Why We Have Black History Month

What it's like to be Black in America.

How segregated school districts 

keep black children in poverty

How Home Ownership Keeps 

Blacks Poorer Than Whites - Forbes

Black People More Likely to Be Stopped 

by Cops, Study Finds

Blacks Are Most Likely To Be 

Arrested By Police

Black people twice as likely to be charged with drugs

Black people six times more likely to face drug arrest

Study: Whites More Likely to Abuse Drugs Than Blacks

Whites deal more drugs, but 

blacks get arrested more often

Black People Are Way More Likely To Be Killed By Police Than Their White Peers: Study

Black Americans incarcerated five times 

more than white people

Nonwhites Are 2/3 of US Prisoners

Kristof: U.S. imprisons blacks at rates higher 

than South Africa

U.S. Imprisons More Blacks Than Apartheid South Africa

What part or parts of any of this seems remotely fair or just or right?

Keep in mind, too, this is just a small portion of all the many, many statistics on America, Americans and how Blacks are treated in our nation and have been since the nation's inception.

This isn't "Black History" so much as what has been going on for the past 300 years and what's still going on and why we need to change it. Why we need to change all of it.

Links:

Slavery by Another Name

From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, the Role of Prisons

'13TH' Argues Mass Incarceration Is An Extension Of Slavery

The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

Separate, Unequal, and Ignored

Should Be Required Reading

A friend on Facebook (yes, Facebook), posted the following article yesterday. I found it more than a bit incredible and a surprising good, even important read.

Will Racism Ever End, Will I Ever 

Stop Being a Nigger?

For me, it was incredibly quotable. I'll just stick with this one, however:

"...the greatest trick of a racist is getting folks to believe that racism doesn’t exist in the first place or that the people with no power and no privilege are the real racists, the real oppressors."

It reminded me how little, how precious little we Americans know of our own history, our own national history. It also reminded me how we need much more of it in our schools. Besides the above, I think people should have to read the following.

This book:

Slavery by Another Name

And if not reading that last book, then at least seeing the PBS special on it:

Slavery by Another Name

And finally, this article from 2 years ago:

The Case for Reparations 

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's fairly outrageous what we don't know or, worse, deny.

Born This Day, 1827

Indeed, born this day, September 27, 1827 was one Hiram Rhodes Revels and for a few reasons, should absolutely be taught and known by Americans who he was and what he did.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church(AME), a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. He was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.

During the American Civil War, Revels had helped organize two regiments of the United States Colored Troops and served as a chaplain. After serving in the Senate, Revels was appointed as the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), 1871-1873 and 1876 to 1882. Later he served again as a minister.

One of the biggest things Hiram Revels did was to  be The Black Man Who Replaced Jefferson Davis in the Senate

Too few Americans know this man and know what he did and how important he and it all was.

Another Executive Order, Issued This Day, 1863

A presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln.

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation warning that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863. None of the Confederate states restored themselves to the Union, and Lincoln's order, signed and issued January 1, 1863, took effect. The Emancipation Proclamation outraged white Southerners (and their sympathizers) who envisioned a race war, angered some Northern Democrats, energized anti-slavery forces, and undermined forces in Europe that wanted to intervene to help the Confederacy. The Proclamation lifted the spirits of African Americans both free and slave. It led many slaves to escape from their masters and get to Union lines to obtain their freedom.

That President's opponents were viscerally, emotionally, strongly against this Executive Order, also.

Link:  Emancipation Proclamation

Important Article on Race Today

Columnist/economist Paul Krugman penned an excellent, even important article in the New York Times that was released today.

Slavery's Long Shadow

...racial hatred is still a potent force in our society, as we’ve just been reminded to our horror. And I’m sorry to say this, but the racial divide is still a defining feature of our political economy, the reason America is unique among advanced nations in its harsh treatment of the less fortunate and its willingness to tolerate unnecessary suffering among its citizens. 

Of course, saying this brings angry denials from many conservatives, so let me try to be cool and careful here, and cite some of the overwhelming evidence for the continuing centrality of race in our national politics. 

My own understanding of the role of race in U.S. exceptionalism was largely shaped by two academic papers. 

The first, by the political scientist Larry Bartels, analyzed the move of the white working class away from Democrats, a move made famous in Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank argued that working-class whites were being induced to vote against their own interests by the right’s exploitation of cultural issues. But Mr. Bartels showed that the working-class turn against Democrats wasn’t a national phenomenon — it was entirely restricted to the South, where whites turned overwhelmingly Republican after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon’s adoption of the so-called Southern strategy

And this party-switching, in turn, was what drove the rightward swing of American politics after 1980. Race made Reaganism possible. And to this day Southern whites overwhelmingly vote Republican, to the tune of 85 or even 90 percent in the deep South. 

The second paper, by the economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote, was titled “Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-style Welfare State?” Its authors — who are not, by the way, especially liberal — explored a number of hypotheses, but eventually concluded that race is central, because in America programs that help the needy are all too often seen as programs that help Those People: “Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.”

Just this, above, a portion of the article points out truths, sure, but also ends up being quite an indictment of Republicans in general, the Republican Party itself and much of the Right Wing in this country.

I believe there will be 3 reactions to the article.

First, there will be the Right Wingers and Republicans who deny it completely, out of hand, immediately.

The second group will never see or so, be able to consider these points.

Finally, there will be a small, tiny, even number of these people who read the article and accept its truths.

We have a long, long way to go in America, regarding race and wealth and poverty, that's certain.

An American History Anniversary (guest post)

The American history we don't know.

The American history we're not taught.

The American history we don't want to know.

BLACK WALL STREET - Today is the 94th anniversary of the Race Riot and Bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma, May 31st, 1921.Read The Article: You do know that Black Wall Street was rebuilt by the Black residents after the bombing took place in 1921. They rebuilt it with their own money and got no government support.

"After the riot, black Tulsans, who were living in tents and forced to wear green identification tags in order to work downtown, still managed to turn the tragedy into triumph. Without state help, they rebuilt Greenwood, and by 1942 the community had more than 240 black-owned businesses.

"If we did it once we can do it again.

http://www.theroot.com/…/greenwood_oklahoma_from_the_black_…

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Listen to “The African History Network Show” with host Michael Imhotep, every Thurs, 8pm-11pm EST and “The Per Ankh Hour Q & A Show” with Prof. Kaba Kamene (aka Booker T. Coleman) of “Hidden Colors 1 & 2” and Michael Imhotep of The African History Network every Wednesday 10:00pm-11:30pm EST athttp://www.blogtalkradio.com/theafricanhistorynetworkshow orwww.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com by phone, when we are LIVE at (914) 338-1375. Call in with your questions and comments. Archived episodes are available for you to listen and are also archived on www.Itunes.com.

And in our national history, it's not that isolated an incident, either, this Tulsa, Oklahoma killing and murder. Don't think for a moment that it is.

Racial History in America, 1700 to today

First we owned them--Africans, later to be African-Americans--and beat them and kept them down and tortured them and killed lots and then, after the Civil War and ever since, we locked lots and lots of them in jails and prisons and wouldn't let them live near us or get or have a great education or the good jobs.

And that takes us up to today.

And all us whites, out in our comfortable suburbs don't understand.

Imagine that.

What too many Americans--not just Right Wingers--don't get about race. And America

There is a terrific article out yesterday on Why the GOP hates U.S. history: Inconvenient truths that freak out American conservatives.

It's a good to great read.

Full of those pesky facts, it tells of a few fairly incredible instances of where people on the Right (I like to call it "The Wrong") and in the Republican Party, specifically, keep either rewriting or trying to rewrite American history to fit their own ideas or preferences.

I think a lot of Kansas Citians suffer from this same mentality, clearly, especially regarding race as evidenced by people I've met or whom I know--some even in my own family, frankly--as well as the commenters of some blogs in town.

All that said, I think the best part of the article, for me, is this about that Right Wing rewrite of America's racial history, especially concerning blacks, African-Americans in the US, slavery and where we all are now, mostly economically and financially:

Recently convicted felon and conservative columnist Dinesh D’Souza’s book, “The End of Racism,” provides some great examples of rewriting race. D’Souza says of slavery, “No free workers enjoyed a comparable social security system from birth until death.” Later, he writes, “Masters … encouraged the family unit which basically remained intact.” In a particularly appalling passage, he writes, “slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many other ever tried to escape.” And concludes, “In summary, the American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well.”

The Problem: Conservatives in the U.S. have a race problem, specifically that many of them believe that blacks are “primarily responsible for their own success or failure” and that government programs only get in the way. And conservative politicians tend to racialize welfare programs to decrease support for them. To believe that black Americans would have been better off without government intervention, you have to pretend history doesn’t matter.

As Marx notes, people, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” There simply is little mobility for black Americans today because the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and housing segregation still weighs heavily. A recent study finds that counties with higher concentrations of slave ownership in 1870 had higher levels of poverty and racial inequality in 2000. Further, white people in these counties harbor more racial resentment.

That’s because when slavery permeated society — the legal structure, culture, science — nothing was left untouched by racism and racial hierarchy. The conservative “I built this myself” mentality denies that most wealth is passed from generation to generation, and so is privilege. Erasing the memory of racial hierarchy allows conservatives and Americans to pretend that individual effort, rather than structural racism, is keeping black people down.

So what was slavery really like? Jennifer Hallam writes, “Economic benefit almost always outweighed considerations of family ties for planters, even those who were advocates of long-lasting relationships between slaves.” Rather than being “relatively mild,” slavery relied on brutality and violence, the horrors of which are described in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Bury Me in a Free Land”:

I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood with each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

And, of course, racism and racial hierarchy didn’t end when slavery was formally abolished, but rather continued through local policies, terrorism and violence. This violence was often orchestrated at the highest levels of government. Consider, for example, the FBI’s attempts to discredit MLK or the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton.

In his response to Phil Robertson’s sentimentalism about the Jim Crow era last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates cites Freddie Moore:

“The corpse of 16-year-old Freddie Moore, his face showing signs of a severe beating, hands bound, remained hanging for at least 24 hours from a metal girder on the old, hand-cranked swing bridge spanning Bayou Lafourche. Hanged by the neck the night of Oct. 11, 1933, in a mob lynching, the black youth had been accused in the death of a neighbor, a white girl.”

And racial violence didn’t end in the ’30s, but continued until through the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and, well, two months ago.

_____________________________

It's sad to even troubling so many don't know and understand this.

It's even more so that so many will not just debate it but deny it all.

Slavery. And America

Humans of New York

They take you from your family, your history. They make you work. They tell you when to mate. They chop off your foot if you try to run away. 

And I’m sorry to say this, but white people did that. 

And black people are still living with the remnants. For over 200 years, black people built this country and didn’t get a single dollar. And sure, it isn’t happening anymore, but we’re still living with the remnants. We don’t have the same connections, the same powerful friends, the same access to capital. I tell young African Americans that they’ll do just fine, but they’re going to have to work twice as hard. I tell them that they will need to go out of their way to search for their identity. 

They aren’t going to find much about their heritage in the history books. Even the constitution classifies black people as three-fifths of a man, and that was supposedly written by the most enlightened, glorified white people of that time. I tell young African Americans that they are going to have to dig hard to find out the giant contributions that Africa made to civilization, because they aren’t going to find it on the television. And I tell them that just because it’s a tough road does not excuse them from personal responsibility. I tell them that God put them on earth to build and not destroy. And I tell them that some opportunities cost money, but books are absolutely free.”

Links:  Slavery by Another Name

Watch the Film | Slavery by Another Name | PBS

More American history

And further, additional evidence of why we really do owe blacks and African-Americans reparations:

On July 29, 1910, citizens in the small, predominately African American town of Slocum, Texas were massacred. This was one of many towns, such as Rosewood and Tulsa, where a successful, self-sufficient African American community was the subject of a terrorist attack designed to maintain economic white supremacy. In each town, the incident that sparked the attack was relatively insignificant and often fabricated. The death toll was comparable if not higher than in the Rosewood massacre and the Tulsa race riot (massacre), but few have heard of Slocum. A new book, The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas is an invaluable resource on this history. 

Continue reading here:http://zinnedproject.org/2014/07/slocum-massacre/ 

Also read, "Convenient Amnesia in Texas—The Slocum Massacre": http://bit.ly/1o4oFQA 

A Texas school principal who is a descendant of the Slocum Massacre has asked the Zinn Education Project to help shine a light on this seldom told history. 

Teach about this practice in history with the lesson "Burned Out of Homes and History" by Rethinking Schools author Linda Christensen: http://bit.ly/1fDOUvG

Kicking off Black History Month: Here comes (back around) the hate

So here we are, February 1, 2014. The start of another Black History month. Good.  We need this.

The nation needs it. God knows the white people, in their own country need it since we don't know our own history.



Recommended reading:

W.E.B. DuBois BLACK RECONSTRUCTION

Ronald Takaki A DIFFERENT MIRROR

Eric Lott LOVE AND THEFT

Noel Ignatiev HOW THE IRISH BECAME WHITE

Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall AGENTS OF REPRESSION: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement

Alexander Saxton THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WHITE REPUBLIC

(B)ell hooks BLACK LOOKS

Douglas A. Blackmon SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME

Andrew Hacker TWO NATIONS: BLACK AND WHITE, SEPARATE, HOSTILE, UNEQUAL

Go get 'em.

Link:   Slavery by Another Name

Confirmed: Still "open season" on black males in America

Let's not kid ourselves. The title, above, is precisely what the jury and their verdict confirmed last week in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial, like it or agree with it or not.

It's been made clear once again, shoot a black male in America and chances are extremely good you will not only get away with it but not spend any time in jail whatever.

Forget that Mr. Zimmerman was told by the police to not tail the stranger in the hoodie:

Police dispatcher:  "Are you following him?"

 Zimmerman:  "Yes"

 Dispatcher:  "Okay. We don't need you to do that."

Put that out of your head.

All that matters is that it has been proven, once again, that a black male's life in our society still, to this day, has precious little value.

Douglas Blackmon, in his important, revelatory book Slavery by Another Name pointed out how, after the Civil War--and for far too many decades--black men in the South could be and were, repeatedly arrested for doing nothing more than walking in very public areas.  If, at time of arrest, they couldn't prove they were gainfully employed, which was not uncommon at all, of course, they were not only arrested but found "guilty." To make matters far, far worse, they were not only put in jail but then sold--seriously, sold--by the jail to corporations for their work.

If you didn't know this, it doesn't surprise me.  Far too many Americans know far too little of our nation's own history and far less than that, of course, about black Americans and their history.

So along with being discriminated against and lynched and held down socio-econonically, they were also treated like this, as I just described.

Keep in mind, too, the numbers and ratios of black Americans that are in jails now, and have been for far too many decades, showing our justice system incarcerates black men at far, far higher rates than white males or other minorities.  Just a few of the very factual statistics:

• A black male born in 1991 has a 29% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life.2
• Nearly one in three African American males aged 20–29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision whether imprisoned, jailed, on parole or probation.
• One out of nine African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34.
• Black males ages 30 to 34 have the highest incarceration rate of any race/ethnicity.

I'll stop with the statistics there.

Suffice it to say, as so many have so rightly pointed out, this society and our social and economic systems are slanted or tilted or worse, against the black male in America.

What's great is that we get to blame it on them, too.

Just as happened just now, with Trayvon Martin.

Turns out he was guilty.

Links:  Statistics of incarcerated African-American males 

Jail Inmates at Midyear 2009 - Statistical Tables

The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality

Slavery by Another Name | PBS

I love the new ad slogan for Apple Computer

That's beautiful, isn't it?

Clearly a shameless ploy to get us thinking it's all done here in the States.

The second part of the ad should closely follow with:

"...still made by near-slave labor in China."

Thank you, Tim Cook.

Before Memorial Day, the first Decoration Day

Slaves Started Memorial Day

"For two weeks in April, former slaves had worked to bury the soldiers. Now they would give them a proper funeral.

The procession began at 9 a.m. as 2,800 black school children marched by their graves, softly singing “John Brown’s Body.”

Soon, their voices would give way to the sermons of preachers, then prayer and — later — picnics. It was May 1, 1865, but they called it Decoration Day.

On that day, former Charleston slaves started a tradition that would come to be known as Memorial Day."

____________________________________________

But need a "Black History Month"?  Why would we need that?

Side note: You might go to the link to this story. It's great history--national history--and it's actually a fascinating, even beautiful story. 

Quote of the day--on potential

Americans think they know their nation's history

They don't.

We don't know our nation's history. Case in point, from Facebook yesterday:

 

J. Marion Sims is called “the Father of Gynecology” due to his experiments on enslaved women in Alabama who were often submitted as guinea pigs by their plantation owners who could not use them for sexual pleasure. 

He kept seven women as subjects for four years, but left a trail of death and permanently traumatized black women. 

Anarcha was one of the women Sims experimented upon. A detailed history of this monster is in Harriet Washington’s book, Medical Apartheid.

Sims believed that Africans were numb to pain and operated on the women without anesthesia or antiseptic. The procedures usually happened this way.

Black female slaves who were guinea pigs would hold one subject down as Sims performed hysterectomies, tubal ligation, and other procedures to examine various female disorders.

Sims also performed a host of operations on other slave populations. The following excerpt details his “practice” on enslaved infants.

Sims began to exercise his freedom to experiment on his captives. He took custody of slave infants and, with a shoemaker’s awl, tried to pry the bones of their skulls into proper alignment.

Link: 

J. Marion Sims