Why Black Folk Are Side-eyeing Ya’ll
We been here before, over and over again before
Don’t mind us.
Some of us aren’t that optimistic. We feel you all. We do. Some of you lot are sincere and for you, we are grateful. But that collective side-eye you might be seeing — that eye comes from those of us who have a grasp of history and its patterns.
What history, you may ask, am I writing of? The struggle of the past 155 years — a well documented struggle that has seen every bit of progress matched with an often violent backlash.
So that side-eye you see, as my Brit brothers would say, allow it. We’ll use the modern history of the rise of President Obama as an example but we’ll buttress it with the years after Reconstruction for good measure.
It was surreal.
There stood Barack Obama, a presidential candidate, before a crowd of 200,000+ people…in Berlin…cheering Obama.
My brother and I had lived in Germany, I wouldn’t have figured it to be one of the most progressive places. But apparently a lot had changed since the mid-80s when store owners would grumble scwartze under their breath at our mere presence.
Now, in 2008, here were the German people losing their shit for a Black candidate from America. It was incredibly eye-opening. This was something that I hadn’t seen in my lifetime. Were we going to see the election of a Black President in my lifetime?
We cast our ballots and many of us expected the worst. Memories of the debacle in Florida was only eight years behind us so it wouldn’t be a shock if Obama didn’t win.
But he did. And across the country, people took to the streets to celebrate. And it wasn’t just America. It was all over the world. There was a sense of euphoria. Barack Obama had won 53% of the vote and people were filled with Hope.
That Hope was there on that chilly day of President Obama’s Inauguration where 1.8M shivered, excited to be a part of history. It was an event that felt like a winter family reunion. And it was the last day that level of optimism would be seen again.
There was a similar era.
It may seem like the stone ages, but for some of us, it’s a mere two generations away. That era was known as Reconstruction and we don’t talk enough about it.
The Civil War was over. The enslaved Africans were freed ending a 310 year institution that had grown America (and Europe) into a super power on the backs of the free labor of Black men and women.
The initial reparations act was eliminated in a compromise to keep the Confederate states as a part of the union. But there were some concessions — they had to tolerate Northern troops who were there to enforce the changes that were needed to transition the formerly enslaved into a life of freedom.
This is the era when the vast majority of the Historically Black Colleges were founded. Columbia University historian Eric Foner estimated that 2,000 Black folks held political office in this era — an era that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates called one of “unparalleled hope.” Black towns were founded and flourished across the US.
Was America changing?
Don’t. You. Believe. It.
Reconstruction ended, and, after feeling under siege, there was a violent backlash. Lynching became, as The Crisis described it, “an Industry.” Hundreds of Black men and women were strung from trees, decapitated, some times set on fire, more often than not before a smiling, celebratory crowd that took body parts and pictures for souvenirs.
One of the first films acknowledged as a masterpiece by some film historians was the propaganda-filled “The Birth of a Nation,” a film which depicted those Black political figures mentioned above as lazy, shiftless, shoeless, liquor swigging caricatures who spent time in Capital Hill sleeping and scratching.
“The Birth of a Nation,” originally titled “The Clansman” also is often credited as the igniting force behind the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan which by 1924 reached between 2.4 to 4m members.
Race riots were the order of the day where whites brutally attacked men, women, and children from Atlanta to New York — it was the rule, not the exception (Google: The Red Summer of 1919 or click on this hyperlink as a ‘good’ example).
This type of domestic terrorism continued for the next SEVENTY YEARS.
President Obama never stood a chance.
We now know that there was a plot to prevent him from being successful in any of his endeavors. We also know that in order to be in that office, you’re going to get your hands dirty. Those two things played a role in the apathy of many voters — but that wasn’t the only factor in the election of the current president.
As we discussed here, racism (as well as xenophobia, sexism, and the support of Big Business) played a much larger role in the current president’s election. According to Lynn Sanders and Donald Kinder, Trump used tactics that focused on racial resentment which, in this Nation article, summarizes that tactic in this way:
Racial resentment measures dog-whistle or color-blind forms of racism, such as the belief that Black people need to simply “try harder” to be successful in America, or that generations of discrimination do not hold back Black Americans.
The past four years have seen a rise in overt racial attacks and hyper aggressions, spawning new terms like “Karens” and a general unrest that hadn’t been seen in years.
But long before there was such a term. Black folk were baffled by the role that white women played in the election of our current president. Exit polls at the time suggested that 53% of white women voted for the little hand man. While those numbers have been considered overblown by five percent, the fact remains, some of the former supporters of Obama now turned to a proud sexist and misogynist for their choice of President.
It wasn’t just women, according to studies — it was closer to 6.7 to 9M people who switched over to vote for Trump — the underlying reason — race.
See what we’re getting at here?
Whenever there’s a swing towards Hope and change, the other end of that pendulum is a swing towards harsh, sometimes violent retaliation to any perceived loss of privilege…so pardon us if we sit back and watch this thing unfold with bated breath.
We been here before and the results haven’t been good. I close with these words from Minister Farrakhan in A Torchlight For America (which you should get and read):
Unfortunately the truth of the real condition of America is kept hidden from the people until conditions become so intolerable that the most uninformed of the people readily sees that something is wrong. Then, scapegoating becomes a necessary tool used by the wickedly wise policy-makers and business leadership to re-direct and focus attention away from their own misdeeds and onto someone who is defenseless in this society.
Don’t want the side-eye, then don’t fall for the proverbial banana in the tail pipe. Because that scapegoating tool is on the horizon.
note: That hopeful crowd in Germany twelve years ago…where are those people now as Germany goes through an uptick in racism? The German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency (ADS) reports that cases have increased by 10%.
Guess what’s true for America is true for the world — white supremacy ain’t exclusive.
Although the article is short, the hyperlinks are plentiful. Don’t feel pressured to read them all as what is going on is overwhelming enough.
