40 Acres and a Mule

I am not a racist. I grew up around a diverse group because my family moved a few times. I had white friends in the white neighborhood at the predominantly white school. Later on in life I had black friends in the projects and the all black school. (1 white student) I have been around the block in the racially integrated category. Two hitches: In the white neighborhood, the guy that lived behind us hated black people. He had three kids. The first day I asked if I could play with them he screamed NO and took his children in the house. I was devastated. In the black neighborhood I was surrounded by people who were intimidated by scholarship and an intact middle class family. Somebody from down that way stole my bike too. I was devastated. Of course everyone is a little partial to their own race but I laid that stuff out there to say that people of all colors give you problems.

Now that I have laid all of that out I have a very large issue. Regardless of how things are now, or how far we have come in society, there is a debt that has never been paid to black people for some of the things that have happened in this country. There might be an argument if I based that statement solely on the whole slavery deal, but that’s the worst thing; not the only thing.

Seriously, aside from the generations of being property, finding our way once “set free”, continuously pressing on to be able to vote and use facilities, and the discrimination of today there are still other events that further depress the soul. If you start thinking about stuff like the Tuskeegee Experiment where they purposefully infected black men with syphilis and falsified a treatment regimen to see what would happen, it sounds almost unbelievable. It took Bill Clinton to apologize for that one. And now we find that several states were practicing eugenics up until 1980. What’s that? That is where somebody decides to purify a people and they begin to sterilize the people they don’t like so they will not reproduce from that same gene pool. Of course that was done to black people too.

For a long time I felt like the whole reparation argument was getting tired. The people who called for it always seemed to be on dark side of logic. Of course they were portrayed as crazy black folk who couldn’t let go of the past. Now I realize that we didn’t even know what the past was. So not only were we the slaves ripped from another land, separated from families there and here, marginalized in the rights department, but we were also test subjects for untreated curable diseases and sterilized so we couldn’t “make” anymore. The sad part about it is, we haven’t even gotten to the present day statistics and plight of black people here in the U.S. Sure we have a black president, but is that supposed to erase the other stuff. Black people as a whole didn’t make it to the top, he did. 

I guess we could stand on the improvements in race relations and the new opportunities that are out here now. We could lift up educational accomplishments and shattered athletic ceilings. The problem with that is it doesn’t realize or recognize the past. The problem with that is the past does all of the recognizing.

One of the biggest problems facing blacks is the need to start from financial scratch at the start of every generation. See while we had that other stuff going on like slavery and civil rights and eugenics, the other party was amassing wealth and began to pass it down. We are talking about wealth on a generational level. The world is different when your great grandfather began passing down stuff that far ahead of your time. Matter of fact, it’s a difference if your parents can leave assets. If you start from a more fortunate place, your ability to reach higher is already bolstered by the height of your start. If you start from a place of nothing, the opportunities are possible but the odds are still stacked. Studies have already revealed this to anyone paying attention.

Blah, blah, blah…don’t want to get too far off of the subject so let me say this. If you owe someone a million dollars for keeping him in jail for 2o years mistakenly, then what do you owe to an entire people for (skip slavery) giving them diseases and destroying their reproduction? But if you let the politicians say it, they will never apologize for America.

Would be nice to get that 40 acres and a mule, but I don’t believe it’s going to happen. The truth about it is, there is no way to look for restitution when you are not even sure of what all has happened.