2. Greatness Blog – Making America Great for African Americans (for the first time)
March 22nd, 2017
As the new presidency continues, today, I want to explore the possibilities of making America great for African-Americans. During his campaign, President Trump announced, “The African American people have been absolutely mistreated and abused by Democratic politicians, who have taken advantage of them.” He cited statistics. “40 percent of African-Americans live in poverty and there is 58 percent unemployment among black youths. By every metric, whether jobs, healthcare or education, Democratic policies have been a catastrophe for minorities.”[i]
He explained that his policies would elevate African-Americans because he would promote job creation, foster educational choice and revive the American spirit. He told African-Americans, “Vote for me. What do you have to lose? I can’t do worse. You can’t do any worse than what these people have been doing, and I will do better. In four years, 95% of you will vote for me.”
I’m delighted to know our new president knows life is not great for many African-Americans. But I found it puzzling that he blamed the Democrats and I wanted to do some research on this topic. And I wondered to which era he referred when he plans to make America great again for African-Americans.
So first, I asked myself, When was life great for African-Americans?
If we go way back to the Atlantic Passage, Africans were kidnapped, stacked into slave ships and sold to the highest bidder like chattel. Certainly, that was not a great time for African-Americans.
If we go back to the 350 years of slavery, African-Americans were traded and sold like livestock, and forced into hard labor. During that era, they were whipped and hung if they disobeyed, forbidden to learn how to read or meet together and their children and partners were often sold to the highest bidder. No, that was not a great time for African-Americans in America.
Perhaps the Emancipation Proclamation when slaves were freed brought a better day, when they were promised 40 acres and a mule? But few freed slaves received land. The next President supported southern whites as they returned the ex-slaves to a role of servitude. They enacted Jim Crow laws, forbidding them to work in many occupations, taking away land given, instituting separate, but equal policies, refusing them the right to vote and good education. The angry whites would lynch, hang or jail African-Americans who refused to obey the new laws. No, this was not a great time for African-Americans in America.
Perhaps those who escaped the south to the north had it better? During the great migration, over six million African-Americans left the south. Have you read The Warmth of Other Suns? This wonderful book written by Isabelle Wilkerson chronicles their journey. And if you read it, you will discover that when African-Americans moved north, the American dream often fell short.
But then came the Civil Rights movement. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, new laws were enacted. Things did get better then, certainly. Housing, employment, public accommodations were now opened to African-Americans without discrimination. Their situation in life did improve.
But a few years ago, Ta-Nehsi Coates wrote an article published in the Atlantic magazine entitled the “Case for Reparations.”[ii] He explained that after 350 years of slavery, 90 years of Jim Crow, 60 years of separate, but equal and 35 years of state-sanctioned red-lining, the only way to really solve the problems for African-Americans would be reparations.
His article chronicles what happened to African-Americans as they moved out of the south. In northern cities, redlining first prohibited them from owning houses and obtaining housing loans. Later, they received predatory loans and foreclosures. The same areas redlined in 1940s are now the segregated areas of our cities where education, jobs and opportunity are limited, and young people may be more likely to go to prison than college.
After the civil rights era, we had the War on Drugs. Have you read Michelle Anderson’s book: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness? She builds a strong case explaining that the war on drugs intended to make life terrible for African-Americans, and many others. By revoking fourth amendment protections, they began to allow previously illegal searches and seizures, combined with racial profiling and minimum sentencing, putting a record number of African-Americans in prison. We now have the highest incarceration rate in the world,[iii] and African-Americans are 40% of the prison population, although they make up only 13% of our population[iv]. Education, or the lack thereof, plays a major role in the prison population. Those without high school diplomas are three times more likely to be locked up than educated folks.[v]
So, yes, President Trump is right. There is a problem with all the metrics for African-Americans. But blaming it on the Democrats or the Republicans doesn’t work. This problem goes way back and has been perpetuated by the American institutions.
Now the numbers he cited exaggerated the incidence of poverty for African-Americans. The poverty rate is actually 22%, not 40%.[vi] And the unemployment rate among African-American youth is actually 19%, not 58%.[vii] But certainly, these metrics are still a problem. Their poverty rate is twice as high as for whites, and their youth unemployment rate is four times as high as the very low 5% unemployment rate for the population as a whole when President Trump took power.[viii] And you will note that after civil rights, the situation did greatly improve for African-Americans, until the last recession. But after President Obama pulled us out of that, the metrics are still considerably better than in the early 1960s.[ix]
So now, I’d like to say, President Trump, you have a big job ahead, to make America great for African-Americans, not again, but for the first time.
To do this, I see you’ve appointed Steve Bannon, a white Supremacist, as your right-hand man, a member of the Klu Klux Klan. And then you appointed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, a man with a history of treating African-Americans unfairly. It’s not looking very good.
As you craft your strategy, I want to ask, “What are you planning to do to help the African-Americans (and others) re-entering society after incarceration? Can you help them get jobs so they don’t go back to prison? Haven’t they paid their debt to society in prison?”
Giving out vouchers for education and dismantling the public school system on which 90% of our children rely may create more unequal schooling.[x] While private schools for the rich do a great job, in Ohio, the charter for profit schools where the poor attend have a lousy track record.
And, Mr. President, we are not a colorblind society. If you consider dismantling the enforcement of civil rights laws, the condition for African-Americans will be getting much worse, not better.
To make America great again, you are working in your first 100 days to exclude Muslims, to build a wall against the Mexicans and to dismantle many of the government protections for all of the people. Yet, Mr. President, many of us believe that our diversity makes us great and our Constitution guarantees civil and religious freedom. Many of us believe it is the government’s duty to protect those freedoms, using regulations. Regulation is how government shapes a nation, making this a great place for the people.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way our society has treated African-Americans. A closing quote by James Baldwin in the Academy Award nominated 2016 film, “I am not your Negro” explains this well. “What white people have to do,” Baldwin said, “is try to find out in their hearts why it was necessary for them to have a nigger in the first place. Because I am not a nigger. I’m a man. If I’m not the nigger here, and if you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you have to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that.”[xi] I encourage you to watch the film and think about this, Mr. President, as you strive to make America great for the first time for African-Americans.
[i]While campaigning for president, Donald Trump called into the Fox News “Justice with Jeanine” program on August 20, 2016 making these comments. See the report here: http://insider.foxnews.com/2016/08/21/donald-trump-judge-jeanine-getting-black-hispanic-vote-2016. In stump speeches, he quoted the statistic of 58% unemployment. Watch this one: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-african-american-vote-227218
[ii]“The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehsi Coates, The Atlantic, June, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
[iii] “The U.S. incarcerates 693 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to that of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the U.S. has an incarceration rate that far exceeds every other country.” https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2016.html (The States of Incarceration by Peter Wagner and Allison Walsh, June, 2016)
[iv] Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census: State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity. Briefing by Leah Sakala. May 28, 2014. Prison Policy Initiative. Figures calculated with US Census 2010 SF-1 table P42 and the PCT20 table series
| 2010. Inmates in adult facilities, by race and ethnicity. Jails, and state and federal prisons.[50] | |||
| Race, ethnicity | % of US population | % of U.S. incarcerated population |
National incarceration rate (per 100,000 of all ages) |
| White (non-Hispanic) | 64 | 39 | 450 per 100,000 |
| Hispanic | 16 | 19 | 831 per 100,000 |
| Black | 13 | 40 | 2,306 per 100,000 |
See: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm
[viii] annual unemployment by race
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpsee_e16.htm
[ix] This graph shows that the percentage of Black families in poverty has declined from 33% to 22% since 1967, before the civil rights laws were enacted.
[x] The National Center for Education Statistics report that the percentage of students in private schools has been declining, with now less than 10% of students attending private K-12 schools in the USA. See: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=65
[xi] 2016 Documentary, “I am not your Negro.” Word by James Baldwin. Directed by Raoul Peck.