So I'm a Jesus person. So I believe in miracles.
But even if every person in America woke up tomorrow and miraculously had zero racism or prejudice in their hearts, it would not fix the racial problem in our country.
My goal with these next couple of posts is to give the briefest of introductions to systemic racism. This is written particularly for white folks who honestly don't understand why race is still such a charged issue even when everyone they know seems to genuinely be a nice, non-racist-type person.
My proposal is that the American political, social, and economic machine has been finely tuned over hundreds of years to produce consistently racially skewed outcomes that have been and will continue to be self-perpetuating. At this point it is a moving walkway that does not require actively racist participation to continue. All it requires is that no one re-make the machine that has been carefully curated over centuries to produce with astounding predictability the exact results it was created to produce in the beginning.
Below is only the briefest skim over several hundred years of legislation that will illustrate how the machine got built. There are literally thousands more examples that could be talked about at the national, state, and local levels. but hopefully this will get us started.
(Note: I'm deeply grateful for the good work of the Racial Equity Institute workshops, the mini-series "Race, the Power of An Illusion" and the podcast "Seeing White" for their great work in helping to educate this white guy and put these pieces together).
1640: The John Punch Case
A black man named John Punch together with two white men run away from their indentured servitude. Punch is given a life sentence, the two white men are merely given an extension to their servitude. This is recognized by some people as the first slave in the American colonies.
The back story: the vast majority of Americans at this point are poor. The small number of wealthy white elites know that if the poor people band together they would be powerless to stop any uprising.
So they systematically work to break up the poor people by race. Wealthy whites tell poor whites, "You might be poor but you are one of us and you will have more rights as a poor white person than any other poor person will have. There will always be black people beneath you on the social ladder."
This promise keeps poor whites from bonding with poor blacks and other ethnic minorities to destabilized the established wealthy, white power structure. This alluring promise is repeated throughout the generations to keep poor white people at bay.
(Aside: it might be worth asking the question how poor white folks are doing here in 2018 on the other side of this bargain).
Late 1600's: "What is a white man?"
The notion of a 'white race' that would control power and access to land and wealth originated in Virginia as the House of Burgesses debated "What is a white man?" in the late 1600's. This is when whiteness formally becomes invented by people who to this point had thought of themselves as English or Irish or...
This conversation runs for approximately 250 years with each generation defining and re-defining white-ness to make sure that only white people get access to land and wealth and power for generations.
Late 1700's: Skull Studies Rank Races
In a prime example of how our presuppositions shape what we 'discover,' there are dozens of skull studies done by European and American scientists determined to rank all the races of the earth. Of course "Caucasoid" continually comes up first (the biggest noggins) with Africans last.
This supposedly scientific discovery becomes a key plank in justifying slavery.
1785: The Land Ordinance Act
Simple: 640 acres offered at $1 per acre exclusively to white people.
This pours gasoline on the wealth gap from generation to generation as whites pass along large plots of land that are exponentially increasing in value. Ethnic minorities will continue to be boxed out of land ownership (a primary way that wealth gets passed along from generation to generation) for almost 200 more years.
1787: The 3/5th's Compromise
The demon of racism gets formally written into our nation's founding documents with cataclysmic results. We have never recovered. This formally and officially puts people made in God's image in the "not-fully-human" category (the fuel that all ethnic hatred runs on). At the same time, this ensures that southern white slave-holding interests will have disproportionate power in Congress.
1830: The Indian Removal Act
The president is authorized to 'negotiate' and exchange lands with native peoples. In reality, this encouraged the president to seize Native American lands and remove them from land that had been theirs.
1877-1950's: The Jim Crow Era
Merely 75 years of domestic terrorism, lynchings, and dehumanizing treatment with zero recourse for anything resembling justice.
1896: Plessy v. Ferguson
Separate but equal facilities are ruled constitutional, consigning black students to poorer educational experiences and perpetuating the already well-established cycles of poverty.
1933: The New Deal
This made approximately $120 billion in loans available nearly exclusively to white people. That would be worth approximately $1 trillion today.
1944: GI Bill
In another of the largest government handouts in history, $95 billion was given away exclusively to over 2 million white people.
(Aside: who has benefited the most from government handouts over our nations history? Not 'needy minorities.' White folks. From hundreds of acres of land ridiculously cheap to college tuition totally paid for, white people have benefited from government handouts more than any other people group.
Perhaps there is nothing wrong with receiving government assistance. But when white folks complain or object to government assistance to non-white Americans, they can only do so from a lack of knowledge about our own history.)
1945-1960: Redlining Housing Practices
A black community was marked as 'black and undesirable' and whites are steered into the suburbs, leaving black communities with little to no tax base and feeding cycles of poverty which continue to plague us today.
Even when such practices were outlawed, de facto racial steering continued.
1980's: War on Drugs
Not surprisingly, the predominantly poor black inner-cities (the outcome the machine had been designed to produce) become communities rife with any number of societal ills. In a classic example of addressing the symptom rather than the root cause, the war on drugs accelerates a new era of disproportionate numbers of black males imprisoned.
Today
In every measure of human health and well-being, black people are disproportionately represented at the bottom: high school drop-out rates, infant morality rates, heart disease, economic well-being, family stability, unemployment, percentage of population in jail, life expectancy, etc. etc. etc. Every. single. one.
This is not about one person making bad decisions. This is about a machine designed over centuries to keep a certain subset of people from having access to all the options available to white people.
This is about an American political and economic and social machine where generations of people were steered into racially and economically stratified prescribed paths in order to produce these racially stratified results with black and brown people disproportionately on the losing end.
And all of this is in motion whether you're a 'good white person who isn't racist' or not. The machine goes on and on.
That (in the very briefest of terms) is what is meant by systemic racism.
No comments:
Post a Comment