I turn 60 this year in September. Six decades since I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1956 to two transplanted South Dakotans. I guess that qualifies me for old white guy status. Although I’ve interacted with various black people — as a young child, in various workplaces, as roommates during my undergraduate years in college, and as classmates and friends when I attended Law school —I freely confess I am fundamentally ignorant of the concerns of the African American community. I am certainly not qualified to speak about matters that concern that community.
Recently many other posters, however, have written about that community, and many of them have been white. There have been a lot of posts about African American voters and for whom who they should or should not vote in the Democratic primary. One rec list post highlights the criticism of African American columnist Charles Blow who takes offense at what he claims are the frequently condescending and paternalistic tone of white Sanders’ supporters regarding Black support for Clinton. I’ve seen other diaries highlighting various endorsements by prominent African-Americans, politicians, writers, activists and others for both candidates.
One thing I haven’t seen much from anyone is a discussion of the issues that matter to the Black community. Now I’ll confess I don’t read every blog post/diary here and so undoubtedly I’ve missed many that indeed did go into detail about those issues. Maybe I’ve even missed a rec list post or two that addressed this topic. But what I have seen far more often is a rec list dominated by partisan posts in support of one candidate or another, and lots of nastiness in the comments sections between the supporters of Sanders and Clinton, which are, to quote Shakespeare, “full of sound and fury.” Whether those discussions signify anything more than that, I leave for you to judge.
As I said, I’m not qualified to discuss the issues and concerns of African Americans. I can only guess at what matters to that community. But I know enough to know, as a white person (my “heritage” is mostly German/English/Scottish Irish), what I don’t know. So, instead of offering you my thoughts on the concerns of Black Americans, allow me to present you to you the words I’ve heard or read spoken and/or written by African Americans themselves. Specifically, I would like to present to you three issues that many African American writers, scholars, activists and community leaders have identified as significant concerns. Here they are, in no particular order,
Fear of the Police
One major issue I’ve heard a great deal about, and I imagine many of my fellow white kossacks have as well since Markos first hired Shaun King last year to write about this subject (if not before), is the issue of excessive, often murderous force used by the police against black people, and the systemic and often overt racism regarding how law enforcement treats black Americans compared to whites. In the words of Ta-Nehesi Coates, who has written eloquently on this very issue:
This weekend, after a Chicago police officer killed her 19-year-old son Quintonio LeGrier, Janet Cooksey struggled to understand the mentality of the people she pays to keep her community safe:
“What happened to Tasers? Seven times my son was shot,” Cooksey said.
“The police are supposed to serve and protect us and yet they take the lives,” Cooksey said.
“Where do we get our help?” she asked.
[...]
When Cooksey says that her son’s father should not have called the police, when she says that they “are supposed to serve and protect us and yet they take the lives,” she is saying that police in Chicago are police in name only. This opinion is widely shared. Asked about the possibility of an investigation, Melvin Jones, the brother of Bettie Jones, could muster no confidence. “I already know how that will turn out,” he scoffed. “We all know how that will turn out.”
Indeed, we probably do. Two days after Jones and LeGrier were killed, a district attorney in Ohio declined to prosecute the two officers who drove up, and within two seconds of arriving, killed the 12-year-old Tamir Rice. No one should be surprised by this.
I’ve never once feared for my life at the hands of the police. In fact, the police probably saved my life at the age of 24 after three white thugs with long criminal records decided to beat the shit out of me because I rear ended their van. I’ve had a few other experiences with the cops regarding times when personal property of my wife and I was stolen, and of course, various traffic incidents. At no time did I ever think that calling the cops to help me out was a dangerous thing to do. I have no idea how that feels. I can try to compare times I felt in fear for my life to how so many black people feel every day of their lives regarding the risk of run-ins with law enforcement, but the truth is that the feelings I’ve had on a few occasions in my life do not compare tom the constant anxiety and fear that many in predominantly African American communities feel. Perhaps, some white people, immigrants from totalitarian regimes, for example can relate to living in what is essentially an occupied territory, but I sure cannot.
Other African Americans who have written or spoken about about the racist and often fatal treatment of African Americans by the police include without limitation, activist Deray McKesson, NYT columnist Charles Blow, the aforementioned Shaun King. There are also many, many black people on this site, however who have written over the years about this specific problem, including Denise Oliver Velez, Egberto Willies, JoanMar, Frank Vyan Walton, and many many others to whom I apologize for not listing here. I highly recommend all of them to you.
The Prison Industrial Complex, the War on Drugs and Incarceration
African Americans are imprisoned in America far out of proportion to their numbers in the general population [Source: NAACP]. As of 2009, over 1.4 million people of color [i.e., African American and/or Hispanic] were incarcerated in Federal, state and local prisons and jails compared to roughly 900,000 non-Hispanic whites. African American males alone accounted for an estimated 841,000 prisoners or about 40% of all inmates [Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics Midyear 2009 - see Table 17]. According to the people I have read, this was no mere accident, but was a calculated political decision by a supposedly great American President.
As Michelle Alexander, a civil-rights advocate, lawyer, legal scholar and professor, writes:
Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control. It is the process by which people are swept into the criminal justice system, branded criminals and felons, locked up for longer periods of time than most other countries in the world who incarcerate people who have been convicted of crimes, and then released into a permanent second-class status in which they are stripped of basic civil and human rights, like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to public benefits.
At the time President Reagan declared his war on drugs in 1982, drug crime was on the decline. It was not on the rise, and less than 3 percent of the American population identified drugs as the nation’s most pressing concern.
So why would he declare an all-out war on drugs at a time when drug crime is actually declining, not on the rise, and the American public isn’t much concerned about it? Well, from the outset, the war on drugs had much less to do with … concern about drug abuse and drug addiction and much more to do with politics, including racial politics.
President Ronald Reagan wanted to make good on campaign promises to get tough on that group of folks who had already been defined in the media as black and brown, the criminals, and he made good on that promise by declaring a drug war. Almost immediately after his declaration of war, funds for law enforcement began to soar.
The effect of that policy decision, one that has continued to be supported to a greater or lesser degree by every presidential administration that followed Reagan, has, by all accounts, had devastating effects on on the lives of millions of black men and women and their families. Again, I turn to Ta-Nehisi Coates for the problems these racist policies created for black people in America:
“Prison is no longer a rare or extreme event among our nation’s most marginalized groups,” Devah Pager, a sociologist at Harvard, has written. “Rather it has now become a normal and anticipated marker in the transition to adulthood.”
The emergence of the carceral state has had far-reaching consequences for the economic viability of black families. Employment and poverty statistics traditionally omit the incarcerated from the official numbers. When Western recalculated the jobless rates for the year 2000 to include incarcerated young black men, he found that joblessness among all young black men went from 24 to 32 percent; among those who never went to college, it went from 30 to 42 percent. The upshot is stark. Even in the booming ’90s, when nearly every American demographic group improved its economic position, black men were left out. The illusion of wage and employment progress among African American males was made possible only through the erasure of the most vulnerable among them from the official statistics.
These consequences for black men have radiated out to their families. By 2000, more than 1 million black children had a father in jail or prison—and roughly half of those fathers were living in the same household as their kids when they were locked up. Paternal incarceration is associated with behavior problems and delinquency, especially among boys. [...]
Last winter, I visited Detroit to take the measure of the Gray Wastes. Michigan, with an incarceration rate of 628 people per 100,000, is about average for an American state. I drove to the East Side to talk with a woman I’ll call Tonya, who had done 18 years for murder and a gun charge and had been released five months earlier. She had an energetic smile and an edge to her voice that evidenced the time she’d spent locked up. Violence, for her, commenced not in the streets, but at home. “There was abuse in my grandmother’s home, and I went to school and I told my teacher,” she explained. “I had a spot on my nose because I had a lit cigarette stuck on my nose, and when I told her, they sent me to a temporary foster-care home … The foster parent was also abusive, so I just ran away from her and just stayed on the streets.”
I urge you to read the entire article by Coates, as copyright law preclude me from further excerpts. It’s absolutely heartbreaking stuff.
Again, I merely note that I’ve never feared much for my children or their white suburban friends being sent to prison for drug offenses. This is true even though (according to both my son and daughter) drug use and drug dealing was rampant at their high school, one which is very well respected in large part for the academic achievements of its students, its high graduation rate and the large number of graduates who pursue some form of higher education. Again, I can’t imagine what black families go through on a daily basis, particularly poor black families stuck in run down neighborhoods of our inner cities with crumbling, unsafe, underfunded schools and little hope that anything or anyone will ever change their fate.
Suppression of the Right to Vote
This is actually a topic of which I have some passing familiarity thanks to my work for Election Protection in the city of Cleveland, Ohio on Election day, 2004. Specifically, I worked at the Election protection field headquarters near downtown Cleveland:
I'd chosen to volunteer for EP in Cleveland because it was closer to my home. It would prove to be a fateful decision.
By luck of the draw, I was asked to stay at the local field headquarters and field calls from our non-legal volunteers out at the polling places, and brainstorm solutions for any problems they encountered. I also documented the complaints and reports of voting irregularities, as well as communicating what they told us with the EP staff so that they could coordinate strategy . I also passed along requests for more voting machines the local Board of Elections ( which proved to be a futile exercise) and tracked down a Temporary Restraining Order which the DNC had obtained against the RNC prohibiting Republicans stationed at the polling places from challenging a person's right to vote based on lists that the RNC had unlawfully prepared. Handouts of that TRO were passed to every volunteer, as well as my explanation as to what it required of election officials (distribution of these copies proved to be needed because a number of officials had posted these lists at their precincts in the mistaken belief that they could lawfully be used to challenge Democratic voters). [...]
[I saw or heard from my fellow volunteers on that day about] the long lines, the broken machines, the refusal of the [Cuyahoga County Board of Elections] to respond, outrageous election challenges by GOP operatives, cars with bullhorns cruising minority neighborhoods warning people that police would arrest people who owed past due child care or parking tickets, names purged from voting rolls, last minute changes to polling places, refusals to hand our provisional ballots, violations of court orders prohibiting the use of GOP generated lists to deny the vote to legitimate residents, the banning of election monitors, the lockdown of some precincts while the vote was being counted, ballots being transported in unsealed containers by GOP part officials to where they were to be counted, etc. etc. etc. We took numerous affidavits of people regarding these and other abuses, argued with election official (sometimes successful, sometimes not) to stop unlawful practices such as requiring photo id for Spanish speaking and/or Hispanic looking voters, and documenting as well as we could the "atrocities." [...]
I finally get what the poor [African American] people in the Cincinnati projects I canvassed for Kerry were trying to tell me with their weary postures, rueful grins and knowing looks. We don't have a democracy. At least not the kind where each vote counts the same as every other one. What we have is a broken electoral process. No, more than just broken, our elections have been corrupted. They are a sham and a mockery, and its past time to be talking about that fact if we ever want to return a modicum sanity, honesty and common sense to our politics.
Now voter suppression is not directed solely at African Americans, but they are certainly one of the groups that have been heavily targeted in this year’s election across the country. On this one I’ll let the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, leader of the Moral Mondays campaign in North Carolina do the talking from this video entitled “The Call to be Positioned as Powerful Prisoners of Prophetic Hope:”
Are these the only issues that concern the African American community? I’d be a fool to say they are. I don’t even know which of these three issues I’ve highlighted for you is of greater importance among African American voters than the other two.
But I hope the Clinton and Sanders campaigns have done their homework. I hope they aren’t spending all of their money on polling and messaging. I hope they’ve taken the time to listen to the people whose votes they are courting.
I hope they aren’t just paying lip service to those voices and telling them what they want to hear. I sure as hell hope they aren’t taking their votes for granted. Democrats must have a platform and an agenda that addresses the real concerns of Black Americans, one that speaks to their needs. Because the simple truth of the matter is that without their votes in large numbers come November, Democrats will lose the election, and our next President might very well be Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or someone just as worse. And that would be a catastrophe for the country.