Double Negative

 Throughout our history in America it’s been relatively easy to convey our pain and disillusion or chronicle precisely the sojourn we’ve endured as slaves and oppressed people, particularly as many great orators and leaders have graced our ranks.  We lament all the horrors heaped upon us and we point an accurate accusatory finger at white America from slave masters to modern day politicians.

We talk about the slave indoctrination taught by Willie Lynch and the conditioning that shaped us as a people.  The hundreds of years of wretchedness, illiteracy and poverty.  The lynchings, church bombings and pure scorn emitted and displayed from white to black.  The  designation of 3/5 human and Supreme Court pronouncements affirming our existence as property.  The cross burnings and the across‑the‑board discrimination, fraud and swindle.  Need I go on?  I think not.  We don’t need a history lesson about these things.  We do, however, need to evaluate history honestly, accurately and with precise understanding.

I ask us to look at the history outlined above as if we were alien outsiders viewing these events up close.  We would not just see one people as victims of violence, indoctrination, conditioning and lies.  We’d see two people.  Though our pain would scream loudest we’d also see the poison fed to white people, particularly children, about black people.  All this to justify treating us and others the way they did.  White people were just as much enslaved, victimized, indoctrinated, conditioned and lied to as we were.  If slaves lived their entire lives knowing nothing but slavery, then there had to be white kids living their entire lives knowing nothing but how to be a slave master.  If African Americans lived their entire lives believing that they were indeed inferior beings, there were white kids believing they were superior.  This dual‑poisoning was unavoidable; it was the very air Americans breathed.  Few escaped it who lived, many more only in death.  Was it true?  Of course not! Was it believed and lived out?  Yes!  Therein lies the whole tragedy of America. The actual people who started this are long dead and gone, but their legacies and ghosts still haunt all of us in the form of “perpetuation.”

In many ways it was worse for white people.  Imagine what a shock it must have been to the first batch of white kids when they realized how thoroughly they’d been lied to about being superior beings simply because they were white.  Just as African and black excellence was hidden from slaves and their descendants, it was also not taught to white kids.  White kids were taught that they created everything, controlled everything and just about owned everything.  Certainly everything in their environment confirmed as much.  It was perfectly normal for white kids to accept the imbalance because they were the positive beneficiaries, which made it easy for them to act in ways that maintained the status quo.  They, in effect, had to become even less human than they claimed we were to keep us so‑called “in our place.”  The more we yearned and begged for just a tidbit of human dignity, the more savage and brutal they’d become because their world of lies  (which gave them privilege) was gradually being pulled from beneath them.  And when your very existence is perceived to be under attack you fight.  Wouldn’t you fight to hold onto what you truly believed was your birthright?  Your God-given place on earth?  You’d say, “how dare these miserable niggers and their nigger‑lovin’ allies ask us to retreat from our inheritance one inch?”

After hundreds of years this was not only a natural response; it was the only one possible.  I don’t blame Trent Lott for acting against having his fraternity integrated.  He was a child of Jim Crow and only fought for what he was taught and saw all his life.  The children of both races were the real victims through it all.  They had to carry it on as best they could; it was their very identity.  What else would have a pre‑teen white boy ‘cuss at and order around a grown black man in public?  Now you tell me, is this child damaged?  Then flip it.  What would make the grown black man bow, shuffle and do what the kid told him to do?  How damaged is he?  Very damaged, but not stupid.  He knew how close he was to death.  This is the America that children, black and white, were raised in for at least 300 solid years.  In their formative years they had no choice; just slavery for them all.  Adult life didn’t offer much more.

Nowadays we do see a changed America, even changed hearts.  Some would have us believe that white supremacy is dead and that nobody caters to racial inferiority /superiority theories anymore.  I’ll go as far as saying that white supremacy is dying a slow death; it’s still potent enough to rear its head and wreak havoc for another hundred or more years.  The acceleration of its death depends on whether or not we believe it’ll just die a natural death or does it need a good death blow.  I favor the death blow because power, racism and corruption does not concede; they wiggle and squirm looking only for ways to rock you back to sleep.  Remember, a tree is known not by the bark that it wears, but by the fruit that it bears.  The cosmetic changes in race relations over the past 50 years is just that ‑ cosmetic.  You can cite all the legislation you want, all the social programs you want and all the abundant integration you want.  All I look at is the condition of black folk as a whole and who has all the wealth in America.  While it’s true African Americans don’t do enough for themselves to level the playing field, what’s more true is that African Americans, by and large, are still discriminated against and still duped by the donkey and the elephant.  We have to strike a death blow and we have to do it now.

We cry, we beg, we march, we sing, we vote, we legislate and litigate.  We do everything the American way except the one that put America on the map to begin with ‑ build wealth!  We’ve had all the wake‑up calls we’re gonna get: 9/11 is twenty years old now.   We are targeted for death for being the Americans we’re not, that is, Americans who share equally in the wealth and power of this country.  We are not those Americans; anyone who says we are is full of shit. George Floyd’s murder more than proved this.   We could be those Americans once we get our true birthright.  Just because there’s a common enemy now doesn’t mean I forget the foot on my neck by my own countrymen.