The Poison Flower’s Bloom and Roots: Systemic Racism

Many, if not most, Americans believe that America is the good guy because of the way American history is revisioned and taught, which is actually pretty scary considering how closely it resembles propaganda of fascist governments. Anyway, it’s just like any story with a villain and a hero. Storytellers know that the way to create villains and heroes is to show the designated protagonist doing what is considered “good” and show the designated antagonist doing something “bad”. The latter goes for the Black Panther Party, BlackLivesMatter, and other black scholars of black resistance. Most non-black people heard of the claims of “looting” and “vandalizing” associated with BLM before they discovered what BLM stands for. The former happens with America, however. Textbooks attempt a half-hearted stance of objectivity when it comes to topics of the Native American genocide, African genocide, and the beginning of chattel slavery, but America still comes out as the hero in the end. Textbooks then gloss over The Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, The Great Depression, The Civil Rights, etc. and yay! First Black President. America is the good guy — all others who argue differently are the bad guys. Racism is over and BlackLivesMatter is “reverse racist”.

No. Systemic racism is far from dismantled and still thrives. Systemic Racism was coined by a white scholar, Joe Feagin. In Feagin’s research, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, he describes systemic racism as such, “Beginning in the seventeenth century, the Europeans and European Americans who controlled the development of the country that later became the United States positioned the oppression of Africans and African Americans at the center of the new society. Over the long history of the country, this oppression has included the exploitative and other oppressive practices of whites, the unjustly gained socioeconomic resources and assets of whites, and the long-term maintenance of major socioeconomic inequalities across what came to be defined as a rigid color line.” In other words, systemic racism founded America, has maintained America, and still maintains America all at the cost of obstructing black people from equitable or even equal access to resources.

Yet, not many people can define systemic racism nor know America’s brutal past. These people are still sitting on the fence when it comes to race in America. These people perhaps think that BlackLivesMatter is just as racist as the KKK or at least no different than how the KKK started. Perhaps these people think that speeches against racism are “racist” themselves for simply pointing out race because America is supposedly “past race”. And maybe even secretly, many people think that black people are prone to be angry and prone to be more violent, which makes their experience with police dangerous and fatal. To all those people, I say that they are morally and factually and historically wrong. Although, I understand how these people form these beliefs because these beliefs stem from an incomplete education of history between white and black people i.e. many are these beliefs are ahistorical. In talks about systemic racism, reparations, BlackLivesMatter, etc, most people will say that the past doesn’t matter because we can’t be blamed for what our ancestors did. What is interesting is that while they might believe they don’t benefit from anything their ancestors did, if that were true, each generation would start a nation from scratch. In other words, if we are living in a country founded 400 years ago, then history does matter and does effect the present. We can’t reap the benefits of what we feel comfortable about but ignore the evils under the guise and false comfort of ahistoricality. Now, let’s unpack the major, but little known historical points in America’s history that help build systemic racism — the very system that BlackLivesMatter, Being Black at School, MLK Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, the Black Panther Party, and countless others aggressively resisted and still resist.

1776 Birth of the term “Caucasian”

1781- Thomas Jefferson suggests Black inferiority

1790- Naturalization reserved for whites

1830- Indians dispossessed of lands

1854 Nonwhites barred from testifying

1857 African Americans denied citizenship

1887 Jim Crow segregation begins

1934 U.S. housing programs benefit whites only

1935 Minorities denied Social Security/excluded from unions

Source: PBS.org

This brings us to more recent patterns of systemic racism maintenance. Some of these events overlap, fyi. Click the links to read the actual research:

1862: The Homestead Act

Many middle-class white people, especially those of us who grew up in the suburbs, like to think that we got to where we are today by virtue of our merit — hard work, intelligence, pluck, and maybe a little luck. And while we may be sympathetic to the plight of others, we close down when we hear the words “affirmative action” or “racial preferences.” We worked hard, we made it on our own, the thinking goes, why don’t ‘they’? After all, it’s been almost 40 years now since the Civil Rights Act was passed.

What we don’t readily acknowledge is that racial preferences have a long, institutional history in this country — a white history. — PBS.org

Let us briefly consider the systemic racism as it operated in just one historical period of the U.S. economy. Under the federal Homestead Act — passed in the 1860s and in effect until the 1930s — -the U.S. government provided about 246 million acres of land (much of it taken from Native Americans by force or chicanery) at low or no cost for about 1.5 million farm homesteads. Because of the extensive racial exclusion and violence directed at African Americans, including those recently freed from slavery, those who gained access to these wealth-generating resources were almost entirely white…”- Joe Feagin

1880–1940: Lynching

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to “lynch law” as a means of social control. Lynchings — open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob — seem to have been an American invention. In Lynch-Law, the first scholarly investigation of lynching, written in 1905, author James E. Cutler stated that “lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States.”

Most of the lynchings were by hanging or shooting, or both. However, many were of a more hideous nature — burning at the stake, maiming, dismemberment, castration, and other brutal methods of physical torture. Lynching therefore was a cruel combination of racism and sadism, which was utilized primarily to sustain the caste system in the South. Many white people believed that Negroes could only be controlled by fear. To them, lynching was seen as the most effective means of control.

1920s: Tulsa Race Riots

This thriving business district and surrounding residential area was referred to as “Black Wall Street.” In June of 1921, a series of events nearly destroyed the entire Greenwood area….

In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Black Tulsa was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took imprisoned blacks out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.

Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, over 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. In 2001, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission released a report indicating that historians now believe close to 300 people died in the riot.

1939–1945: The Government Secretly Experiment Chemicals on African-American Soldiers in WWII

“It felt like you were on fire,” recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. “Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just, they were in bad shape.”

Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.

An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards’ experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.

1900s-1960s: White supremacist groups thrive in American politics

According to Crespino, white supremacy remained an explicit part of southern Democratic politics through the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Two notable examples were South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential run on behalf of the States’ Rights Democratic Party (aka “Dixiecrats”) to protest the Democratic Party’s civil rights agenda, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s 1963 speech promising “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Partisan dynamics began to change in the 1960s, says Crespino, when white supremacist groups began to find common cause with other kinds of conservative groups, namely those that were anti-government.

1985: Philadelphia Police bomb a residential area known as MOVE

After my stories last week on the 30th anniversary of the MOVE siege in West Philadelphia in 1985, in which Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a residential neighborhood, leaving 11 dead — including five children — we were surprised by how many people told us they’d never heard of the bombing.

1980-Present: The War on “Drugs”, but really Black People

Dan Baum, writing in support of drug legalization at Harper’s, has unleashed a frank 1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman, and as inadvertently salient an argument for legalizing drugs as any I’ve ever seen:

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Further, perhaps people have heard someone cite that more black people commit crimes against white people than the opposite. This is totally false because it is incomplete data, ahistorical, and downright, violently misleading. Usually if not always, those figures are cherry picked e.g. 2012–2013, but if the stats were derived from a longer time span, say from even the 1800s-2016, white violence unto black bodies would be astronomically high. This article articulates it better than I can.

White supremacy a.ka. systemic/institutional racism is humanity’s ultimate villain. Dismantling it facilitates the freedom of black people and the humanity of white people. So when those aforementioned people declare “reverse racism”, tell them that when they can show me a history like the one above where African-Americans did similar things to white people on a national, economical, societal, and political scale, then yes, “reverse racism” will cease to be a myth. More humorously, as Aemar Rhaman articulates it in his stand-up comedy routine here.

Alllivesmatter could possibly be considered a noble philosophy, but it is not a realistic representation of everyone’s life in America because the very nature of philosophical ideals is that they are based on the hypothetical i.e. events that have not yet happened. When we say “BlackLivesMatter” and when we protest against systemic racism, we are demanding that our lives should matter and we are asserting that we will dismantle a system that is constructed specifically against black people. This is why anti-systemic-racism work and scholarship is so important and necessary. This is why we need teachers on the frontline with their black students demanding that their students’ lives matter. We will never “cure” racism, but we can limit the political, societal, and economical power that racism has.

Your systemically oppressed students need you. Your black students need you.