admin
Dear Editor,
It’s a time of contagion in our nation. We’re willing to provide literally trillions to address this thing which came over us like a tidal wave in just the last few months, with absolutely no guarantee of success from our investment.
But what about the contagion that’s been with us for over 400 years? Are we willing to provide a commensurate amount of effort and money to address the moral, physical and mental health of all of us?
African Americans were first brought here 400 years ago, torn from their homes and enslaved, for our forefathers’ economic benefit.
We might say: “How does that apply to me; I wasn’t here 400 years ago.”
The problem with that is that our nation, our economy and our culture has been built on what our forefathers and those they enslaved created, the system they set up or were imprisoned as unpaid labor within.
We might say: “I probably had ancestors who were enslaved at some point in history, what does it matter?”
The problem is we don’t have a pigment which labels and stigmatizes us and we weren’t dropped into a culture which not only engendered and embraced our ancestor’s enslavement, diminishment, or worse; but to the present day either actively engenders or passively accepts the institutional, ongoing enculturation of their inequality.
We might say: “But they’ve been free since 1865, why don’t they move on!”
There are a number of reasons.
We tolerated or embraced, both within our states and nationally; organizations and individuals who systematically demeaned, debased, lynched, and otherwise murdered and defiled African Americans at least up through the 1960s.
We created laws which systemically segregated and minimized funding for their schools till 1954.
We have created laws and encouraged or tolerated policies and procedures which encouraged their poverty and segregation and thus minimized their employability, their education, and their opportunity to embrace the American Dream up to the present.
We’ve created state laws and local policies and procedures throughout the years which limit African American access and opportunity to vote as citizens to potentially improve their opportunities and when national laws were created to prohibit these discriminatory laws, policies and procedures. In recent years we’ve allowed these reforms to be wiped from the books.
Our leaders and our law enforcement implicitly, if not overtly realize that due to these 400 years of mistreatment, there is an overwhelming anger, frustration, and hopelessness among many, if not most African Americans.
And many of us, particularly in the law enforcement community tragically and ironically put that so understandable anger, frustration, and hopelessness down to African Americans “natural inclination” toward incivility and violence thus reinforcing our inherent, systemic racism.
Jim Martin
Perryville
