The United States of America has a recent and long history of racial intolerance. It would be a surprise to some that it was barely 43 years ago that the US government outlawed discriminatory practices in that prevented many African-Americans from voting.
In fact when US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama was born in 1961, many public places particularly in the south were segregated. So Obama’s possibility of ascending into the highest office in the land is a testament to the racial progress that America has made in the last forty years.
The problem with the race question in America today is that many people equate racial progress with a complete solution of the racial problem. Many people think that because schools are de-segregated, and there have been many African-American mayors and public officials the entire effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws have been wiped out.
However, it hasn’t been fifty years since African-Americans were ‘legally’ recognized as citizens in all parts of America, people who walked with Martin Luther King are still alive today. In fact Martin Luther King is only eight years older than John McCain, the Republican presidential hopeful. This illustrates the short time that the dynamics of race have changed in America. However the question is can we expect the abject material poverty, and psychological impoverishment resulting from been viewed as less than human to be wiped away within a generation?
The reason for the disproportionate poverty of African-Americans is a discourse that has largely been avoided by the American people, they prefer to highlight instances where a black person has overcome poverty as proof that African-Americans are on an even playing field as whites.
I guess this discourse is politically incorrect, and I was not expecting Senator Obama to raise it in his campaign, it is the elephant in the room, the ongoing problem that no one wants to discuss, Why?, well maybe it stirs up white guilt, it reminds them of the not too distant past, it reminds them of segregation, of slavery. What America should ask itself is: “If the government had to legislate in order to grant civil rights to a certain group of people, as late as the 1960s, how does one expect these people, within forty-something years to catch up in every aspect of society with the others”
When you suppress a minority, practice segregation, and limit their rights, you allow poverty to fester, you allow hatred of the majority to fester, because the black man can see the affluence of the white man, he can see it, but he cannot get it. Now add this notion of the American dream, you tell blacks that they are American, you allow them to compete in Olympic games for America, you put them in your army, they fight and die for you, but you deny them human rights when they return. In many states they cannot vote, in some states they cannot marry a white person, some states they have to give up their bus seat for a white person if the situation permits; surely you can understand the anger and the hatred that would brew in the black community. You are being told that you are American; you are being told that this is the land of the free, but at the same time, you are being denied your basic human rights.
The suppression of a race would naturally lead to segregation, and thus ghettoization in terms of housing. We’ve seen this in areas such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. A people with limited rights are naturally a poor people, a people facing discrimination are naturally a poor people, for they cannot alleviate themselves to affluence, as discrimination prevents them from getting better jobs or receiving higher wages.
Poor people are angry people, angry people may become violent people.
America has continued to ignore the problems of poverty in the black community, and has instead chosen to focus its attention on the results of poverty- mainly drugs and crime. So it’s natural that when black people are disproportionately poor, they will therefore disproportionately fill the police cells and prisons.
And then what happens, we see just one side of it, we don’t remember the causative factors, we forget slavery and racism, and all we see are black felons. The black man becomes synonymous with criminal, violent, insolent and indolent.
This partial amnesia of America is worrying, this refusal to accept that black people are still suffering from the legacy of slavery is the reason why America would never see past race, America would never become a post-racial society, until it accepts wholeheartedly the evils it has practiced and how it plagues the African-American society today. It’s much too late for monetary reparations, but to use Martin Luther King’s analogy: America has given the Negro people a bad cheque which has come back marked 'insufficient funds', and it’s about time American society starts paying up.
One cannot be forgiven until they have first accepted wrongdoing, America has only partially accepted its crimes, and until it fully accepts responsibility and takes the right steps to mend these problems, racism would forever be as American as apple pie.
