Ever since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don’t like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the “era of colorblindness” there’s a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have “moved beyond” race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
- There are more African Americans under correctional control today — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
- As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
- A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
- If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80%.) These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
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You’re forgetting the fact that everyone who commits a felony is given the same treatment. The choice to commit a crime is yours and yours alone. It is no one’s fault but your own if you break the law and justice will be served. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, so why would poverty be as such?
The reason that a white child is statistically more likely to not go to jail for a drug related offense is because, statistically, they come from a better home environment and the parents take responsibility for the child. If the parent is out working 3 jobs and there’s no father figure in the picture, the child is left to do as they please. They are free to partake in the criminal activity again. I do not see the flaw in the logic here. If it were statistically the other way around, I would still not see any problem with the logic.
You have got to stop blaming the situation and start realizing that personal responsibility is a necessary provision of freedom and all men, and women, will be held accountable to that.
Furthermore, the assumption and blatant defacing assertion that all republicans are simply black hating racists that are perpetually trying to keep the black man down is offensive and sickening. You should be ashamed of yourself. With your educational level, you should know better than to think that way.
This entire article is a blatant attack on White America. You are a sad excuse for an American and I cannot believe that I have just read this filth.
If you’ve been labeled a felon, you have GIVEN UP your rights. No one FORCED you to do something. The proverbial or actual holding a gun to someones head is also no excuse. Principals are higher than any criminal could understand and the spineless giving into threats is no excuse. Any injury that comes of a refusal to give into a threat is not the fault of the threatened, but that of the one issuing and carrying out the threat.
Maybe you should look at other causes – entitlement programs, medicare, social security, and the like – rather than just looking at something and seeing what you want to see. There was no direct correlation with any facts that you presented other than crime results in incarceration and loss of rights. The disparity that you have noted in black verses white neighborhoods is not what you see. It is impoverished versus middle and upper class neighborhoods. The parallel disparity of blacks in poverty versus whites in poverty is a direct result of dependency on the government stemming back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Please, wake up and smell reality. Stop trying to start a race war like Brown’s Revolt. Don’t give credence to the bigots and racists who believe that blacks and whites cannot live together in peace. Please work to fix problems in society instead of putting a “racism” sticker on everything you see.