School essay minus proofreading

Michael Paradis

English 5


40 Acres and a Mule
The unique history of exploitation and injustices endured by black America deserves both greater recognition and economic correction. This correction need come in the form of providing better housing, infrastructure, schools, and most importantly jobs to black communities nationwide. The long struggle blacks have endured can be divided into three unique eras, each misrepresented in the mainstream historical narrative, but each equally detrimental to our ideals as a Republic for all. These are the period of traditional slavery, the period of sharecropping and Jim Crow, which lasted from the end of Reconstruction until the second world war, and the great migration through today. Although the nature of exploitation endured by black America may have changed during these three time periods, the pattern of exploitation is clear and demands those specific corrections. Other American communities have legitimate claims to equally horrific grievances as black America there can be no doubt, but as the exploitation of black Americans was the economic backbone that allowed the founding fathers the idealism and freedom we associate with this country and it’s origins, their struggle is at the root of our struggle.

Traditional slavery is a concept as complicated as it was destructive. As recently as 50,000 years ago, or roughly 2,000 generations, humanity existed only in Africa. Since then, economic geography and forces of nature have spread humans across the globe, and developed unique phenotypes to handle the separate environments, creating lighter and darker skinned people as a result. It wasn’t until the 1619, some 200 years after the Chinese set up trading posts in East Africa, that Europeans began to establish the institution of slavery as it existed in the Americas until Brazil (now home to more blacks than any other non-African country) abolished the institution in the 1890s. What this means in the United states, writes Joe Feagin in his article “Racism Causes Serious Social and Economic Inequality”, is that “For nearly two thirds of their total time in North America, African Americans were enslaved”. The African was taken on a perilous journey chained to a floor damp with feces, urine, menstrual blood, and the cries of others across the Atlantic, separated from their family and made to labor continuously. The categorization of blacks as sub-human, as a commodity or a tool, was justified by whites because of the supposedly enlightened lives it allowed the American aristocracy to live. The intellectual environment which gave birth to America happened because black labor enriched these people for generations. The cultural effect this had on blacks was to create the culture of resistance and of what would later be co-opted by white rebels as ‘cool’. Blacks, for all of the trauma they endured, elated themselves by flaunting their culture and bawdy selves, in effect saying that while you may own my body, you will never own my soul. This, alongside the economic and intellectual developments of the United States in the antebellum period can be seen as the only lasting benefits of an otherwise horrific institution.
Because slavery developed into being a regional phenomenon in the United States, the Union victory in the civil war offered America a chance to re-examine the roll of blacks in American society. Before his assassination, it was Abe Lincoln’s expressed desire that black America be "returned" to Liberia, or Haiti, or some other exclusively black place, as it seemed the safest way to achieve his ultimate goal of national unification. This also reflected the pessimism that would win out in the reconstruction period and keep black America in a position of near enslavement for another century. In opposition to such pessimism originally stood radical Republicans such as general Sherman, whose order of the forcible “donation to liberated slaves of "40 acres and a mule." “, as Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his case entitled "Debt of Honor," was the historical equivalent of the corrections I am proposing for black America today. The Republican efforts were sabotaged by a President who believed it was the slave owners who should receive compensation for their losses. The freedom black America retained from the reconstruction era was not enough to prevent a system of sharecropping and peonage to emerge as a successor to slavery. Generally, blacks were unable to participate or access government, education, social services, geographical and social mobility, or anything else society could withhold from them. Black America was still largely trapped in the South, owing back rent to white landowners unwilling to give up their lifestyle or social caste system, even in light of their military defeat. Victims of terror and intimidation by the Klu Klux Klan, black America grew a stronger sense of self and place in that dark century following the civil war, as their communities were largely forced to do without government or societal aid or intervention. Lynching, the phenomenon of vigilante justice visited upon blacks or supporters of blacks, only peaked at the end of the 19th century, showing that progress was by no means guaranteed or steady after the end of the civil war. This era was only really brought to an end by changing economic and demographic factors, which during the world wars caused the greatest migration of people this country has ever seen. General Sherman’s promise once again seemed like a possibility.
In the period beginning in 1910 and ending after the second world war, it is estimated some 6.5 million blacks left the south for cities in the north and west. More often than not, the communities blacks moved into were previously owned by underclass whites and already areas poorly served by economic geography and notable for substandard building conditions. Nevertheless, the well paying industrial jobs the north offered allowed for at least two generations of Blacks to prosper and participate like never before on this continent. With the money the uneducated factory workers earned, they raised stable, middle class, educated families. Their children would be the first blacks to move out of exclusively black communities and into the suburbs. This was truly a golden age, black culture finding a real sense of vibrancy and dynamism in the north with the Harlem renaissance, the glamor of the jazz era, and finally the pure elation of soul music.
The civil rights era was the ultimate expression of an ascendant black America, but they were a fragile development dependent on continued national prosperity. The end of the 1960s saw the pendulum swing once again against black America, as whites largely left the cities and the industrial jobs dried up, once again taking away from black America it’s 40 Acres and mule. Urban black communities became isolated centers of poverty, as far out of the reach of the national government as the isolated sharecroppers one or two generations before. This decline reached it’s low point in the late 1970s, as the South Bronx burnt itself out and a then incumbent President Carter asked while touring the destruction “see which areas can still be salvaged”. In the mid 1980's, the former industrial powerhouse of St. Louis’ top export was recycled bricks from old buildings. Since the 1980's, Americas cities have made dramatic improvements, but these have not been felt and have often been at the expense of the black community. Gentrification has gone hand in hand with the war on drugs, a war actively fought against urban black communities by the US government. The astronomically disproportionate black incarceration rate in American prisons when combined with the statistic that most federal prisoners are there on drug related charges would not be so shameful if it had the effect of ending the drug trade. But instead, the drug trade is more prevalent than ever in urban black communities because it not only provides economic opportunity but is the only source of power those neighborhoods have access to. The corner, as David Simon wrote in his expose of the drug trade in west Baltimore of the same name, “is the savanna watering hole” for the urban black community. Everybody has to come there to drink sometime. The metaphor is apt because it remains the only life source for these communities. Urban blacks risk jail time not out of the maliciousness our punishing laws would suggest they intend upon society, but out of economic necessity and societal expectation. Culturally, Black America had abandon the integrationalist overtones of the soul, rock, and disco eras and began pushing into more defiant and inventive territory, mirroring the economic changes that ended integration and increased segregation geographically. The defiant sense of cool that was so uniquely a contribution of black America was co-opted in the 20th century by whites, and once it was clear that the situation for blacks wasn’t improving, black efforts to reclaim their culture became more aggravated, especially with the development of hip hop. The 20th century ended with most of black America without their 40 acres or their mule, with the suburban black middle class a notable exception.
Historical causality is a complicated notion. Because nothing happened in isolation, and because there will always be data from the past we do not have, there can be no certainty when saying that certain events happened because of certain other events. Even so, it is clear to me based on the patterns established above that the position of black America today is the direct result of their continued exploitation and betrayal on the part of the larger American society. It is because of this I feel we must actively invest in black America so as to stop this terrible historical injustice that until it is addressed will continue to stand in opposition to our deepest values as Americans and human beings. The effects of such policies in finally ending our uneasy relationship with our past and our identity would be the best thing for white and black America, as our interests in citizens of this continent have always been fundamentally the same.


UPDATE:

going to also include this article somehow. I mean, my gosh! http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin