#90 BLACK HISTORY

#90

BLACK HISTORY DIVIDED BY LAWS AND PREJUDICE AND A GENERAL AMBIVALENCE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

T

he history of black people in America is a history of struggle not just for freedom but for happiness.

Whereas white lore begins with the passengers of the Mayflower escaping religious persecution in Europe and landing at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620, black disempowerment begins one year earlier with the passage to Virginia of the first 20 to 30 slaves captured in Africa for generations of servitude, slavery and dehumanization.

Further shipments of captured Africans would support the plantation economy around the cotton fields of the Deep South in the decades to come until freedom rang with the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Black history, as in any history, can never be entirely accurately captured from one singular perspective especially that of a non-black person that has not endured the inhumanity experienced from the inside by black people. But progress may so often be made from images taken from the outside looking in, and from without as much as from within as a starting point of a new history.

Many black thinkers never wanted any help from white people other than to just want white people to get out of the way of black progress after decades and perhaps centuries of disempowerment by the white power company in Washington DC.

There was no winning in America for blacks during the time before the civil rights movement, other than on the baseball field in San Francisco and the basketball court in Los Angeles and on stage at the Apollo Theater in Manhattan.

The first Reconstruction following the American Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was an empty victory for American freedom and democracy.

The Constitutional Amendments that legislated equality for black people and put them on an equal footing with white people and anyone else for that matter were quickly limited by the Jim Crow laws that codified black segregation under the thoughts of ‘equal maybe, but separate and apart, for sure.’

Black history following emancipation had not even been one of losing a distinct identity by being absorbed into the hegemony of the ruling class, but rather a history of fragmentation and isolation apart from and suppressed by white America.

Blacks had culture, but many of them may have been the last to know about those uniquely rich individual traits because of the subjugation and constant degradation purposefully meant to erode any sense of entitlement to self-worth and individualism.

Instead of progress, blacks struggled to find happiness in a day wrapped in intergenerational psychological trauma, triggered over and over again by the unequal treatment in public places and the insanely wild extrajudicial lynchings of young black people and the violent hatred of the white lynch mobs.

Blacks often live in the briefest of moments of happiness if and when that moment arrives.

A socially engineered society carves out of civilization a circle filled with spaces and carves the spaces inside the circle into segments with the white nuclear family having the most power at the core of civilization, with everything less than that model of white supremacy having less power, less wealth and less rights.

Blacks had been so severely marginalized as to not even be given a space inside the socially engineered circle of organized life within civilization.

This segregation influenced all aspects of the public consciousness, being imposed by those in authority, legislators, judges and the police, and the citizenry begrudgingly accepting freedom for blacks by separating blacks from the white power society and thereby indirectly limiting their democratic freedoms.

Blacks had been made free but simultaneously made unequal through the implementation of those new laws of freedom through the policies of segregation that limited those new rights.

FREE BUT SIMULTANEOUSLY UNEQUAL

These discriminatory policies were imposed, not just by cultural stereotypes, but by legislated laws created by democratically elected politicians and enforced by the independent judiciary and law enforcement agencies.

Judges are not law makers or law breakers, but too often judges are followers, and too often, when it comes to black equality and freedom, judges continue to follow. This public conflict between the state and the individual was personified in the rise of black civil rights leaders symbolically representing the black community who so far could not speak for themselves effectively enough to be released from the indentured servitude to the white state.

One of the biggest struggles, which is in every society, whatever color, is the indifference of the people as to why they live like they do and why they have to continue to live like this. Black civil rights leaders enlightened the people about their daily struggles and their present state of happiness.

People too often everywhere live in the ever so fragile moments of fleeting happiness as a form of avoidance.

This transient state avoids an examination of the prejudices shaping their day and limiting their ability to rely upon and extend those moments of happiness. That basketball game might be just the moment of escape needed, but the end score is another day without an examination of that struggle with life.

Civil Rights Leader Malcolm X taught through example of how to be introspective and build self-respect through individual empowerment.

Freedom from slavery and freedom from segregation for urban blacks was freedom only on the tail whispers of the wind.

But Malcolm X taught blacks who they were, if they were not slaves. And if they were not slaves and if they were not fragments on the margins of white society, then they were individuals with a common culture and an individual identity to be proud of and worth protecting.

The black America had been shaped in relation to the means of production, taken from Africa for sure, but perhaps escaping the cotton fields in the South only for the factory floors in the North.

The Civil Rights Movement found sources of equality and sought to institutionalize those strongly held beliefs that blacks were equal and deserving of equal treatment.

The impoverished living conditions provided a convenient stage for civil rights demonstrations across America, since what burned down had little value before the fires.

White culture did eventually accept the new blackness rising form the fires like a Phoenix, but only begrudgingly again by commodifying blacks as superstars within the white entertainment industries, such as the black athlete and the black comedian and the black musician starring in global corporate media entertainment programming.

But the implementation of the new blackness was a subtle manipulation of the black individualism and the individual awareness of self-worth that those people within the civil rights movement required before history could start over again.

The white power company in Washington DC still controlled the environment to their benefit, while being able to avoid a public examination of the deep racial prejudices of a society still reluctant to share society with the new generation of descendants of slaves.

Blacks still needed to celebrate the richness of their own culture in a poisoned racial climate.

EVER SO FRAGILE MOMENTS OF FLEETING HAPPINESS

And other things were going on in America that created a diversion for policy makers, such as the gender equality war and the radicalization of the religious right.

White female activists would soon be on the march for gender rights. And lawmakers could still earn public praise for gender equality and religious freedom while getting away with doing little to equalize blacks still living in poor conditions that were rooted in the discriminatory Jim Crow policies.

Blacks also struggled internally to synthesize the white policies of hegemony, as opposed to the segregationist policies, as division within the community became fueled by certain blacks prospering within the white corporate structure.

The upwardly mobile blacks received push back for their success. And the corporate media machine began to manipulate black icons in a manner that reinforced and expanded white hegemony instead of developing the unique black individualism necessary to reconstruct society.

This white portrayal of black success created a public image for the community, but those symbols fell far short of depicting the distinct black cultures flourishing in different regions of the so-called, great nation of freedom and democracy, while still avoiding the deep examination required of the racial prejudices limiting opportunity for blacks in large cities and small towns.

People were relegated to just living their lives in hostile urban environments where basic issues such as travel on public transportation had become racialized. And what happiness there was, was fleeting.

Still other blacks relied on ‘victimhood’ to push for public gains. Society had impoverished and marginalized people for no other reason than racial persecution. And those prejudices had become so entrenched in society as to create a learned helplessness. Blacks needed help, here.

To complicate matters even further, lighter skin blacks became favored, despite the lighter color being a result of interracial marriages or forced sexual relations with the plantation owners and white field managers.

The service society normally divides up the issues along means, needs and circumstances. A single mother has the same needs regardless of skin color. And yet, the racial profiling and systemic prejudices and the public image of blacks as descendants of slaves prevents issues from being resolved. The disagreements among themselves on how to restore the balance made everything all the more complicated.

A child needing a meal, a girl needing an education, a young man needing gainful employment all gets muddled and misdirected into limits based on the irrelevant characteristic of the color of a person’s skin. Rather than being seen as individuals, a black person is seen as a member of a racial group, and as a result, the identity of the individual with that group becomes a caste under the white superstructure.

Malcolm X (New York City, February 21, 1965) and Martin Luther King Jr. (Memphis, April 4, 1968) dedicated their lives to public service in this cause. But on the day of their assassinations the systemic political persecution and the racial prejudices had exhausted the goodness in their souls. And the civil rights heroes chose then to best advance their respective causes through martyrdom.

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.

The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-first Century, by Peniel E. Joseph, New York, Basic Books ,2022.

Transcending Racial Divisions: Will You Stand by Me?, by Christine Louis-Dit-Sully, Winchester, John Hart Publishing, 2021.