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.
From the very beginning, there were consistencies and inconsistencies in Ashley Todd's narrative about the alleged attack she suffered. The inconsistencies were within the story itself (the reverse "B" most obviously). The consistencies were with a long, long history of lies about blacks that are inescapably linked with racism in all its forms, from slavery, through segregation, through the "colorblind" racism of the present day. Both leaped out at me as the story exploded. Among the consistencies were the 4,742 identified lynchings from 1882 to 1964, for which the breakdown of "causes" reads:
"Cause"
Number
Percent
Homicides
1,937
40.84
Felonious Assault
205
4.32
Rape
912
19.22
Attempted Rape
288
6.07
Robbery and Theft
232
4.89
Insult to White Person
85
1.79
All Other Causes
1,084
22.85
Total
4,743
100.00
Speaking of "Insult to White Person," although not strictly a "lynching" per se, I thought as well about Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy murdered for whistling at a white woman. You see, the history of lynching is a history of terrorism, a history of collective punishment and mass intimidation. One black does something, however trivial-or is alleged to-and some black, any black, must pay, without all that "due process" stuff that's reserved for white people.
This, quite naturally, puts the entire black community at risk. Which is, of course, the underlying point. A point that's very much alive today, as revealed in a blog post from Fox Executive Vice President Joe Moody, titled, with unintended irony, "Moment of Truth":
If Ms. Todd's allegations are proven accurate, some voters may revisit their support for Senator Obama, not because they are racists (with due respect to Rep. John Murtha), but because they suddenly feel they do not know enough about the Democratic nominee.
Revisit their support for Obama not because they are racists? Why then? What exactly is it, Joe, that connects a blackety-black man who attacks a white female McCain volunteer with support or lack of it for the Senator?
It's not just racism is a generic sense, but the specific tradition of racial terrorism that's being invoked here. Any black at any time can be singled out for any reason, even if he's on the verge of being elected President of the United States.
STATE BLOGS
