Jim Crow Re-Visited: Part II of Traitor to My Race: The Abolition of White Privilege
From the end of Reconstruction in 1876 until present times, Jim Crow was instituted and has adversely impacted the lives of Black men and women and their children in both the North and the South. By the early part of the new century, as many Black men were under criminal justice supervision as had been slaves in 1860. This second of three articles outlines how this occurred and what has been and can be done to address it.
::::::::first part is at Origins: Bred In the Bone: Part I of Traitor to My Race: The Abolition of White Privilege
Article Series: Traitor to My Race: The Abolition of White Privilege
PART II OF III: JIM CROW RE-VISITED
By the time of Reagan’s election in 1980, the liberal state, i.e., a government that saw itself obliged to provide resources to those of its citizens in need, as the Roosevelt governments did during the 1930’s and ’40’s, was largely discredited. Lyndon Johnson, at the behest of his corporate sponsors and the Texas oilmen to whom he was politically beholden, had traded his Great Society and his War on Poverty for the war in Vietnam. The promise of a Second Reconstruction carried to the conclusion that had been abandoned in 1876, that would bring full citizenship to all persons of color in this country, actually to all poor persons, and that was grounded in the bedrock legislation that the Civil Rights movement had obliged Johnson to push through Congress, had once again been abandoned. So, too, was the possibility of putting a halt to America’s imperialist wars of aggression, of potential benefit to millions. I believe Martin Luther King was murdered because he had publicly made the connection between white supremacism, Viet Nam and U.S. imperialism in a speech he delivered in the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his death, entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break the Silence.”
Nixon followed Johnson as President, pitching his appeals to “the silent majority”, i.e., a white middle class eager to believe in privileged whites and black bogeymen as the causes of the country’s travails; overseeing the “Southern strategy” developed by his campaign consultant Kevin Philips, to induce white Southerners to forsake the Democrats and join the Republican Party; and authorizing the Watergate skullduggery employed by his chief of staff Haldeman to get elected twice. Early in his first term, as Haldeman recorded in a diary entry in 1970 (as published in The NY Times on5/18/94), Nixon confided to him “that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Pointed out that there has never in history been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true.”
While continuing U.S. involvement in Viet Nam until 1972, Nixon launched his misnamed War on Drugs, actually his war on Black American men, whose militancy and opposition to his domestic and foreign policies provoked great fear in him. Since I’ve written about these events and those that follow below in great detail in a book of essays that will be published some time next month entitled Nation of Killers — Guns, Violence, White Supremacism: the American Dream Become Delusion (in press), I’ll simply summarize what followed.
Michelle Alexander picks up the story in The New Jim Crow ” (2012) and tells us how Black men, along with other persons of color, began to be incarcerated at an astounding rate, most for simple drug possession. At the time of her book’s publication, one in four Black men was under some form of criminal justice supervision — approximately four million men, equivalent to the number of Black slaves in this country at the outbreak of the civil war.
Nixon’s policy of removing Black men from society has had far-reaching and almost inevitable consequences. By October, 2103, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the U.S. incarceration rate was the highest in the world, with 716 per 100,000 of the country’s residents in jail or prison. Further international comparisons reveal that the United States, which has about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. In 2007, criminal justice corrections, which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole, had evolved into an industry with $74 billion in annual revenues.
Most indicative of the marginalization of Black men in America has been the killing of unarmed Black men at the hands of police officers throughout the country, compounded by the failure of local district attorneys, in the great majority of these instances, to issue indictments against the police officers who did the killings. In early August of this year, one year after an unarmed Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson by a Ferguson police officer against whom no charges were brought, The Washington Post reported that “So far this year, twenty-four unarmed black men have been shot and killed by police — one every nine days” (August 8, 2105). Mainstream and conservative commentators waxed ambiguous as the individual killings mounted, flipping between blaming the victim and holding the police and criminal justice system accountable. So did most white folks.
Charleston appeared to tip the balance and bring about a crisis of conscience for most Americans. First, it was shocking to contemplate a lone white supremacist gunman walking into a prayer meeting at an historic Black church in the heart of Charleston, calmly sitting there after being warmly welcomed, and then shooting and killing the nine Black congregants present, including their Black pastor, a member of the South Carolina state legislature. Even more astounding for Americans, whose response is such circumstances is usually vengeful, were the statements of forgiveness for the gunman by the family members of those whom he had killed. The response was immediate and supportive: the Confederate battle flag, a symbol of resistance and pride for most white Southerners and of slavery and brutality for Black and progressive Americans, was finally removed from the grounds of South Carolina’s capitol building. Rallies and prayer meetings of support and consolation were conducted across the nation. A consensus appeared to be emerging that racism and unfetttered hatred of Black Americans were at the root of the Charleston and even the police shootings.
In short, a nationwide response that promised hope, but, as The Washington Post article above illustrates, offered no guarantee of any lasting change on the part of the white political majority towards their Black countrymen, of an end to white supremacism. Which is what this article presumes to address, since lasting change will involve a change in white Americans’ self-identity, a daunting task and challenge. Given this country’s checkered history with race, it’s likely that this will turn out to be another opportunity lost, and that white supremacism will continue as the ideological root of American imperialism at home and abroad, as well as the bulwark of so-called free market capitalism and the huge inequality in income and opportunity it has produced between the classes.
Black Lives Matter, founded in the aftermath of the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his accused murderer, is taking no chances. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont progressive and Socialist from Brooklyn, my home town, discovered this to his surprise when he was confronted by two women members of BLM who took over the podium and his microphone when he was about to address a campaign rally in Seattle on August 9. White progressives were shocked, myself included — why challenge the one candidate who would seem to be the most sympathetic to their cause? But as I later learned, Bernie, who had been expected to talk about the unwarranted shootings and killings of black men by police, had begun his speech with his usual spiel about income inequality, failing to mention that this phenomenon had most adversely affected poor Black Americans. The BLM women were having none of this and drove Bernie off the stage. The upshot? Bernie is talking to and learning from BLM organizers about the issues that are of principal concern to them. To summarize, from BLM’s website, their national demands:
“form[ation] of a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the U.S. “
“discontin[uance by the Federal Government of ] its supply of military weaponry to local law enforcement “
release by “the office of the US attorney general ” [of] the names of all officers involved in killing black people within the last five years ” so they can be brought to justice “
“decrease in law enforcement spending ” and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools ” “
Good Alinsky-style organizing: confront the principal actors, in this case, all those running for President, and don’t let them off the hook; create conflict and controversy, gain the public’s attention and obtain the moral high ground; promote a public conversation about your demands; secure a place and a voice for yourself and like-minded individuals and organizations in whatever discussion and resolution your actions foment. In short, Joe Hill’s mantra: Don’t mourn, organize!
END OF PART II
(REFERENCES TO BE FOUND AT CONCLUSION OF PART III)
Submitters Bio:
Brief Bio.: Dr. Carney is a retired social worker with nearly 50 years of experience in social work, with thirty-five of those years spent in the public mental health system . He is an Alinsky-trained community organizer, Institute-trained in Bowen Family Systems theory, and trained in Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy. He received his MSW from UCLA in 1969 and his DSW from CUNY in 1991. He recently retired from a large New York social welfare agency, where he served as director of the agency’s case management programs in New York City for seventeen years. At present, he lives in the Adirondacks of upstate New York with his wife of 34 years and devoted his time to writing, hiking and caring for his cats. He has just finished his first book of essays, in press, entitled “Nation of Killers,” scheduled for publication in late September or early October. He will then begin writing a long-delayed memoir which he has tentatively titled “Two Outsiders; The Father and Son Who Never Met.” He also blogs regularly at http://www.madinamerica.com/author/jcarney and at socialjustice solutions.org, and has begun posting at opednews.org. He considers himself a committed advocate for change in public mental health as well as a supporter of those who struggle to promote it. He endeavors to follow the advice of the late Joe Hill, i.e., “Don’t mourn, organize!
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