A Brief History of Systemic Racism
Many people that I know are looking around with confusion at why our fellow countrymen are waging a ground offensive in our cities and towns. It may feel like out of nowhere, we are expected to just accept our “white privilege” and acknowledge “systemic racism.” __________________________________
We are wondering why we can’t go back to the normality that we enjoyed a mere three weeks ago, others just don’t see what all the fuss is all about. Instead of investigating, we argue about the Confederate Flag over morning coffee and get into semantical debates about hashtags. I believe now is the right time to look back at how the hell we got here.
For three centuries, America tolerated the legal bondage of human beings. Reconstruction lasted for 12 years following the end of the Civil War, seeing little to no positive results for the African American community(1). The South wasn’t entirely on board to say the least.
Newly enfranchised blacks gained a voice in government for the first time in American history, winning election to southern state legislatures and even to the U.S. Congress. In less than a decade, however, reactionary forces–including the Ku Klux Klan–would reverse the changes wrought by Radical Reconstruction in a violent backlash that restored white supremacy in the South.(2)
They South felt insulted by the idea of “equality with the negro” and fought back successfully with Jim Crow laws that were in essence a new form of legalized slavery and another way to dehumanize our fellow man(3).
The North was equally obstructive in less than obvious ways through covert segregation. Segregated unofficially through “Gentlemen’s agreements,” “blockbusting,” “white flight,” and “redlining,” all leading to the rise of the black neighborhood. The white population refused to share a street with an African Americans(4). This abandonment resulted in rooted poverty, leading to large numbers of disaffected young people in dire situations. Without any access to a decent education due to selective school district underfunding(5), teenaged mothers began raising children in terrible conditions. Mostly absent fathers struggled to find income(6), leading to a higher rate of evictions(7), and rising homelessness. Not at all a sidenote, these communities became easy prey for the wolves of predatory lending(8). Few with means seemed to care, setting the stage for what we see in our modern era.
In the 80s, massive de-industrialization caused millions of jobs to disappear as manufacturing moved to developing nations(9). The first to be fired as plants and mills began to close down were African Americans(10). The plight seemed inescapable as employment dried up, starting a predictable rise in illegal means of income(11).
The War on Drugs took the form of a war against poor Americans precipitating the mass incarceration of low-level offenders that further removed young men from the workforce and exacerbating the economic disparities(12). This situation, set in motion by white racist views, now seemed hopeless.
Compounding that hopelessness was the continued polarization of America by the rise of fringe political beliefs and conspiracies perpetuating the idea that one side or the other “hates America.” Polarization and conspiracies can only grow in an environment of undermined trust in established institutions such as the media, science, and academics(13). With this polarization, led by the right wing party(14), a sort of emotional trickle down of hopelessness found its way into the psyche of the urban and suburban poor minorities.
In other words, a large swath of America feels lost.
It is on this backdrop that the gruesome video of George Floyd dying for nearly nine minutes, filmed by a 17-year-old girl, emerged. An unusually large number of people viewed the video not once or twice but many times — they were home due to a nationwide quarantine. The impoverished, dehumanized, and over-policed black population watched the video through helpless eyes. “I can’t breathe” brought to mind every police interaction that they have had. To believe that this is just about George Floyd is to deceive yourself. That video confirmed a simmering, deeply held notion that there is a system rigged against them.
Trapped. Humiliated. Helpless. What would you expect to happen?
It only took a few days for protests to spread around the country and grow in diversity. Many Americans felt real empathy and joined the African American population on the streets. The unrest grew as the momentum increased. Every wrong that lived in the cells of the minority must be accounted for. Statues torn down, police stations burning, a commandeered section of Seattle experiences murders and marches through cities and rural towns are daily.
America’s answer to this crisis? On a person to person level it has been to blame them, post divisive memes, scream about the plight of white people, point out failures in the movement, and heap on even more conspiracies to explain it away. We know this is not a movement to be squashed through the usual means of villainizing and resistance. It’s not a Democrat plot to overthrow the government. It’s not an evil plan by George Soros. Black Lives Matter is leaderless, so leveling accusations is akin to throwing gas on the fire. In the absence of a leader, any criticism is a criticism of the individual. It’s personal, no matter how hard one tries to depersonalize it.
Sure, it is easier to handle when we can diminish the situation. Posting pictures on social media of “bad black people” that committed crimes and videos of “good black people” that articulately agree with us. This isn’t a new strategy. It's as if we are using our modern platforms to collectively produce “The Birth of a Nation”(15). The response hasn’t changed and so the riots continue.
We need a solid direction amid the branches of discord. An acknowledgment of the tangible aspects we can control right now. I am not talking about policy or strategies, I am talking about you, the reader, and what you are contributing. This movement is looking for empathy. Empathy is hearing, understanding, and taking on the cause as your own.
If we keep responding with anything but empathy, and if we cannot handle the simple act of listening, then we should expect things to get much, much worse. Perhaps we are held back out of fear that doing so would challenge a carefully crafted worldview with which we’d rather not part.
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When the people say they want justice reform, the answer isn’t “back the blue.”
When the people say they want equality, the answer isn’t “lift yourselves up by your bootstraps.”
When the people say they want symbols of oppression gone, the answer isn’t “stop erasing history.”
And when the people say they want equal treatment as human beings, the answer is definitively not, “all lives matter.”
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Sources:
- https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african-american-odyssey/reconstruction.html
- https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/reconstruction
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/reference/united-states-history/jim-crow-laws-created-slavery-another-name/
- Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton; American Apartheid 1998
- Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality
- Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson, Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City
- Matthew Desmond: Evicted, Poverty and Profit in the American City
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cico.12179
- Miguel A. Centeno and Joseph Cohen, Neoliberalism, Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
- William Julius Wilson: The Truly Disadvantaged
- Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in the Era of Mass Incarceration
- Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America
- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology
- https://www.journalism.org/2020/01/24/in-recent-years-partisan-media-divides-have-grown-largely-driven-by-republican-distrust/
- The Birth of a Nation (1915) — IMDbwww.imdb.com › title
- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/the-worst-thing-about-birth-of-a-nation-is-how-good-it-is
