White America’s ‘Broken Heart’

[sheshe2]

America has a gauzy, romanticized version of its history that is largely fiction. According to that mythology, America rose to greatness by sheer ruggedness, ingenuity and hard work. It ignores or sidelines the tremendous human suffering of African slaves that fueled that financial growth, and the blood spilled and dubious treaties signed with Native Americans that fueled its geographic growth. It ignores that the prosperity of some Americans always hinged on the oppression of other Americans.

Much of America’s past is the story of white people benefiting from a system that white people designed and maintained, which increased their chances of success as it suppressed those same chances in other groups. Those systems persist to this day in some disturbing ways, but the current, vociferous naming and challenging of those systems, the placing of the lamp of truth near the seesaw of privilege and oppression, has provoked a profound sense of discomfort and even anger.


In Sanders’s speech following the Iowa caucuses, he veered from his position that this country “in many ways was created” on “racist principles,” and instead said: “What the American people understand is this country was based and is based on fairness.” Nonwhite people in this country understand that as a matter of history and heritage this simply isn’t true, but it is a hallowed ideal for white America and one that centers the America ethos.

Indeed, the current urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived — structural inequity has leapt the racial barrier — and that the legacy to which they fully assumed they were heirs is increasingly beyond their grasp.

Inequality has been a feature of the African-American condition in this country since the first black feet touched this ground.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/04/opinion/white-americas-broken-heart.html?ref=opinion&_r=2

..............................................................................................................................

Their broken heart comes from the ever present reality of the census reports. By 2043 White will no longer be the majority.

[Recursion]

1. And when that plurality line is crossed, the angry white howling of the past 8 years

will seem but a pleasant memory, the babbling of a placid brook, I fear.

[brush]

2. I'm hoping maybe once that line is crossed whites with entitled attitudes will . . .

ditch it and realize that they are in the same boat with everyone else and we can go all French Revolution on those that want us to eat cake.

I'm not counting on it though because white supremacy is deeply, deeply entrenched in this country, which explains all the red state poor voting those that have and continue to ship their jobs overseas.

[Floridanow]

29. The current efforts of republicans

To disfranchise minority voters is crazy. My hope is that minorities are more reasoned and protect the voting and human rights of everyone when they take control of the reigns of power.

[Number23]

3. Good Lawd. I'm kicking and rec'ing and haven't even gotten past the second sentence yet

It ignores or sidelines the tremendous human suffering of African slaves that fueled that financial growth, and the blood spilled and dubious treaties signed with Native Americans that fueled its geographic growth. It ignores that the prosperity of some Americans always hinged on the oppression of other Americans.

Hell FUCKING yes. THANK YOU, sheshe!!!!!

[sheshe2]

4. He sure can tell the story, #23.

The man is brilliant.

You are welcome.

[Iliyah]

5. This should be in the history books!

For all ages.

[betsuni]

6. Thank you for posting this!

This has been bugging the hell out of me: "the urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived..." I don't know. Middle to upper-middle class bobos pay obscene amounts of money for fancy-pants multiple higher education degrees and what for? It sure doesn't seem to be making anybody any smarter. Here they are, getting all worked up about revolution and inequality as if it's new and something must be done right now or else DOOM, and the rest of us are like, get in line, jackass. It used to be that they simply lectured poor people about economical lentil dishes that freeze well, now this whole revolution thing.

[sheshe2]

8. Yes.

"the urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived..."

I may be around to see it, or not. Who knows, 2043 it is a long way off. Yet I do believe we need a nation of color. Every color under the rainbow. My family gets more beautiful every time one marries and has children. We have Irish that married Japanese. They married Hispanic their children are beautiful as are the Irish that married AA, their children a delight to see, so beautiful.

We are diverse. I love that and I embrace the change. It makes us stronger every day.

[Cha]

7. This is brilliant from Charles Blow, she, thank you so much! Good to know what President Clinton

had to say in Iowa, too.

"We are going to share the future. The only question is: What will be the terms of the sharing?"

Thank you, Bill Clinton.

I know how Hillary and Bill want to do the sharing and thankfully so do the majority of those whose time is long overdue.

snip//

Clinton won the support of nonwhites in Iowa 58 percent to Sanders’s 34 percent. This gap also exists — and has remained stubbornly persistent — in national polls, and in some polls is even wider. For instance, according to a January Monmouth University Poll, nationwide black and Latino support for Clinton was 71 percent as opposed to 21 percent for Sanders. At this point, this is a settled issue for nonwhite voters, and those voters are likely to be Democratic primary king- or queen-makers.

[sheshe2]

9. Yes.

Great quote from Bill, Cha.

"We are going to share the future. The only question is: What will be the terms of the sharing?"


This is the color of change Cha, it is sweet and so very past due. I embrace it.

[Cha]

10. It's so embraceable.

[sheshe2]

11. Hey you.

One of my hides? It was from saying this. I am trying to post quietly.

Yet I needed to say this.

[FrenchieCat]

12. I keep on wanting to "like" everything

And the remember that I'm not on FB!

[JustAnotherGen]

13. Google The Great Gatsby

Followed by

Greatest or Best American novel

Or

Great American Novel


Think about the themes pressented in Fitzgerald's book.

It can only be great for some.

I would like to direct America to Achebe's Things Fall Apart for consideration.

[sheshe2]

23. I will!

Thanks for the suggestions JAG.

[brer cat]

14. Excellent piece by Charles Blow.

Thanks for posting, sheshe!!

[Squinch]

15. Great article! Just great.

[1StrongBlackMan]

16. Great piece ...

that harkens back to Randys1's observation, like opiate addiction, problems are only problems when they affect, directly and negatively, white folks ... until that time, the problem is merely a moral failing of those suffering the problem; to be ignored, if not, punished.

I take no pleasure in the awakening of white America to the suffering of the rest of America; but, this awakening will bring about change, however, I suspect the change will be based in a lesson, not quite learned.

Michael Eric Dyson has observed that social change proves most effective when it is bottom up, rather than, top down. When we benefit the marginalized, others benefit, as well. For example, the Civil Rights Act was initially, specifically, written to benefit race, color, and religion; but, sex was added, not as an "ah ha moment, but in an effort to sink it. With its passage, the scope of beneficiaries expanded to include women, then the other abled, then the aged ... Now, all American peoples have benefited from this bottom up measure. Likewise, Affirmative Action was designed for PoC ... the biggest beneficiaries of it have been white females.

My fear is, like labor unions, and the tenant farmers/share-cropper movement, before it, the "revolution" will follow the familiar pattern ... when white folks suffer, the call for revolution and unity amounts to "me first, and the benefits will trickle down to you"; rather than, "you first, because the benefits will percolate up to me."

[randys1]

18. I just saw a TV ad for opiate addiction treatment "it is a medical condition, so seek treatment"

with the nice music, showing the nice white addicted person as a sick person with an illness

Where were the ads "crack got you down? come to our rehab clinic!"

Makes me wish we could put Chapelle in charge of it or something...

(remembering his hysterically funny stuff on crack, but it aint so funny, is it)

[Kind of Blue]

21. Excellent points showing once again, nothing new.

Reminded me of Hubert Harrison and Professor John H. Bracey, Jr.

"Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it…True democracy and equality implies a revolution …startling even to think of " ~ 1911 Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 http://www.jeffreybperry.net/_center__font_size__3__font_color__green___b_1__hubert_harrison___i_the_voice_of_76560.htm

"There are more casualties, dead and wounded, in the Civil War than all the American wars combined. And if you had said to white Americans give me a million lives to free the slaves, they'd say no. But to ignore slavery cost a million white people their lives - not black people - and over a million white people their limbs over slavery. But the failure to deal with slavery is the price white people paid for looking the other way, for ignoring it, saying we'll deal with it next year some time. So you'd think people would learn." Transcribed from the 2011 lecture, found on YouTube, of UMass Professor John H. Bracey, Jr. "examining how racism and white entitlement have economic costs for all Americans."

Contained in the struggle between black liberation and white supremacy is almost every issue that concerns us currently —

"Surveillance, government control, privacy, security, maintenance of infrastructure — even pollution, environmentalism, and what has become climate change, they’re all there. Add to that tolerance of religion and non-religion, access to healthcare, dominion over one’s own body, the right of self-defense, the right of free expression, the desire for justice and equality. Each one of these issues is there in black liberation, and often explored at length long before this current generation was born.

This is no accident, no coincidence, because the making of black and white was the making of the world we know now. http://hebrewvisionnews.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-white-problem-how-white-people-got.html

[1StrongBlackMan]

26. The linked piece at the bottom is really good. I haven't gotten through all of it ...

But I like what I have read thus far. I'm posting here so I can find it later.

Thanks.

[sheshe2]

24. Now this...

My fear is, like labor unions, and the tenant farmers/share-cropper movement, before it, the "revolution" will follow the familiar pattern ... when white folks suffer, the call for revolution and unity amounts to "me first, and the benefits will trickle down to you"; rather than, "you first, because the benefits will percolate up to me."

is spot on.

Thanks for your thoughts, 1Strong.

[JustAnotherGen]

25. Last year I posted

We have to hold the line.

We being black Americans.

There is too much legislation that comes out of 1964 and 1965 that rests on the legislative achievements of those years.

$15 an hour in a double income same sex white couple - means nothing if they have no place to live due to some kind of bizarre redline law.

$15 an hour means nothing to a woman whose direct manager finds out she's pregnant and she loses her job.

[1StrongBlackMan]

27. Absolutely correct ...

I would have that that clear .... which makes so many of the economic primacy arguments, or rather, that so many support economic primacy, all the more bizarre ... and doubly so, that so many PoC, members of the LGBT community, and other "others" buy into it.

I suspect much of the support is owed to never having been face such denials ("That was way back then&quot , and forgetting that someone ("those old folks&quot had to fight and die for the current luxury of taking such "rights" for granted.

[Gothmog]

17. K&R

[BlueMTexpat]

19. Great article, sheshe2!

Thanks so much for sharing.

[Starry Messenger]

20. Speed the day.

[Kind of Blue]

22. Thanks, Sheshe2! Blow freakin' nails it every time.

"By 2043 White will no longer be the majority." And there lies one of the biggest fears.

The only exception I take is that "Inequality has been a feature of the African-American condition in this country since the first black feet touched this ground."

I saw some discrepancies in years of the following accounts of William Tucker.

- *On this date in 1606, the first recorded birth of a child of African decent in the continental United States occurred. This was is in the Cathedral Parish Archives in St. Augustine, Florida, thirteen years before enslaved Africans were first brought to the English colony at Jamestown in 1619.

William Tucker was the first person of African ancestry born in the 13 British Colonies. His birth symbolized the beginnings of a distinct African American identity along the eastern coast of what would eventually become the United States.

William Tucker was born in 1624 near Jamestown, Virginia, the son of “Antoney and Isabell,” two African indentured servants. Historians do not know much of William Tucker’s life due to the fragmented pieces of primary source material available for contemporary study. http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/first-black-birth-recorded-america

- According to the 1624-1625 Virginia Census, 22 Africans lived in Virginia at the time of Tucker’s birth. The first 20 of these Africans arrived in 1619 and all of them worked under indentured servitude contracts. These men and women were not slaves because Virginia’s General Assembly had not yet worked out the terms for enslavement in the colony. Consequently these first Africans in Virginia received the same rights, duties, privileges, responsibilities, and punishments as their white indentured counterparts from Great Britain. They also worked under the same terms and many but not all were given land at the end of their period of indenture. In fact they and their descendants became the nucleus of the free black population which existed in Virginia prior to the Civil War.
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/tucker-william-1624#sthash.LnoAkdht.dpuf

And one that conservatives Love to bandy about because he owned slaves as if slavery in every society was the same as we know it later in the Americas.

"Like many of you, I was always told that the first Africans to arrive in what is now the United States were the 20 and odd Africans who arrived as slaves in Jamestown, Va., from what is now the country of Angola, in 1619. But this turns out not to be true. As a matter of fact, Africans arrived in North America more than a century before both the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock and before these Angolans arrived in Virginia. What's more, we even know the identity of the first documented African to arrive. His name was Juan Garrido, and more astonishing, he wasn't even a slave. Next year will be the 500th anniversary of his arrival in Florida, and the state plans to commemorate this remarkable event.

Juan Garrido was born in West Africa around 1480. According to the historians Ricardo Alegria and Jane Landers, Garrido's notarized probanza (his curriculum vitae, more or less), dated 1538, says he moved from Africa to Lisbon, Portugal, of his own volition as a free man, stayed in Spain for seven years, and then, seeking his fortune and perhaps a bit of fame, he joined the earliest conquistadors to the New World. All the sworn witnesses to this document affirm that Garrido was horro, or free, when he arrived in Spain. http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2012/10/who_was_the_first_african_american_100_amazing_facts_about_the_negro.html

- But Africans, both slave and free, arrived beginning with Columbus at the end of the 15th Century, more that 100 years before the English and Dutch appeared. Gathered together here are a number of stories about individuals of African ancestry and their experiences in the New World. ALL of these people and events were prior to the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620.

Nevertheless, the first Africans who accompanied the early Spanish explorers were not all slaves. Some were free (such as Pedro Alonso Niño, who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his third voyage); and others were servants.

Nuflo de Olano, who accompanied Vasco Nuñez de Balboa across the Isthmus of Panama was, however, a slave. So were Juan Valiente and several others who traveled and fought with Hernán Cortés in Mexico, or the Pizarro brothers in Peru, or Pánfilo de Narváez in Florida. Those blacks who sailed with Columbus on his first voyage to the Americas in 1492 were free men, and their descendants presumably were as free as any other Spanish colonist in the Americas. http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3444701162/slavery.html

[1StrongBlackMan]

28. However, from your linked HebrewVision piece ...

The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.

As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom. The whites were told this was because God had made the blacks inferior to the whites, just as the whites were inferior to the superior classes that owned property. It’s worthwhile to remember that they didn’t give whites political rights, they didn’t give whites the vote — that would not happen then nor at the revolution and independence. Whites didn’t get the vote until the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Property owners, both of land and slaves, were the only ones who could vote. That included black land and slave owners until various states passed laws in the early 18th century to take their franchise away.

So, at best, that equality, like the "foxhole Christian", was illusory and short-lived.

[Kind of Blue]

30. Yeah, illusory and short-lived as it was,

my main point, as with the examples in the other response, is that Blow's statement is not quite accurate. And, to me, starts and stops the exploration of Africans and the Americas in 1619 Jamestown, though there is more history. I won't go way back but 40 years before Jamestown, St. Augustine, Florida. Instead of my ususal blah-blah-blah, here's a little video making the point. The timeframe may still be too short a period in history leading up to the 1680s Jamestown but, to me, all of it should be revealed.

"When considering the short history of America, one’s mind drifts to names like Columbus, Ponce de Leon and John Smith, but there is rich history waiting to be unearthed and spread from sea to shining sea: How African-Americans played a pivotal role in the shaping of one of the most powerful countries in the world.

Most notably, the first African-Americans in the New World were not judged by their skin color, rather if they were Catholic and Spanish.

In the beginning stages of St. Augustine, its founders did not intend it to be a colony rich in diversity. What resulted was a multi-ethnic town with a group of people whom -- unless you held a Spanish bloodline to protect -- did not treat others unfairly. Ironically, it would take more than 400 years before the Supreme Court brought this idea to fruition."

Unfortunately I do not know how to embed videos besides the usual YouTube links. But I think this one is really worth watching. Interesting that the first Underground Railroad ran first south to St. Augustine where enslaved people were fleeing Jamestown.

http://www.lasvegasnow.com/journey-2016/americas-untold-journey-450-years-of-the-african-american-experience

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

31. This is why Bernie Sanders and his arrogant supporters cannot connect with the black electorate.

I, for one, cannot wait for him to lose. I'm starting to loathe his fanatics.

[Lisa D]

32. K&R!

Great article.