06.26.2019 The Case For ADOS: Deal With the Data Before The Data Deals With You! (Part Five)
This series is an ongoing journey. A narrative that articulates the necessity of why reparations for the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) are critical.
Part One was an introduction and a defense from lies and smears against our young and developing movement. Part Two was an explanation of what these ADOS efforts are for, as well as an explainer to counter reductionist dismissals. Part Three was the lead-in regarding our operating principles and community outreach and development strategy via Agile Activism. Part Four introduced a case study revealing tangible, catastrophic damage to ADOS via social engineering and targeted public policy.
With this edition, this will articulate why the socioeconomic imperative for why reparations are critical, and also that fence-sitting nor gatekeeping this issue can no longer be acceptable.
For the future of ADOS the people, victory on this issue is not an option. Hence the title of the article, pulled from a statement made by a fellow soldier, “Reggie from Boston” from co-founder Yvette Carnell’s bi-weekly call-in show. Deal with the data, before the data deals with you.
THE SOCIOECONOMIC IMPERATIVE FOR ADOS
Those that already on board with the ADOS political message has a working knowledge of the socioeconomic data, but there are many more who still do not.
The United States, and primarily its governments through the main group of peoples that are the primarily influencers of how the governments will run, have historically and overwhelming been those run by white men.
It is these governments of white men who stunted ADOS cries for justice, who plotted behind closed doors to subvert and silence those voices who called for restoration. A group of ostensible human beings who punished this forced under-caste, through statutorily legal but patently immoral means. Through a continual disregard of the façade of morality, through the application of terrorist extralegal methods of suppression.
The necessity of reparations is a counteractive measure to The American Stain, not only from the looting of ADOS wealth, but through the creation of laws that literally incentivized racist segregation and made ADOS a literal contagion to wealth.
Imagine that. The very presence of an ADOS family moving on a block, much less a group of families, dropped the value of property. A position that asserted that Black folk get less because they were, we are, less. Poisonous industrial and chemical plants are allowed to be disproportionately built in proximity to ADOS communities of human beings, further calcifying the status of a people as a permanent, intractable under-caste.
So what does that mean for ADOS in 2019? With a presidential election that is 16 months away? Let us look at some numbers.
WHAT DOES THE DATA MEAN?
Many people have a hard time understanding the difference between wealth and income. These terms have wrongfully become synonymous in American culture. There is, some symbiosis between the two, but the amount and level of such relationships are profoundly affected by race and the history of ADOS in America.
Simply put, wealth is what you own versus what you owe. “Wealth” refers to the stock of assets held by a person or household at a single point in time. These assets may include financial holdings and savings, but also include the family home. “Income” refers to money received by a person or household over some period of time. Income includes wages, salaries, and cash assistance from the government.
It is this conflation (misunderstanding terms or ideas) that leads to confusion.
On top of that, humans have a tendency to look at an individual situation, more often than not their own or some one that they know, and understand that as some kind of universal belief that everyone should abide by. Whether you are a regular reader, or if this is your first piece that you have read from me, understand that this will be an ongoing theme:
The plural of anecdote is NOT data.
Even if you, the individual reader who happens to be ADOS and earn a respectable income and happen to live in a majority ADOS neighborhood, what does it profit you to be well-off when you have a community of people around you, entire blocks on blocks that are not? What does it profit you to be well when much of your family is not, and turn to you as a means of support?
ADOS, as a collective group of American citizens with a righteous justice claim, can no longer afford to do this in America. The response for ADOS has to be collective and America’s racial wealth gap must be wiped out via direct justice to the ADOS population via reparations.
Let’s look at some infographics and sketch out this ADOS American Epic.
Think about the images that you have just reviewed as I sketch the picture of what this means for most of ADOS. This reveals that contrary to what you watch at the BETAwards, ADOS nearly have no wealth.
When $350,000 of net worth vaults a family into the top five percent of ADOS, that is a population of people that lacks wealth. When over half of white American families (42 million out of 83+ million households) are in the “Average” category of wealth, and over 13 million of these families have a net worth of $1.2 million or more (and less than 340,000 out of 20 million Black families do, by comparison, you are a witness that America’s so-called “racial wealth gap” is more like a racial wealth abyss.
The data is going to deal with ADOS as we are experiencing, in real time, the problems of being priced out of the ability to live in American cities. The United States, through strategies of urban planning, have chosen to prioritize the rehabilitation of spaces over addressing the rehabilitation of people.
Strategies to “revitalize” blighted neighborhoods only means to raze the crumbling properties owned, but more often occupied, by ADOS, build new structures with the goal of attracting more Americans, overwhelmingly white, who possess the wealth that the overwhelmingly majority of ADOS have been systematically denied.
Former ADOS residents of these communities are being gentrified into refugees, with a dearth of affordable housing that is proportional to their incomes. When you are priced out of the ability to afford rent, the lure of extralegal vice becomes stronger, the demand to engage in superhuman activity strictly for the purpose of survival happens more frequently, and more people wind up homeless, even those who are employed.
This is not alarmist talk. This is not speculative rumor. This is happening across the entirety of this nation.
Let me provide you an anecdotal example (not data! but including vital data that helps explain a necessary qualitative story) in my home city of Louisville, Kentucky.
Louisville has undergone a number of “neighborhood revitalizations” over the last twelve years. These forms of urban renewal has razed old projects and replaced them with variable “mixed-use” housing with variable and varying levels of “success,” and this is what is a problem.
It is a problem in what American cities and their mayors or city managers see as “success.” Success in perception, public relations or even the redevelopment of physical areas of neighborhoods have not translated into greater success for ADOS—as a matter of fact, it is a devolution. Conversations with and presentations from my colleague and comrade Joshua Poe helped me to better understand this incoming threat.
THE GROWING HOUSING CRISIS (A Louisville Case Study)
Louisville has a problem of eviction rates. Currently, it is double the national average. The 2019 Louisville Housing Needs Assessment recommends constructing 31,412 units at 30 percent of Area Median Income, referred to as AMI.
AMI is the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) designation for income limits. It comes from the 1937 Housing Act because private developers did not want to compete with public housing.
AMI is different from median household income in this: median household income is a mathematical calculation of the median of Louisville household incomes, while AMI adjusts each household’s income based on the number of people in the household as well as local housing cost factors. AMI is pegged as the median income for a family of four and is used as a measurement tool to, among other goals, “set income restrictions for assisted affordable housing units.”
In Louisville:
- Louisville AMI is $71,500
- Louisville Median Household Income is $50,099
- 30% AMI (as explained above) is $21,450
- 50% AMI is $35,750
- 80% AMI is $57,200
There is a need to build over 30,000 new units at prices people whose incomes in the 30% AMI bracket can afford in Louisville, but nearly all of the rental properties being built in these neighborhood redevelopments are for 80% AMI…and up.
In existing West Louisville (predominantly ADOS) neighborhoods, here is the breakdown of median incomes by census tract:
What does this mean for America’s poor, but particularly and for the self-interest of the American descendants of chattel slavery, is, that ADOS are systematically being priced out of the ability to live in America’s cities.
As new structures are built, the rents for existing structures will rise as well. The difference between $500 a month for rent jumping to $850 or more is significant, especially in this era of “gig economy” work.
As living conditions tighten, tensions fester. The last couple of weeks in Louisville neighborhoods have been especially rough.
NECESSARY TAKEAWAYS
SPEAKING TO ADOS READERS, and those who genuinely seek to be an ally with this developing movement: A critical understanding that you must have, is, despite the propaganda that you are surrounded with in all the forms of media, please absorb this: it is not your fault. An essential key in the transformation of everything that you have understood as “conventional wisdom” to a transformational focus on a collective lineage-based self-interest demands that one releases oneself from the, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has described it, the “assailant’s-eye view of history.”
To understand American history and be able to conceive of a transformational Black politics and agenda for ADOS, know this:
White supremacy does not contradict American democracy — it birthed it, nurtured it, and financed it. That is our heritage. It was reinforced during 250 years of bondage. It was further reinforced during another century of Jim Crow. It was reinforced again when progressives erected an entire welfare state on the basis of black exclusion. It was reinforced again when the intellectual progeny of the same people who excluded black women from welfare turned around and inveighed against it through caricaturization of black women.—Coates
Most Americans, and a significant fraction of ADOS, oppose reparations. Among Democrats, the gap has particularly narrowed, with 34 percent for, 37 percent against and 29 percent not sure in a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll.
An overwhelming majority of these Americans who oppose reparations will assert that they are not racist, but continue a durable unwillingness to address the racial wealth gap, the previously-described “abyss” that grows as whites are compensated by past and present racist policies. Over the next 25 years, $68 trillion will be passed to the descendants of dying Baby Boomers.
Or, as in the troublesome manner Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. described white moderates in his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” there are three alternative positions that these Americans take: 1) A tepid support of modest solutions that barely keep up with the rate of the wealth gap increase; 2) a Social Democrat-ish class-based solution doomed to fail with the poorest ADOS, because there is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that these problems are class and race-based; or 3) a blanket opposition of reparations because they (and frankly, many ADOS, including those who profess to be reparations advocates) have absorbed the racist-to-the-core idea that ADOS will squander the “handouts” and that the cost of reparative justice is too much.
It is a strategy of American politicians, both Democrat and Republican, who treat racial justice as a political calculation instead of a moral one. According to Texas A&M sociology professor Joe Feagin, contemporary white Democratic candidates will pursue policies that will increase racial equality, but only as far as white moderates and conservatives will let them. These politicians weigh what ADOS and other minority groups want versus what white American voters will accept as change in the power balance. White Americans on both the political left and right fear racial equity and America’s demographic changes because of the implicit desire to maintain their present advantages.
The racial wealth gap is not going to go away if we stop talking about it. ADOS being gentrified out of the neighborhoods that they have lived in will not disappear, nor will the increasing numbers of the homeless, despite being employed. ADOS are speeding headlong into economic catastrophe.
When it comes to America’s ADOS problem, the primary political parties continue a nagging spectacle of work avoidance. The Democrats engage in a most begrudging heel-dragging of address, and Republicans stick to their “look at all that we have done for you!” narrative. This is in no way a surprise as we understand American politics, but it is fundamentally and certainly, racist.
When shall the American Descendants of Slavery be compensated and repaired? What shall this nation do to make this right and make us whole? Whatever the final answer, a robust Black politics is in it.
WHY WE MUST FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTEOUS JUSTICE CLAIM AND HOW YOU CAN GET INVOLVED
What about the people who worry about reparations dividing the country? From the standpoint of ADOS, how can we be more divided anymore than we already are? When it comes to reframing one’s thoughts towards an ADOS-focused self-interested politics, know this: There is no question whatsoever that there is a debt owed. The history of harm and plunder exists, is provable and has been proved thousands upon thousands of times over, and these instances of plunder were often sanctioned by governmental law.
ADOS justice through reparations does deserve a national and legislative conversation on how best to implement such a comprehensive program over a period of time and the what the elements of a restorative package will entail. “Go and sin no more” government is not good enough. Given the breadth and depth of America’s racial wealth gap, a non-racial, slow and incrementalist policy is woefully insufficient for the necessary redress to make the collective of our people whole. Malcolm X first said it, it has been repeated many times over and it is as impactful now as it was then: if you stab me with a nine-inch knife, pulling the knife out six inches is no one’s healing. A total removal of the knife does not heal the wound. It is only when there is a targeted effort to remove the knife, heal the wound and make restitution for the stabbing offense can a true healing have the opportunity to take place.
Part of the overarching American problem is an assumption made that nothing good ever comes or could ever come from Black American descendants of slavery. The presumption of inferiority remains a lingering stigma on our lives and persons, and it is a continuing problem that continues to deny Black Americans the very resources necessary to live as Americans in the nation whose wealth was built by the labor and literal bodies of our ancestors.
If you are new to learning about ADOS, and you were willing to read this long article, finish it! Then head over to ADOS101.com to learn more about who we are, how we formed and what is our Black Agenda for the American descendants of chattel slavery.
The co-founders of this political project, YouTubers Yvette Carnell, a Howard University graduate and former staffer for congresspeople as well as the Democratic National Committee in Washington, DC has a bi-weekly show on Monday and Wednesday nights starting around 9:45 pm EST.
Antonio Moore, has a a Los Angeles-based attorney who is also an Emmy-nominated producer of “Freeway: Crack in the System,” has a weekly DASH Radio hour-long talk show, also livestreamed on YouTube at 7 pm Pacific, 10 pm EST every Friday evening, along with random five to 20-minute quick-hit videos throughout a given month.
If you wish to get involved with our growing network of ADOS chapters across the country, join the SuperChat on the YouTube shows, let us know where you are from and we can connect you with the people in your area organizing and get you started, or if you are on Facebook, request a join with the ADOS: American Descendants of Slavery group.
06.26.2019 11:55 a.m. UPDATE — included are additional resources for those who seek to learn, and ultimately do more, but do not yet know how. Shawn Hill, administrator of the ADOCS Book Club group on Facebook, has provided a quality, brief video on how to get our people in the ADOS movement.
For those who want to start a new study and work group in an area where there is not yet one, these advocacy resources should hold considerable value:
For those that profess and seek to be allies in the righteous justice claim of ADOS, understand: An ally is only as beneficial as their commitment, and investment, towards the justice objective.
IN CLOSING, FOR NOW
Take a moment to be self-aware. As an ADOS in this country, take some time to add up what you own against what you owe. Look at your own life with its challenges, and think about people that you care about and their lives and struggles.
Reconsider everything that you may have believed as the common wisdom: that Black people did not work hard enough, did not want it enough, that we are a group of people that want something for nothing.
Reject and remove all of the internal language of those, whether from the outside or closer, that have told you that you and your people have no history or value to this world. Fill that now-empty space with an ongoing education toward a self-interested lineage-focused politics.
As an aggrieved group of American citizens that have systematically been denied capital, innovation is critical. For us, this innovation, through the leverage of digital democratization tools, have allowed us to grow this work and be less obstructed by gatekeepers. For ADOS, our allies are few and our real friends fewer. For a considerable number of our people in the coming decades, we have to do this. Victory is not an option. It is innovate or die.
Prayers and continued focus for this victory that will likely be a marathon, not a sprint.
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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. I can be found here at Twitter. 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.
