05.09.19 The Case For ADOS: A Case Study: Lab Rats, Public Projects and The Secret of NIMH (Part Four)
This article returns to the heart of the matter, why American Descendants Of Slavery (ADOS) demand a justice claim of reparations.
This demand extends more broadly beyond the so-called “long ago” institutions of slavery and Jim Crow rigid racist segregation, and into actions and political activity that continued and often aggravated the ongoing realities of injury and plunder of America’s forced migrants into permanent servitude and treatment as property.
THIS LATEST EXPLORATION
This part is a story of insult upon injury, an existing injury of ADOS locked out of access and first-class citizenship via the government-supported denial of home loans to Black Americans throughout the country. A locking out supported by the extralegal racist efforts of whites using “restrictive covenants” to bombings, all in the name of maintaining a strict racial segregation. A locking out that not only stunted opportunity for striving working-class ADOS citizens, but added additional compounded struggle for the ADOS poor.
For those ADOS who were too poor to be exploited by plunderous contract leasing, public housing was a last option of viable resort.
The devastating aftermath of dismantling of housing projects is another marker for The Case For ADOS and a rightful claim of reparations.
There has either been a durable inability, or unwillingness, to confront the problems of ADOS who have been hurt by racism and racist policy. Continued misinterpretations happen as ADOS make charges of “anti-Black racism” against the people and structure that limit our possibility. Americans are conditioned to believe that racism is a negative, and overtly violent, response from an evil individual or group, evoking the issue of the violent racist white terrorist as the only form of harmful racism there is.
What I speak of is an inherent violence, one not always or overtly physical — violence of policy, violence of place, violence of options, violence of limited movement, violence of the very bodies of ADOS which makes this fixed race-caste state of people a target for, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has described in multiple works, plunder.
We have majority ADOS communities that are marginalized, communities of, as Coates describes, “of isolation of the injured and the robbed,” places where the failure is forced and the robbers are allowed, by government policy mind you, to do as they will while the people, ADOS, are left to suffer what they must. The combination of concentrated generational poverty along with the melanin markers of the “skin you’re in” make for catastrophic consequences.
Populations of Black Americans, ADOS, the second wave of The Great Migration, refugees in Northern cities, seeking equal protection under the law, continued to be a form of chattel, in this case a form of human livestock management via public housing. These actions of policy, whether accidental or intentional, carried out by a managerial class of bureaucrats and architects and contractors and housing authorities, whether it was mendacity, incompetence or some blend of both, did provable harm.
The condition of ADOS is no unexplainable phenomena. The appearances of neighborhoods in collapse is no result of an inferior, pathological culture. What people observe in the present is the result of centuries of targeted plunder. Certainly not just enslavement and Jim Crow. Of wealth. Of bodies. Of people’s very lives, with most of this time not possessing the comforts of equal protection under the law.
Now that the total lack of sanctuary has eased to one of lack of relative sanctuary for ADOS, there are too many in America that consider the racial slate wiped clean. However, as compounding interest can generate great wealth over time, there are catastrophic opposite effects via compounded debt via failure. Racism is reified.
Coates: “Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.” As life plays out and hindsight makes for 20/20 vision, we better understand this is not the case.
HOW WE GOT HERE, PROBLEMS WITH POLICY
The Housing Act of 1949 was a comprehensive expansion of the federal role in the construction of public housing as well as an increase in the government’s involvement in mortgages and insurance. In a segregated America and especially segregated urban cities, site selection for public housing was explicitly segregated.
The main elements of the Act included (The first four of them are the ones most relevant to ADOS):
- federal financing for slum clearance programs associated with urban renewal projects in American cities (Title I)
- increased authorization for the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance (Title II)
- extension of federal money to build more than 800,000 public housing units (Title III)
- funding for research on housing and building techniques (Title IV)
All of these were asymmetric against and to the outcomes of ADOS, but especially Titles II and IV to the limiting of Black wealth. Black people were not only made a contagion to wealth via government policy, but the costs of being ADOS was playing a rigged game of higher prices and fees because, America.
For all of the Black American…American, “success stories,” that is, the ADOS imperative, a damned-near necessity, to engage in superhuman activity to only reap a fraction of the benefits of citizenship, so many thousands fell between the cracks. What happened to them?
Lab Rats, Public Projects and The Secret of NIMH
Preface: I want you to hear me clearly on this. To those who will read this, I am not making value judgments on people. What I share are the results of research and history and my analysis and counter-arguments on what to do in its aftermath.
The Secret of NIMH is an animated fantasy adventure film from 1982, based on a 1971 children’s novel, “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.” It was a film that had a little commercial success, $14.7 million. The animated film and the book were fiction based upon real research from a 1950s well-known scientist, John B. Calhoun, who tested laboratory rats at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and his research has been used as racist urban strategy to have ADOS, through a “throwing stones but hiding your hands” strategy, exterminate each other into political irrelevance and extinction.
Calhoun’s research is available via an Internet search. His work with mice (and similar results were observed with rats) were based on social behavior and urban density. Here is Dr. Calhoun’s wiki entry to give you a start on his work. Let me also say this: I do not believe that Calhoun intended his research for ill purposes in Black communities, but his research was used by federal, state and local governmental organizations for that purpose. Calhoun placed rats in an enclosed area representing a high-density urban community, allowed them to reproduce and remain in that area for generations and observed the results, to see how the society would advance over time.
From Wikipedia:
Initially the population grew rapidly, doubling every 55 days. The population reached 620 by day 315, after which the population growth dropped markedly, doubling only every 145 days. The last surviving birth was on day 600, bringing the total population to a mere 2200 mice, even though the experiment setup allowed for as many as 3840 mice in terms of nesting space. This period between day 315 and day 600 saw a breakdown in social structure and in normal social behavior. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, increase in homosexual behavior, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves — all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed “the beautiful ones.” Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.
The conclusions drawn from this experiment were that when all available space is taken and all social roles filled, competition and the stresses experienced by the individuals will result in a total breakdown in complex social behaviors, ultimately resulting in the demise of the population.
If you put a population of rats or mice into a closed, stacked environment and let them only interact with each other, after generations and over time you will family breakdown, turf violence, the inability for males and females to court, couple and reproduce, and men becoming ever more self-absorbed and going their own way. This well received research was taken by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)…and there were results that came from these findings.
At 52 seconds, the brother said that “the experiment had gone terribly awry.” I would offer that it went the way some implementers had believed that it would go. The high rises, and housing projects in general, were an experiment. In this case, a social experiment. Again, I do not believe Calhoun intended for rat research to be used against Black people, but just as the FHA policy, “white covenants” and occasional acts of terrorism kept Black people out of the suburbs until the late 1960s to early 1970s, this social experiment has had lasting, devastating effects upon millions of Black Americans and have done incredible amounts of harm.
How many Black people have died? How many people have suffered a lifetime of marginalization through life in these housing projects and the social problems that cling to poor ADOS, cementing an under-caste status? How have people’s lives, over generations of people, been damaged because of the quality and value of life declines that have resulted from housing projects and the legion of social problems that sticks to them? Above and beyond the real injury epigenetically encoded into our DNA through our ancestors’ suffering through slavery, you have millions of people right now who have a direct case for reparations as a result of direct government policy that occurred over the last 75 years.
THE TAKEAWAY
It is a result. Those ADOS with lack, with deprivation, branded with a so-called pathological culture, are a result. A direct result of a lack of sanctuary, of theft, of marginalization and all of the maladaptations that can develop from such. You place these subjects in an environment that lacks jobs, is underfunded, disincentives exist to encourage keeping families together, in an environment where extralegal activity springs up in environments of a lack of both wealth and income — people aren’t just going to let themselves starve.
The American rhetoric of “bad culture” and “poor values” from media pundits, so readily consumed by Americans who look at the state of the world as if it started yesterday and wish to believe those narratives as unassailable truths, is worthless talk in a country whose economic rise came off the backs of the torture of enslaved fathers, the forcible violation of enslaved mothers’ bodies and trafficking and sale of enslaved children as any other commodity for market and trade.
This American federal government, ostensibly one of “We The People,” created the racial wealth gap, but not only that, the human livestock management experiments conducted upon ADOS through underfunded urban housing policy and the unwillingness to address the effects of damage and plunder then created a compounded injury that has done a near-incalculable damage to ADOS. A tangible damage that is present whether one wants to start with raw loss-of-life body counts due to internecine violence, incarceration, the effects of extralegal economy needing to exist in the face of a lack of work and family stability, all buttressed by a lingering, persistent racist reality and willingness to keep ADOS a permanent racial under-caste.
Michael Ford, ADOS architect and owner of BrandNu Design in Madison, Wisconsin, asserts “Violence in the black community, undoubtedly, is the result of careful architectural planning and social conditioning, not a consequence of “cultural behaviors” of black people.”
Ford’s research, “Hip Hop Inspired Architecture and Design,” has created some key value and critical analysis of the social, political, physical and economic racism and indeed, violence on ADOS, no better articulated than through arguably the greatest hip hop song of all time, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five’s “The Message.”
In just the first verse, the effects of urban renewal (aka “negro removal,”) rat experimentation transferred as human livestock management and the spillover effects of predatory loan practices and the calcified imposition of ADOS as a permanent racial under-caste come in play:
BROKEN GLASS EVERYWHERE
PEOPLE PISSIN’ ON THE STAIRS, YOU KNOW THEY JUST DON’T CARE
I CAN’T TAKE THE SMELL, CAN’T TAKE THE NOISE
GOT NO MONEY TO MOVE OUT, I GUESS I GOT NO CHOICE
RATS IN THE FRONT ROOM, ROACHES IN THE BACK
JUNKIES IN THE ALLEY WITH A BASEBALL BAT
I TRIED TO GET AWAY BUT I COULDN’T GET FAR
CAUSE A MAN WITH A TOW TRUCK REPOSSESSED MY CAR
DON’T PUSH ME
CAUSE I’M CLOSE TO THE EDGE
I’M TRYING NOT TO LOSE MY HEAD
IT’S LIKE A JUNGLE SOMETIMES THAT MAKES ME WONDER
HOW I KEEP FROM GOING UNDER
Calhoun found that overcrowding and poor design triggered what he coined as “behavioral sink,” and the full extent of such damage certainly must be added to the calculus of any righteous ADOS demand for restorative justice, reparations.
This claim is more than a demand for equity. This is a demand for redress for crimes against ADOS communities. After four centuries, it is beyond time for these crimes to be called crimes, it is beyond time these actions are judged as unacceptable by society, and most importantly, beyond any acknowledgment or apology, restitution for said crimes for the injuries wrought.
America is a nation with an “inability to face up to the particular history of white-imposed (B)lack disadvantage,” all in the face of a country built on the 400-years and counting preferential treatment of white Americans.
This is no small or simple ask. This is a demand of a nation that in its arrogance, chooses to engage in “patriotism à la carte,” as opposed to the arduous, painful journey confronting the totality of its heritage, flaws and all.
Explore it we must. ADOS, through this ADOS justice movement, assert that reparations must be a sovereign effort of the United States to provide a remunerative payment and multi-generational restoration to the descendants of individuals and ADOS-owned and -led institutions previously denied throughout American history to our ancestors. However in this age of extreme political chaos and uncertainty, an opportunity for this nation to evolve to the ideals conceived by the framers of this nation has appeared. A nation created by flawed, fallible humans who have a chance to become less-flawed, fallible humans in the name of striving for A More Perfect Union.
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I thank all contributors who have provided support along the way. I continue to be committed in the engagement of this critical work for a righteous justice claim. Any and all contributions to help me research and write future pieces are humbly appreciated. You can donate here: Pay Michael R Hicks using PayPal.Me.
