All of the brutality, the
inequality, the injustice – including the bondage, the whippings,
the lynchings, the knees on the neck – all of this racial
inhumanity stems from the original American sin of slavery. Slavery
was the bitter root of all racial divide in the United States. In a
more subtle form, yet still potentially as deadly, it remains so
today.
Blacks have been
subjugated in America since August 1619, when the White Lion,
an English privateer commanded by John Jope, sailed into Point
Comfort and dropped anchor in the James River. Virginia colonist John
Rolfe then documented the arrival of the ship and “20 and odd”
Africans on board.
The slaves were sold in
exchange for food, and some were transported to Jamestown, where they
were sold again. Three or four days later another English ship, the
Treasurer, arrived in Virginia, where its captain sold two or
three additional Africans.
“Competing
European powers collectively facilitated racial slavery even as they
disagreed about and fought over almost everything else. From the
early 1500s forward, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Dutch
and others fought to control the resources of the emerging
transatlantic world and worked together to facilitate the dislocation
of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas.”
– Michael
Guasco, Professor of History, Davidson College
These are facts available
for the review of any person capable of understanding the plight of
the African American. Black skin color has always represented
inferiority in the eyes of white supremacists and nationalists. Even
in 2020, these whites seek to remain the unchallenged overseers of
any black advancement or equality in the United States.
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
American novelist,
playwright, essayist, poet, and activist James Baldwin, eloquently
spoke to this indoctrination of white superiority in 1965 …
“When I was growing
up, I was taught in American history books, that Africa had no
history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less
said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to
America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice.
Those were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree.”
(James
Baldwin. Speech. “James Baldwin Debates Willliam R. Buckley. 1965.)
White supremacy in the
U.S. came from Europe. This supremacy held that one civilization had
the right to overtake and subjugate, and even to destroy another civilization.
Baldwin explained …
“The most private,
the most serious thing this does to the subjugated, is to destroy his
sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father’s authority
over him.
“His father can no
longer tell him anything, because the past has disappeared, and his
father has no power in the world. This means, in the case of an
American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and the moment you
are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone
and every face is white.”
Baldwin understood the
alienation of surviving in a white society. He continued …
“It comes as a great
shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to
which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not
pledged allegiance to you... The disaffection, the demoralization,
and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the
color of their skin, begins there and accelerates – accelerates
throughout a whole lifetime – to the present when you realize
you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your
countrymen.
“By the time you are
thirty, you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most
serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the
catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters,
the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the
millions of details, twenty four hours of every day, which spell out
to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s
by that time that you’ve begun to see it happening, in your
daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.
“You are thirty by
now and nothing you have done has helped to escape the trap. But what
is worse than that, is that nothing you have done, and as far as you
can tell, nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter
from meeting the same disaster and not impossibly coming to the same
end.”
James Baldwin grew up in
Harlem. But, disillusioned by American prejudice against Black
people, he left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in
Paris. He wanted to distance himself from American prejudice and see
himself and his writing outside of an African American context.
Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even,
merely a Negro writer." He also hoped to come to terms with his
sexual ambivalence and escape the hopelessness that many young
African American men like himself succumbed to in New York.
(James Baldwin. "Fifth
Avenue, Uptown" in The Price of the Ticket:
Collected
Nonfiction, 1948–1985. 1985.)
Baldwin returned to the
United States in the summer of 1957 while the civil rights
legislation of that year was being debated in Congress. While he
wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Joining CORE gave him the opportunity
to travel across the American South lecturing on his views of racial
inequality. His insights into both the North and South gave him a
unique perspective on the racial problems the United States was
facing.
Balwin later made a
prominent appearance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
on August 28, 1963, with Harry Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney
Poitier and Marlon Brando. His works include Go Tell It on the
Mountain (a semi autobiographical novel; 1953) and Notes of a
Native Son (essays; 1955).
Policing Roots In
Slavery
During the Pre-Civil War
era, white men were appointed to serve as “slave patrols" and
“night watches” – their function was to police enslaved blacks.
These patrols would barge into the homes of blacks, seize their
belongings, and beat or flog them. They would also question, search,
and harass blacks if they saw them on the street.
The ratification of the
14th Amendment in 1868 gave formerly enslaved blacks equal protection
of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow
laws aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil
rights were enacted across southern and some northern states,
replacing the Black Codes.
Police corruption and
violence – particularly against vulnerable people – were
commonplace during the early 1900s. Slave patrols transformed into
Southern police departments who enforced laws such as Jim Crow.
Others became the basis for racist terrorist organizations such as
the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan aimed to reduce Black access to the
political system by intimidating Black voters and politicians with
violent tactics such as hunting, whipping, beating, and lynching. The
Klan was notorious for assaulting and lynching Black men for
transgressions that would not be considered crimes at all, had a
White man committed them. Essentially, policing was present to
enforce order among Blacks and ultimately protect the interest of
whites.
For about 80 years, Jim
Crow laws mandated separate public spaces for blacks and whites, such
as schools, libraries, water fountains and restaurants – and
enforcing them was part of the police’s job. Blacks who broke laws
or violated social norms often endured police brutality. Meanwhile,
the authorities didn’t punish the perpetrators when African
Americans were lynched. Nor did the judicial system hold the police
accountable for failing to intervene when black people were being
murdered by mobs.
For the past fifty years,
the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at
the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely
to be killed by the police than whites. Connie Hassett-Walker,
Assistant Professor of Justice Studies and Sociology, Norwich
University, explains …
“For the past five
decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist
regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are
still more likely to be killed by the police than whites. The
Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police
by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s database
indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23%
of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country
is African American.
“Policing’s
institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters
because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For
many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of
reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to
advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement
and its legacy. In addition, the police disproportionately target
black drivers.
“When a Stanford
University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and
2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of
systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more
likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white
drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being
stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver’s complexion is
harder to see from outside the vehicle.”
(Connie Hassett-Walker.
“Slave Patrols: America Has Yet To Reckon with the Racist Roots of
Our Criman Justice System. The Conversation. June 5, 2020
Anyone
looking for answers to racist police brutality and establishing a
system of true equality and justice must look first at slavery.
America has yet to reckon with the racist roots of the criminal
justice system established in slavery.
Slavery was fully
institutionalized in the American economic and legal order with laws
being enacted at both the state and national divisions of government.
Because of its tradition of slavery, which rested on the racist
rationalization that blacks were sub-human, America has a long and
shameful history of mistreating people of color. It is the elephant
that still sits at the center of U.S. history. It remains the cause
for civil unrest.
“American
society, the American anthropology, has from the start been organized
on the invention of white supremacy. Allegiance to a certain kind of
economics required it, and to ignore or deny the implications of
these basic facts is
to choose
to live in a fantasy.”
– Ben
Fountain, Award-winning American writer
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