the white man, and that he could never be anything other than a slave. It has long been the role of males in most cultures to provide for and protect the family and to provide leadership and training to the children.
When African men were brought to these shores, slavery interfered with and perverted their normal masculine behavior patterns. Commercial enslaving was primarily a gender-specific industry. The slaveholder feared the Black man more than he feared the Black woman. Until the early 1800s, nearly 80 percent of the slaves brought into this country were Black men.
In the 1600s in the Virginia colony, both white women and Black women were outnumbered by their male counterparts four to one. White slave owners wanted the strongest slaves that they could find and worked them to death before they were 40 years of age. African women became important as breeders when the Constitution outlawed the importation of slaves after 1808.
It was true that Black women, having a higher birth rate, greater longevity, and being in a protective class with less chance of being killed, allowed the number of Black women to catch up to and surpass the number of Black men. The slave codes had a psychological basis; the purpose was to create a population of slaves that were docile, compliant, and would never rise up against the slaveholders.
Slavery also had an effect on those who imposed the harsh treatment; they became dehumanized and conditioned to inflict pain. Thus, the slave codes had psychological effects that lasted for generations on both the whites who imposed the treatments as well as the recipient Blacks. The recipient Blacks' condition is on display today in many ways. For instance, when white police officers use excessive violence and even kill Black men, the slave codes crippled 15 generations of people.
They killed Black men from fulfilling the role of responsible fathers and husbands. Degrading Black people made them hopeless and non-productive for anything other than slave duties and criminalized nearly every normal behavior. It is unconscionable for society to look at Black people today, criticize their behavior, and ignore the permanent harm inflicted on them.
Whites, the slaveholders' ancestors, designed the system of slavery and imposed the pain of degradation. Why did they enjoy the benefits when the psychological damage is added to the fact that Blacks cannot benefit from the resources found in this country? In fact, they were considered a resource. It is a wonder that any Blacks have managed to rise above the legacy of slavery.
Blacks will need resources from the dominant society to rehabilitate their race. The call for reformation should come from fair-minded people; it should not come only from Blacks.
Question 40: Why was it a criminal offense to teach Blacks to read and write?
The European colonies opposed educating Black people because they knew that educated Blacks, like educated whites, would not tolerate being enslaved, brutalized, and exploited. An educated person would have fought back and revolted. Whites knew that the best way to protect their financial investment and their lives was to impose ignorance on Blacks.
They therefore instituted public policies that stipulated that any white person caught teaching a Black person to read and write would be fined a hundred dollars and suffer 39 lashes with the whip. Later, there are numerous recorded instances where Blacks were lynched for carrying a book or newspaper, especially in the South. Teaching people to read and write was a crime only when it applied to educating Blacks.
Schools were established and operated for immigrants and American Indians, making Blacks the only people who, for centuries, were subjected to imposed ignorance. The last thing white America, and especially the South, needed was Black slaves capable of reading, writing, and challenging the national socio-economic system.
Whites in the North harbored the fears of some Southern counterparts. Education for the majority of Blacks in the country was nearly non-existent. As a matter of practice in the North, segregation in schools was the practice, if not the law. Segregation in the South, however, was both law and practice. The law was clear: it was illegal to teach the slaves to read and write.
White summoners believed that educating or teaching slaves to read or write only ruined them as laborers. The prevailing sentiment in the South was that whites had the responsibility to take every measure possible to ensure that no light entered the brain of a Black person. In some of the Northern states, where it was against the cultural norms but not the state law, some Quakers and philanthropic whites did educate a few Blacks, training them to perform a few household and simple business tasks.
Following the Civil War, Black ministers and business owners assumed the responsibility of educating newly freed slaves. They worked together and built public and private schools for Blacks. However, only in rare instances were Black public schools permitted to educate their students in highly skilled areas such as medicine, engineering, and the practice of law. Howard University in Washington, D.C., was one of those rare exceptions. Howard was built for the Black offspring of white members of Congress, and its students were mainly mulattos.
Oliver O. Howard, who had been a distinguished general in the Civil War and was a member of Congress, was the founder of the university. Howard students received a higher quality education than Black children with indistinguishable and distinguished parents in other schools. In almost all other cases in public and private schools, Black students were relegated to an education that made sure they were non-competitive with white students.
Following the Great Depression, public policies made it acceptable to provide Blacks with at least a marginal education, usually in what was called manual or industrial arts, but it was still disastrous to be educated even in manual arts. Following World War II, in the late 1940s in Southern states, it was normal for Black teachers to be insulted and beaten and to have their schools burned down.
There were instances in which Blacks traveling in Southern states were beaten and even lynched for reading Northern Black newspapers, which were considered contraband. The Ku Klux Klan, an American primer white supremacist organization, was the anti-reading enforcer. Klansmen were assigned to monitor trains and bus stations, watching to find Black porters and travelers who were reading. They confiscated any Black newspaper they found.
Even though many Klan members were uneducated and most could not read, they knew enough to believe that educated and informed Blacks were a greater threat to white society and the Southern culture than uneducated Blacks. During slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and the Black Civil Rights Movement, Black people learned to dumb down to protect their lives and jobs, especially in Southern states.
The 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education forced the issue of Black education. Whites pushed back to keep the races separate, but they were losing legal issues. Consequently, whites decided to move away from Black people rather than to fight them. They retreated from urban centers and relocated their business, wealth, jobs, schools, and middle-class lives into newly constructed all-white suburbs.
By 2017, it was no longer necessary for Blacks to pretend to dumb down. In many urban areas, the schools—public and private—are under-educating Black children. There are reports in some districts that there are schools that: 1) do not even have basic school supplies like textbooks, paper, and pencils; 2) have buildings that are not physically well maintained; and 3) allow up to fifty percent of Black students to graduate from high school without basic skills in reading, writing, and math.
If those reports reflect the educational conditions for Black children across the country, then there is little difference between criminalizing the education of Black children and the failure of responsible people to educate Black children.
Question 41: Is the Statue of Liberty an outdated immigration symbol?
The Statue of Liberty is among the most recognizable monuments in this country and around the world. Millions of people visit the statue annually and identify with it emotionally, viewing it as a symbol of hope that it was for their European immigrant ancestors. The Statue of Liberty, or symbol of hope, greeted the millions of kidnapped Africans brought into this country as slaves. Black Americans are the nation's only non-immigrants. Even so-called natives or American Indians migrated across the Bering Straits around 5,000 years ago.
The millions of immigrants that came before the Civil War came to get a part of the American dream of free land and free labor and to be the ownership of the management class over the millions of Africans imported to be a free labor class. African Blacks, the ancestors of 99 percent of today's native Black Americans, were shipped from Africa to the Caribbean Islands, then to the United States. Most entered the country through James Island and Sullivan Island, destination ports located in the orbit of Charleston, South Carolina. From there, they were shipped to other locations.
Unlike the Statue of Liberty in New York's harbor, arriving slave boats and their human cargo were met by slave drivers, slave pen owners, and auctioneers who stood on display platforms to sell the slaves. The notorious slave-holding platforms were removed from town centers in South Carolina in the 1970s. The Statue of Liberty still stands, although the reception centers for European immigrants were closed nearly 60 years ago.
Since the 1960s, the number of Europeans migrating to America has significantly decreased. The majority of today's immigrants, both legal and illegal, are entering through the nation's southern borders. They, too, like European immigrants of yesteryear, come into the country in search of unearned benefits and opportunities as promised in the American dream. An increasing number of Blacks, as well as white Americans, however, are sensing that the nation can no longer afford to receive an unlimited flow of immigrants and are demanding immigration reform.
They want this nation to close its doors for a while, improve the immigrant vetting process, and alter the words of Miss Liberty's bronze plaque written by Emma Lazarus in 1883. The son that urged the world to send "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" to the U.S. Lazarus wrote the liberty poem as part of the effort to raise funds to construct a pedestal for the statue of Ellis Island.
It is quite ironic, though not a well-known fact, that the model for the Statue of Liberty was a Black woman. Although Blacks were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free after slavery, times have changed. Today, both Black and white Americans are tired, growing poorer, and more apprehensive about uncertain social and economic conditions in these countries and around the world.
How do the words on the Statue of Liberty connect with immigrants from Middle Eastern countries that are fighting 1,500-year-old religious holy wars and refugees fleeing drug wars in Latin America? Since 1965, most immigrants have received support from private and government subsidies, whether grants from their home countries, subsidies from the U.S., or church programs. European and Asian immigrants are not exceptionally poor; the personal net worth of Mexican immigrants doubles or triples when they become citizens of the United States.
So today's immigrants are not generally the "refuse" of their countries' teeming shores, but they still come here seeking the American dream and the many unearned benefits made available to them because they have been classified as minorities. President Barack Obama extended invitations to an even greater number of immigrants and provided increased benefits. But Blacks, who are stuck in urban centers seeking to escape poverty, gang warfare, poor education, and unemployment in their own country, do not have the same access and assistance to the American dream as immigrants and refugees.
It is illegal and immoral for this nation's government to classify immigrants as refugees and give them civil rights, privileges, and benefits that are not available to the suffering urban Blacks. The U.S. focused on correcting the historical government-imposed injustices to Black Americans for a few years in the 1960s but never finished the job. Immigration is not, nor should it be, classified as a civil rights issue. Immigrants, as a class, have not been abused, subordinated, enslaved, or Jim Crow segregated in this country by the American government.
Blacks are now the nation's official abandoned labor class, buried beneath the continuous torrent of immigrants who rank higher in social acceptability in a politically correct society. It is time for native Black people to demand that the nation carry out its obligations to them first. A good beginning point would be for the government to acknowledge that the symbol of the Statue of Liberty is no longer relevant. The next step would be for the government to acknowledge that the U.S. first has an obligation to prioritize and correct the economic and social problems of native Blacks whose ancestors built the country but were never allowed to profit from their work before extending unearned benefits to immigrant newcomers.
For 500 years, native Blacks have been the tired, hungry, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free. This is a political issue that will only be addressed if and when Blacks demand that it be done.
Question 42: Is there a voting guide for the average Black American voter?
Chapter 7 of my book "Powernomics: The National Plan to Empower Black America" offers Black voter strategies they can use to maximize the effect of their group vote and gain the greatest group-based tangible benefits. When Blacks play American politics based upon the needs of the interests of other groups, they are not playing to win; they are playing to be accepted, to get along, and to get nothing in return for their efforts.
The 1870 Code of Conduct was the Maryland law that codified the political behavior whites expected Blacks to exhibit. It described the rules of how Blacks would play in the game of politics, but only play politics. However, it is a socio-economic Darwinism—the survival of the fittest. The Powernomics Guide for Voters is a new code of conduct for Blacks based on the assumption that they will play to win for self as a team.
The principles require group change in behavior and would demonstrate to all Blacks as a group that they will no longer abide by the 1870 Code of Conduct and that they are instituting a new code of conduct in politics where Black interests will now come first. To implement new strategies, Black voters should begin by cleaning their own house first. They must no longer tolerate Black elected officials or others who purport to represent Blacks but actually want only to play in the games of politics.
These officials want to be seen in a positive light as generally friendly and cooperative but do not want to deliver benefits to Black supporters, preferring instead to deliver benefits to competing groups. Too often, Black officials oppose or refuse to stand up for issues specific to Blacks, causing the group to lose, although the officials themselves may personally profit.
The Powernomics action steps below are a guide for Blacks to implement new political strategies. The new code of conduct in politics also informs whites of the changed behavior they can now expect from Blacks. The Powernomics principles in politics are narrowly focused to address the needs and interests of Black Americans and should be used as criteria to analyze candidates, political parties, and balance issues.
The Powernomics Political Principles:
1. Play to win. Politics is a game that decides which groups receive which benefits. Blacks should not participate in a game in which they can never win. Vote to win and to get group benefits, or withhold the group vote.
2. Negotiate quid pro quo agreements with candidates and parties. Create a list of tangibles and measurable benefits your group expects to receive from candidates and political parties in return for the group votes. Vote only for those candidates who promise and deliver the most material benefits to Black Americans for their votes. Do not even consider supporting candidates who insist on using all-inclusive terms such as "everyone," "minorities," "diversity," and "people of color" while they are specifically seeking the Black vote.
3. Aggregate group resources. Vote as a racial bloc. Voting is a team-based activity in which the majority wins and rules. Blacks are a permanent minority. Power and wealth follow the numbers. Build an independent party that uses the Black bloc vote to extract group benefits from political candidates, regardless of the race of the candidate. Once elected, use your Black votes to hold elected officials accountable. If no candidate promises group benefits, also withhold the Black bloc vote. If politicians win because of the Black vote but fail to deliver measurable benefits specifically to the group, discipline the politicians by using the Black bloc vote to recall them or to defeat them in the next election.
4. Vote the economic interests of your group first. What Blacks own and control determines their rights and opportunities. Use your group vote to control economics and to influence and control politicians and political parties. Prioritize and vote the economic interests of your group before looking out for the interests of others.
5. Support only those who support Black Americans. Do not support any political party, political candidate, or business, regardless of color, that would not publicly support Black America. Demand explicit support. Under the new code of conduct in politics, it will no longer be acceptable to send Black politicians to office to look out for everyone. Candidates who get Black support must deliver. Inappropriate behavior or betrayal by Black officials or others would be unacceptable.
The new code will also apply to corporations and ethnic businesses established in Black neighborhoods. Blacks must require those businesses to marshal their political resources to help eradicate the systemic problems of housing, unemployment, lack of top-quality schools, and poor food. It would no longer be politically acceptable for these businesses to attract money out of Black neighborhoods without making a substantial contribution to the well-being of Black consumers.
6. Reject intangible symbolic measures as payments for your votes. Demonstrate rejection of the 1870 political code of conduct by demanding explicit support, material, and measurable resources that can be touched, counted, and have a monetary value. Do not accept implicit, unspoken, assumed, or symbolic support. If the Black vote puts a politician in office, do not accept a basketball court, a street, or a building named after a Black person as adequate reward. If the quid pro quo political benefit cannot be measured or deposited into the bank, it is unacceptable as an exchange for votes.
The 1870 political code of conduct defined the behavior of Black elected officials and, unfortunately, still guides their behavior even today. The code conditioned the politicians, but it also conditioned Black voters and taught them not to vote for their own interests in politics. It conditioned whites to expect that Black voters will not speak for or even name their own group or articulate the needs of the group.
It is unconscionable that today, in 2017, Black politicians and voters have not permissibly rejected the conservative behavior required by the old code of conduct. Powernomics principles, however, guide Blacks to disavow the 1870 code of conduct, to speak votes in a way that benefits their group, and to hold accountable all those who benefit from Black political actions. Blacks should use their votes to elect people who will take positive actions for their specific group and impose consequences on those who will not.