O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
30 comments:
And once again you cite someone from the 60's as if their words are relevant to conditions today. Again, honesty is not a thing for you, is it?
Marshal keeps trying to erase black voices while claiming you don't quote any. He wants something from today?
June 19, 2020
"Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York signed an executive order on Wednesday making Juneteenth a holiday for state employees; the same goes for tech companies like Twitter, and even where I work, at The New York Times. This year, Juneteenth, a holiday that celebrates the arrival of the news of emancipation from slavery, seems to be a bigger deal across the nation. But there’s a conversation I’ve been having with my friends: Is celebrating this holiday enough to begin to fix all that’s so very broken? And, one tick further, is the national embrace of what has been known as the African-American Independence Day a dangerous idea? Some people wonder — if we sip on our traditional red drinks as we socially distance on screens and porches — will we be lulled into feeling more free than we really are?
Saidiya Hartman, the author of “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” and a 2019 MacArthur “genius” grant winner whose work explores the “afterlife of slavery in modern American society,” said: “How to live a free life, how one can live, is the pressing question for black folks in the wake of slavery’s formal end.” Ms. Hartman said that imagining a freer life and a more just society has been the purpose of generations of black people since the days of Reconstruction. “Recently, I heard Angela Davis talk about the radical imagination,” Ms. Hartman said. “And a fundamental requirement is believing that the world you want to come into existence can happen. I think that that is how black folks have engaged with and invested in and articulated freedom, as an ideal and as an everyday practice.”
I couldn’t agree more. As someone who has celebrated Juneteenth for a long time, I think we need it now — not in lieu of the freedom, justice and equality we are still fighting for — but in addition, because we have been fighting for so very long.
The elemental sermon embedded into the history and lore of Juneteenth has always been one of hope. The gifts of the holiday are the moments of connection, renewal and joy for a people who have had to endure so much, for so long.
To me, Juneteenth matters because it says: Keep going, the future you want is coming." — Veronica Chambers
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/18/style/juneteenth-celebration.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
I'm leaving Marshal's comment here, just by way of addressing his nonsense.
First of all, do you KNOW who Langston Hughes is? "From the 60s..."? Well, yes, he was still alive in the 60s, but he was one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance. Do you know what THAT is?
Just, go, read. Learn more. First, READ the poem, then re-read it. Try to understand it. Then, follow the link from the poem (written in 1935) to the link about Hughes and then the link to the Harlem Renaissance (1920s) and just generally learn some more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_America_be_America_Again
Then, "as if their words are relevant to conditions today..."
Good God have mercy on your poor, pitiful damned soul.
Repent.
Don't comment here again until you can LEAD with, "I've read Hughes poem all the way through, at least twice..." and respond with something rational. Then, offer a bit about what you learned about the Harlem Renaissance (and really, given your level of apparent ignorance, I'd encourage a comprehensive class, not just reading the wikipedia info, although that would be at least a start...). THEN, apologize for your various comments and maybe you can comment here and try to offer something rational, rather than something ignorant.
Marshal prefers to think about American racism by reading someone writing 3000 years ago.
Ah. Too bad. Marshal commented again without following the reasonable requirements put to him.
He doubled down on his attacks on King and Hughes by saying...
"When you quote people like him or King and pretend their words are relevant, it would be good...and honest...if they actually were. To date, quotes you've posted by these two are absolutely NOT relevant, because they speak to conditions from that time which are nowhere near the same as now..."
Their words ARE relevant. Of course. Just ask and listen to black people and other rational people.
That you want to pretend that their words are not still relevant because racism has been "solved" and things are all better now, does not make it so.
Here, Marshal, I'll give you one more shot. You say that Hughes' words I quoted from his powerful "Let America Be America Again," are "NOT relevant." I'll give you ONE chance to give a review on the whole poem and tell me what you think it means. Why is this poem still so relevant and powerful today? What makes it a classic poem? Do you think that it was ever a relevant poem, or was Hughes way off in his assessment of US history?
Also, explain the meaning and importance of the Harlem Renaissance, in a relatively few words.
Show me that you're not coming from a place of ignorance on Hughes and then we can talk about relevance. If, on the other hand, you are ignorant of Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance and the import of this poem, then on what basis would we consider your crazy hunches that it's no longer relevant to be relevant?
Here, I'll help you get started...
https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/langston-hughes/let-america-be-america-again
America is not America to me.
How to think like an anti-racist. Lesson 562. 2019, this is wrong:
- An Ohio woman [WHITE] who was found guilty of abuse of a corpse in connection with the death of her newborn daughter was sentenced Friday to three years of basic supervision but will serve no more jail time.
As part of the sentence, Brooke Skylar Richardson, 20, was to spend seven days in the county jail, but Warren County Judge Donald Oda II credited her with time already served.
- Marshae Jones [BLACK] was five months pregnant when she was shot in the stomach. Her fetus did not survive the shooting, which the authorities say happened during a dispute with another woman.
But on Wednesday, it was Ms. Jones who was charged in the death. Ms. Jones, 28, was charged with manslaughter and released from jail on Thursday after posting $50,000 bond, according to the authorities and the website of Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama. The police have said she was culpable because she started the fight that led to the shooting and failed to remove herself from harm’s way.
“The only true victim in this was the unborn baby,” Lt. Danny Reid of the Pleasant Grove Police Department said after the shooting in December, AL.com reported.
Marshal, I've told you that I will give you a chance to comment. Just follow the requirements and make your case. BS and pablum will be deleted. Do what I ask and it will show up.
You say that Hughes' words I quoted from his powerful "Let America Be America Again," are "NOT relevant." I'll give you ONE chance to give a review on the whole poem and tell me what you think it means. Why is this poem still so relevant and powerful today? What makes it a classic poem? Do you think that it was ever a relevant poem, or was Hughes way off in his assessment of US history?
Also, explain the meaning and importance of the Harlem Renaissance, in a relatively few words.
Show me that you're not coming from a place of ignorance on Hughes and then we can talk about relevance. If, on the other hand, you are ignorant of Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance and the import of this poem, then on what basis would we consider your crazy hunches that it's no longer relevant to be relevant?
Answer the questions or not, Marshal. I don't care. I'm just giving you a chance to comment. You don't have to agree with me. You can say that Hughes is and was an idiot, if that's what you think, and that he is NOT relevant at all today. It's a stupid position to take, but you can make it if you want. What I need to see in an answer is some indication that you even know who he was, what his importance is to US history and literary history, what the importance of the Harlem Renaissance was and something to indicate that you've thought about his poem.
That doesn't have to be agreement, just something to show that you've reviewed the information in front of you.
America is not America to me.
June 15, 2020
“This one was shot in his grandmother’s yard. This one was carrying a bag of Skittles. This one was playing with a toy gun in front of a gazebo. Black girl in bright bikini. Black boy holding cell phone. This one danced like a marionette as he was shot down in a Chicago intersection. The words, the names: Trayvon, Laquan, bikini, gazebo, loosies, Skittles, two seconds, I can’t breathe, traffic stop, dashboard cam, sixteen times. His dead body lay in the street in the August heat for four hours.
He was jogging, was hunted down, cornered by a pickup truck, and shot three times. One of the men who murdered him leaned over his dead body and was heard to say, “Fucking nigger.”
I can’t breathe, again. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds of a knee and full weight on his neck. “I can’t breathe” and, then, “Mama!” George Floyd cried. George Floyd cried, “Mama . . . I’m through!”
His mother had been dead for two years when George Floyd called out for her as he was being lynched. Lynching is defined as a killing committed by a mob. I call the four police officers who arrested him a mob.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/the-trayvon-generation?referringSource=articleShare
June 12, 2020
Ben Okri
My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them.
We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied.
“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked.
Dad struggled for words.
“It’s because we are black,” he said.
At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.”
I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?
If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people.
A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out?
Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain.
https://www.ft.com/content/f89f39ec-ab3b-11ea-a766-7c300513fe47
June 12, 2020
Ben Okri
The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology.
Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges.
Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide.
It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes.
But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race.
The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots.
The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison.
https://www.ft.com/content/f89f39ec-ab3b-11ea-a766-7c300513fe47\\
If we are to live out our baptismal covenant: "He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary."
We need to see the baby/young man born of a relatively poor ancient Palestinian Hebrew woman.
Shaun King: "The statues of the white European “Jesus" should come down. They are a form of white supremacy. We can debate rather or not Jesus was real all day long. What I do know, is that white Jesus is a lie. And is a tool of white supremacy created and advanced to help white people use the faith as a tool of oppression. Also, they never would’ve accepted a religion from a Brown man. So they just made up a blonde haired blue eyed European."
June 12, 2020 - Ben Okri
"All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully
I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t.
Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius.
The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place.
The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity....
This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights.
Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives.
Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts."
Why I Stopped Talking About Racial Reconciliation and Started Talking About White Supremacy
By Erna Kim Hackett
Though there is a place for the individual in theology, white theology, in profound syncretism with American culture, has distorted the Bible to be solely about individual redemption. So it is blind to the reality that when Scripture says, “I know the plans I have for you”, the “you” is plural and addressed to an entire community of people that has been displaced and are in exile. All Scripture has been reduced to individual interactions between God and a person, even when they are actually between God and a community, or Jesus and a group of people. As a result, white theology defines racism as hateful thoughts and deeds by an individual, but cannot comprehend communal, systemic, or institutionalized sin, because it has erased all examples of that framework from Scripture.
Secondly, white Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, but never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never the Pharisees. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt. For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel and not Egypt when studying Scripture is a perfect example of Disney princess theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society — and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.
The Harlem Renaissance was a time when black and white Americans alike “discovered” the vibrancy and uniqueness of black art, music, and especially, literature. Large numbers of black artists could earn their livings and be critically acknowledged in their fields. The distinction of black cultural heritage and its manifestation was in vogue during this period. There was a strong communist influence among the Black intelligensia in this area (though it certainly wasn't unheard of in America in general at that time---Woodrow Wilson was a far left "progressive" after all). And along with the proliferation of the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League (begun in the 1910's), there was also a proliferation of licentiousness, with cabarets for homosexuals and transvestites common in its nightlife (which no doubt attracts Dan even more).
"Good God have mercy on your poor, pitiful damned soul."
You shouldn't pray to the God for Whom you have no true devotion, and certainly not after presuming you can do His job.
But from the above arrogance, you go on to make your demands, as if they change the point. Nonetheless, here we go:
"THEN, apologize for your various comments and maybe you can comment here and try to offer something rational, rather than something ignorant."
Until you find spine enough to demonstrate in what way my comments are ignorant or irrational...which means something more than simply asserting such because you don't like and can't counter what I say...then my comments are neither.
"Their words ARE relevant. Of course. Just ask and listen to black people and other rational people."
Again, just saying someone agrees with you doesn't make it so. An actual argument in defense of the proposition might. Give it a try. My argument is coming below.
"That you want to pretend that their words are not still relevant because racism has been "solved" and things are all better now, does not make it so."
Not in the least an accurate reflection of anything I've ever said, here or elsehwere.
"I'll give you ONE chance to give a review on the whole poem and tell me what you think it means."
It's no mystery. In nutshell, it's simply saying what others have said and continue to say, which is that the ideals of American...the intention of what America was meant to be...haven't been realized. Not at all a unique sentiment. Most anyone can say it and not be wrong, except by doing so it demands a perfection the speaker himself hasn't attained, either. But of course, despite Hughers mostly speaking as a black man, the poem doesn't speak only on behalf of the black community. Like the typical leftist...and he was a socialist for sure, if not a full on communist...he was a social justice warrior and speaks for that cause with this poem. Again, no mystery here.
"Why is this poem still so relevant and powerful today?"
This question is problematic. It assumes I find it either. I'm not sure you could find a majority of black people today even know who the guy is, much less know of this particular poem. Certainly YOU find it both, yet you have to ignore the many advances in race relations (and other areas of American life) in order for it to be "still so relevant". I'm sure you have no problem doing that. Powerful and relevant for whom? I mean besides yourself and other socialists? The America of today is not the America of Hughes' time. The conditions for the black community is not at all the same now as then. I doubt that Hughes, like King, would not wonder what the hell the typical black activist is whining about.
"What makes it a classic poem?"
Again, "classic" to whom? Certainly to social justice warriors, poets, perhaps and no doubt those among the leftist black variety. But like those who influenced him as a writer and poet, his preference for "speaking normally" or in the character of the average person made him stand out and accessable. It spoke to the conditions of the time from the perspective of a black leftist.
"Do you think that it was ever a relevant poem, or was Hughes way off in his assessment of US history?"
Most poems are relevant to somebody. This one was likely relevant to other leftists of his day more than to others who weren't leftists. Like similar works of all eras, it was certainly worthless to those who took a rosier view of life and/or America...that is, those who are honest enough to acknowledge American isn't perfect, but still honestly recognize what it was meant to be, was at the time, and what it can be. The thing is, here was a guy who lived during a time when racism was far more prevalent and blatant, and he earned his living doing what he loved to do. Yet, poems like this are his whining about how bad a place American is. He had none of the MANY advantages available to black people today, and STILL succeeded tremendously...writing poems!!! (among other things of course) That would suggest his assessment, as indicated by this poem, is a bit off.
" Show me that you're not coming from a place of ignorance on Hughes..."
It's typical that you regard disagreement with you as "coming from a place of ignorance", as if you're opinions and position come from a place of great wisdom. You don't feel the need to back up that attitude because that would take effort and and actual argument that is coherent and fact-based. You want to believe that I've never heard of the guy simply because I don't hold him in the same high regard as you, especially in your bulshit pro-BLM, "Art's a racist" mode. The fact is that I wouldn't need to know who he was to have an opinion of his work and whether or not it is relevant to today. Unlike you, I can defend my opinion.
"...on what basis would we consider your crazy hunches that it's no longer relevant to be relevant?"
On the basis I mentioned already. The conditions now are far improved over what the conditions were back in the days of either Hughes or King. Of this there is no debate. What lies at the heart of current whining is the false excuse of "racism", not a true "systemic" racism or even the blatant, widespread racism of their time. If this were not true, how can test scores for black students of Harlem in the 1930 be equal to and sometime better than whites of nearby schools? How could most black children be familiar with their fathers, since they were still living at home with Ma? How could the out-of-wedlock childbirth rate be better than whites? Yet today, none of this is the case in an America with FAR less racism (most whites bending over backwards to avoid having anyone think they're racist), equal opportunity laws, affirmative action, welfare up the wahzoo, and a host of other "legs up" available BECAUSE one is black. And you want to tell me this poem is still relevant today? That the King speech you posted is still relevant today? Tell me how.
Now go ahead and delete this you pathetic, lying coward. It's far easier than "listening" or having a conversation you pretend to want to have with those who reject the BLM, white guilt, white privilege bullshit narrative.
I asked you the questions to give you a chance to answer them and you did. I asked, knowing that I was asking for your opinion and I'd, at best, get your opinion, even if that opinion was mistaken and ill-informed. I won't delete your responses. I'll just let them sit there. I will respond with a piece from the New Yorker, speaking as to why Hughes is still relevant.
So, you ARE coming from a place of ignorance about Hughes, and ignorance about racism? Got it. You've answered and that's all you'll get, at least until you apologize for your attacks on women you don't know.
From the New Yorker...
In the two weeks since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Langston Hughes’s 1938 poem “Let America Be America Again” has been viewed tens of thousands of times on Poets.org, the Web site affiliated with the Academy of American Poets. Hughes, one of the foremost writers of the Harlem Renaissance and a prime representative of that movement’s cosmopolitan humanism, was born in 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, a town near the border with Oklahoma.
The following year, Thomas Gilyard, a black “tramp” who had been arrested and charged with murdering a policeman, was dragged from the Joplin jailhouse by a white mob wielding sledgehammers and a battering ram, and hanged, to cheers, from a nearby telegraph pole. The mob then swept through the town, driving black residents from their homes and looting and burning the empty houses. A few weeks later, according to one report, those who dared to return “ordered a law and order league and pledged their cooperation with the officers to drive from the state all bad characters”—not of the kind who had done the killing but of the kind who had been killed.
“Let America Be America Again,” with its famous parenthetical—“(America never was America to me)”—is an anthem for a split nation, a nation that, nevertheless, in Hughes’s words, can’t stop trying to fulfill its own hopeful mythology to “bring back our mighty dream again.” On Thursday morning, I spoke on the phone with the poet Claudia Rankine, who was visiting St. Louis and Ferguson, about Hughes’s poem, and about Rankine’s new book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” which will be published in October by Graywolf Press...
Continued...
“Citizen” opens with a series of vignettes, written in the second person, that recount persistent, everyday acts of racism of a kind that accumulate until they become a poisonous scourge: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you. Rankine writes, too, about famous figures, like Serena Williams and Zinedine Zidane, both of whom have been scrutinized and condemned for “acting out” in the public eye; in a series of scripts for “Situation videos,” a collaborative project with her husband, the photographer and filmmaker John Lucas, she sings of others whose suffering demands the world’s attention: Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson, those forced to submit to stop-and-frisk, those left behind during Katrina.
“To understand is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background,” Rankine writes, riffing on Zora Neale Hurston’s line “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Elsewhere, Rankine describes a man knocking over a black boy in the subway, and the mother’s demand that he look at her son and apologize: “You want the child pushed to the ground to be seen.” The condition that she describes is one of being alternately invisible and “hyper-visible,” watched too closely or not seen at all...
...that poem “Let America Be America Again”—what’s important in that poem is that he says, “America never was America to me.” The poem calls for an America that has never existed for certain segments of the population, to try to arrive there. It addresses that aspirational moment in the hearts and feelings of African-Americans and minorities who walk around every day, thinking—knowing—that there are two Americas, and there have always been two Americas...
...it opens up to all minorities, to poor people, to anybody who’s outside of mainstream white privilege. I think that was his intent, to say: there is an America, but there are many, many groups that don’t have access to that America."
Read the whole article:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/seen-interview-claudia-rankine-ferguson
There were two Americas in Langston's day. There were two Americas in King's day. There are two Americas, still.
Hughes is relevant. Your ignorance about his relevance, coming as it does from a place of white privilege, is part of the reason why.
Marshal... "it was certainly worthless to those who took a rosier view of life and/or America..."
You mean, the white privilege view? Yes, you're probably right.
On Facebook this week, some conservative asked, "why can't we just take the All Lives Matter approach. Why do we need to bring division into this when we need Unity?"
The problem with that, is that she's coming from a place of white privilege. She's asking and presuming that black folks will just be silent about the oppression and harm they see being done by racists and by systemic racism.
"Why not just be quiet and pretend like everything's okay and say all lives matter?" Pollyanna asked.
We don't because black lives are the ones being threatened.
Since we all acknowledge, of course, that all lies matter, why don't we gladly celebrate and embrace the black lives matter mantra?
Why insist the black people bow to your place of privilege? It's not going to happen, and it shouldn't happen.
Oh, by the way, your New Yorker article totally validates my review of Hughe's poem. Thanks for that, but it doesn't explain why you then pretend I missed the point. But this does: you're a freakin' idiot and a fraud.
Sadly Marshal, you don't understand my words, you don't understand the New Yorkers words, you don't understand Kings words or Hughes words or their importance, you don't understand Jesus words. So you saying that the New Yorker validates what you said, literally means nothing.
There were TWO Americas in Hughes' day. There are TWO Americas still.
That is why Hughes poem is still relevant, Marshal.
That you want to deny this reality or that you are ignorant of it (coming from your place of white privilege, you can easily turn a blind eye to it) does not mean it isn't reality.
There's one America. Flawed, imperfect but with the most opportunities for those who choose to seek them out. This was true in Hughes time, but incredibly more so now, and Hughes' own success supports this more accurate and objective truth.
That is why Hughes' poem lack relevance today. It speaks to a different time of far greater racism, while ignoring examples of successes that belie the message of the poem. Today, the message doesn't apply, doesn't reflect the reality of the many advantages today's black person has over the black person of his or King's times...advantages that make promoting the "two America" meme an outright lie.
That you want to deny this reality or that you feign ignorance of it (coming from your place of white-guilt cowardice, you can easily in deceit turn to avoid seeing it) doesn't mean it isn't reality. It means you're a liar.
Continually asserting the same lie never makes it true, nor does attacking me and dismissing my arguments, links and evidence make me wrong. It crystal clear, though, it's all you have.
Things Marshal cannot handle, part 1:
This month, a Monmouth University poll showed that 76 percent of Americans, and 71 percent of white Americans, believe that racial and ethnic discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States. Just a few years ago, little more than half of white Americans believed that.
It has been more than 150 years since the white planter class last called up the slave patrols and deputized every white citizen to stop, question and subdue any black person who came across their paths in order to control and surveil a population who refused to submit to their enslavement. It has been 150 years since white Americans could enforce slave laws that said white people acting in the interest of the planter class would not be punished for killing a black person, even for the most minor alleged offense. Those laws morphed into the black codes, passed by white Southern politicians at the end of the Civil War to criminalize behaviors like not having a job. Those black codes were struck down, then altered and over the course of decades eventually transmuted into stop-and-frisk, broken windows and, of course, qualified immunity. The names of the mechanisms of social control have changed, but the presumption that white patrollers have the legal right to kill black people deemed to have committed minor infractions or to have breached the social order has remained.
Today black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods as white Americans. Not even high earnings inoculate black people against racialized disadvantage. Black families earning $75,000 or more a year live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year. The average black family earning $100,000 a year lives in a neighborhood with an average annual income of $54,000. Black Americans with high incomes are still black: They face discrimination across American life. But it is because their families have not been able to build wealth that they are often unable to come up with a down payment to buy in more affluent neighborhoods, while white Americans with lower incomes often use familial wealth to do so.
As President Johnson, architect of the Great Society, explained in a 1965 speech titled “To Fulfill These Rights”: “Negro poverty is not white poverty. … These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.”
Slavery and the 100-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow were, above all else, systems of economic exploitation. To borrow from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s phrasing, racism is the child of economic profiteering, not the father. Numerous legal efforts to strip black people of their humanity existed to justify the extraction of profit. Beginning in the 1660s, white officials ensured that all children born to enslaved women would also be enslaved and belong not to their mothers but to the white men who owned their mothers. They passed laws dictating that the child’s status would follow that of the mother not the father, upending European norms and guaranteeing that the children of enslaved women who were sexually assaulted by white men would be born enslaved and not free. It meant that profit for white people could be made from black women’s wombs.
Things Marshal cannot handle, part 2.
In January 1865, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order 15, providing for the distribution of hundreds of thousands of acres of former Confederate land issued in 40-acre tracts to newly freed people along coastal South Carolina and Georgia. But just four months later, in April, Lincoln was assassinated. Andrew Johnson, the racist, pro-Southern vice president who took over, immediately reneged upon this promise of 40 acres, overturning Sherman’s order. Most white Americans felt that black Americans should be grateful for their freedom, that the bloody Civil War had absolved any debt. The government confiscated the land from the few formerly enslaved families who had started to eke out a life away from the white whip and gave it back to the traitors. And with that, the only real effort this nation ever made to compensate black Americans for 250 years of chattel slavery ended.
The way we are taught this in school, Lincoln “freed the slaves,” and then the nearly four million people who the day before had been treated as property suddenly enjoyed the privileges of being Americans like everyone else. We are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children or money to buy any of it. Narratives collected of formerly enslaved people during the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s reveal the horrors of massive starvation, of “liberated” black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die. “With the advent of emancipation,” writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, “blacks became the only race in the U.S. ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.”
In 1881, Frederick Douglass, surveying the utter privation in which the federal government left the formerly enslaved, wrote: “When the Hebrews were emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians. When the serfs of Russia were emancipated, they were given three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends and without a foot of land on which they could live and make a living. Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the naked sky, naked to their enemies.”
Just after the federal government decided that black people were undeserving of restitution, it began bestowing millions of acres in the West to white Americans under the Homestead Act, while also enticing white foreigners to immigrate with the offer of free land. From 1868 to 1934, the federal government gave away 246 million acres in 160-acre tracts, nearly 10 percent of all the land in the nation, to more than 1.5 million white families, native-born and foreign. As Merritt points out, some 46 million American adults today, nearly 20 percent of all American adults, descend from those homesteaders. “If that many white Americans can trace their legacy of wealth and property ownership to a single entitlement program,” Merritt writes, “then the perpetuation of black poverty must also be linked to national policy.” The federal government turned its back on its financial obligations to four million newly liberated people, and then it left them without protection as well, as white rule was reinstated across the South starting in the 1880s. Federal troops pulled out of the South, and white Southerners overthrew biracial governance using violence, coups and election fraud. The campaigns of white terror that marked the period after Reconstruction, known as Redemption, once again guaranteed an exploitable, dependent labor force for the white South.
Things Marshal cannot handle, part 3.
Most black Southerners had no desire to work on the same forced-labor camps where they had just been enslaved. But white Southerners passed state laws that made it a crime if they didn’t sign labor contracts with white landowners or changed employers without permission or sold cotton after sunset, and then as punishment for these “crimes,” black people were forcibly leased out to companies and individuals. Through sharecropping and convict leasing, black people were compelled back into quasi slavery. This arrangement ensured that once-devastated towns like Greenwood, Miss., were again able to call themselves the cotton capitals of the world, and companies like United States Steel secured a steady supply of unfree black laborers who could be worked to death, in what Douglass A. Blackmon, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, calls “slavery by another name.”
Yet black Americans persisted, and despite the odds, some managed to acquire land, start businesses and build schools for their children. But it was the most prosperous black people and communities that elicited the most vicious response. Lynchings, massacres and generalized racial terrorism were regularly deployed against black people who had bought land, opened schools, built thriving communities, tried to organize sharecroppers’ unions or opened their own businesses, depriving white owners of economic monopolies and the opportunity to cheat black buyers. At least 6,500 black people were lynched from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of nearly two a week for nine decades. Nearly five black people, on average, have been killed a week by law enforcement since 2015.
Even black Americans who did not experience theft and violence were continuously deprived of the ability to build wealth. They were denied entry into labor unions and union jobs that ensured middle-class wages. North and South, racist hiring laws and policies forced them into service jobs, even when they earned college degrees. They were legally relegated into segregated, substandard neighborhoods and segregated, substandard schools that made it impossible to compete economically even had they not faced rampant discrimination in the job market. In the South, for most of the period after the Civil War until the 1960s, nearly all the black people who wanted to earn professional degrees — law, medical and master’s degrees — had to leave the region to do so even as white immigrants attended state colleges in the former Confederacy that black American tax dollars helped pay for. As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.
“At the very moment a wide array of public policies was providing most white Americans with valuable tools to advance their social welfare — ensure their old age, get good jobs, acquire economic security, build assets and gain middle-class status — most black Americans were left behind or left out,” the historian Ira Katznelson writes in his book, “When Affirmative Action Was White.” “The federal government … functioned as a commanding instrument of white privilege.”
In other words, while black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, while also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, best credit terms, but they were also getting substantial government help in doing so.
Things Marshal cannot handle, part 4:
The inclination to bandage over and move on is a definitive American feature when it comes to anti-black racism and its social and material effects. A joint 2019 study by faculty members at Yale University’s School of Management, Department of Psychology and Institute for Social and Policy Studies describes this phenomenon this way: “A firm belief in our nation’s commitment to racial egalitarianism is part of the collective consciousness of the United States of America. … We have a strong and persistent belief that our national disgrace of racial oppression has been overcome, albeit through struggle, and that racial equality has largely been achieved.” The authors point out how white Americans love to play up moments of racial progress like the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown v. Board of Education and the election of Barack Obama, while playing down or ignoring lynching, racial apartheid or the 1985 bombing of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia.“When it comes to race relations in the United States … most Americans hold an unyielding belief in a specific, optimistic narrative regarding racial progress that is robust to counterexamples: that society has come a very long way already and is moving rapidly, perhaps naturally toward full racial equality.”
This remarkable imperviousness to facts when it comes to white advantage and architected black disadvantage is what emboldens some white Americans to quote the passage from Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech about being judged by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin. It’s often used as a cudgel against calls for race-specific remedies for black Americans — while ignoring the part of that same speech where King says black people have marched on the capital to cash “a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
The racial wealth gap is about the same as it was in the 1950s as well. The typical black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households. “No progress has been made over the past 70 years in reducing income and wealth inequalities between black and white households,” according to the study. And yet most Americans are in an almost pathological denial about the depth of black financial struggle. That 2019 Yale University study, called “The Misperception of Racial Economic Inequality,” found that Americans believe that black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10.
“These data suggest that Americans are largely unaware of the striking persistence of racial economic inequality in the United States,” the study’s authors write. Americans, they write, tend to explain away or justify persistent racial inequality by ignoring the “tailwinds that have contributed to their economic success while justifying inequalities of wealth and poverty by invoking the role of individuals’ traits and skills as explanations for these disparities.” They use the exceptional examples of very successful black people to prove that systemic racism does not hold black Americans back and point to the large numbers of impoverished black people as evidence that black people are largely responsible for their own struggles.
The study shows that the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than $27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as black families earning between $48,000 and $76,000 annually. It’s not because of black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes over all but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that black people need to value education more.
Things Marshal cannot handle, part 5:
Black parents, when controlling for household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study. And some studies have shown that black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials. But probably most astounding to many Americans is that college simply does not pay off for black Americans the way it does for other groups. Black college graduates are about as likely to be unemployed as white Americans with a high school diploma, and black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school. Further, because black families hold almost no wealth to begin with, black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for college and then to borrow more. That debt, in turn, means that black students cannot start saving immediately upon graduation like their less-debt-burdened peers.
It’s not because a majority of black families are led by a single mother. White single women with children hold the same amount of wealth as single black women with no children, and the typical white single parent has twice the wealth of the typical two-parent black family.
It’s not a lack of homeownership. While it’s true that black Americans have the lowest homeownership rates in the nation, simply owning a home is not the same asset that it is for white Americans. Black Americans get higher mortgage rates even with equal credit worthiness, and homes in black neighborhoods do not appreciate at the same rate as those in white areas, because housing prices are still driven by the racial makeup of communities.
To summarize, none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability — not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home — can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same. “The cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the American economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy,” the authors of the Duke study write. “There are no actions that black Americans can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the wealth gap. For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies.”
If black lives are to truly matter in America, this nation must move beyond slogans and symbolism. Citizens don’t inherit just the glory of their nation, but its wrongs too. A truly great country does not ignore or excuse its sins. It confronts them and then works to make them right. If we are to be redeemed, if we are to live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded, we must do what is just. It is time for this country to pay its debt. It is time for reparations.
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