>I answered my own question but you in turn have given evidence of my position.........its the history of all that racism that has held the black race back in this country. I believe a psychic price was paid every time a black person was held back, beaten back, discriminated against, prevented from leaving the ghetto. Over time that psychic price becomes a tab that accumulates and accumulates, and does damage. We see families where alcoholism and drug addiction are passed down from generation to generation. Why can't the psychic toll of slavery, discrimination, and racism be passed down as well?
It's not that it can't be passed down; but unlike alcoholism and addiction, where genetics play a large part, the psychic toll you're talking about is environmental; an African-American kid whose parent/parents do get out of that environment will fare a ton better than if he/she is born into that environment (though that kid will still likely face some discrimination in his/her life, even if he is elected President).
I'm not saying that those historical factors don't have an impact -- they do -- it's that focusing on them gives us an out when it comes to doing anything about the situation because they make the challenge seem too daunting and arcane, when in reality, solutions exist and if we were to really enact them, it wouldn't take generations to see significant improvement. Take Reconstruction for example... blacks in the South came out of slavery and made huge strides in just a few years. They began to build lives for themselves, they started getting educations, and many got elected to public office. But there was a major backlash from Southern whites -- the rise of the Klan, poll taxes, terror, etc, followed by the Corrupt Bargain which ended Reconstruction after just over ten years, the U.S. troops had to stop defending Southern blacks, and Southern whites subsequently enacted Jim Crow laws, resumed lynchings (which you'll see below took a major nosedive around 1870 thanks to the Force Acts), and dismantled all of the progress that had been made. Southern blacks began migrating to the North in the early 1900s to escape the effects represented by the violence in those three blue bars below in 1890-1899, 1900-1909, 1910-1919, but as we know, unfortunately weren't terribly well-received in the North (not to mention hostile acts taken on a federal level by men like Woodrow Wilson and being largely left out of the New Deal), and we ended up with white flight and a lack of opportunity for blacks even outside the South.
But that's not how we learned it in our history classes... even in the North in the 1990s, I was taught that corruption and incompetence on the part of Northern whites and Southern blacks made Reconstruction fail and Southern whites just filled a vacuum -- that was revisionism from the Lost Cause era that still impacts our understanding today (just like we remember Grant as a drunk and Lee as brilliant and noble when neither are entirely true), and it's dangerous because it makes us complacent and makes even sympathetic whites think that blacks couldn't use agency productively if it were given to them; they're largely denied it. There is deliberate oppression that remains largely responsible for the situation we have today. I witness it in my backyard today in Brooklyn -- white landlords believe that if they can replace black tenants with white ones, they can make a lot more money. So they actively neglect black tenants, not conducting repairs on the apartments and doing things like not cashing rent checks for several months in a row and then cashing them all at once so that they bounce and they have an excuse to evict blacks, fix up the apartments, and move whites in. It's happening all over the borough and in other parts of NYC.
Laying it all on the past and on some sort of black pathology lets us off the hook...
Ta-Nahisi Coates does a much more in-depth job explaining all of this. It's very eye-opening -- theatlantic.com
-Z |
