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I fail to see what the bolded sentences have to do with the topic.
Plain and simple, slavery did not really end in 1865. Many African Americans were as firmly chained to a plantation after 1865 as they had been before 1860. Others were deprived of their rights as well as their dignity all over the country. Many suffered from what can only be described as terrorism, and that continued with the tacit approval of the all levels of government until at least the mid-1960s.
In reality, it's not slavery that haunts this country but dejure and defacto segregation, and institutional racism. Dejure segregation (Jim Crow) has only been dealt with finally within the last 50 years, and defacto segregation and institutional racism remain festering problems. I won't even go into general bigotry that runs rampant among some groups in some places.
The way slavery ended, its not surprising how things came to be. Nobody had a real plan. There were lots of plans but no single idea what to do with thousands of people suddenly cut loose to fend for themselves. The systems which followed not only caught ex slaves but poor whites as well and made it possible for the south to resist change for a long time, even if it was far from efficent.
But slavery did end. What followed was more like the origional cheap labor system of debt based captivity but it was functional and cheap.
The terror and limitations are also something which stems from no plan, and no direction. They could happen because there was nothing in place to prevent them. It is a discrase but it it was not slavery.
Is it even reasonable to expect a substatial change to happen on its own when such a deep cultural rift had existed? People are people and they do not change that quickly. I'm not saying it was an excuse, but more a reality. It sometimes takes generations for old ideas to become old. When peoples who have been used are suddenly 'free' and there is no means of incorperating them into society, inevitably they either slip into another trap or open bloodshed comes.
I think its time we quit the blame game and the splintering and look upon others as just human beings. The racial divide was born in the 1600's when a rebellion of black and white poor and indentured almost brought down a governer. There were always going to be poor and they would always be suspect, but if black and white were treated differently, it was thought it might preven further attemps at joint rebellion. It worked. It's time to quit playing the game.
We need to quit blaming someone else and seeing them as the enemy. This equally applies to blacks. Quit living in the past, start a new millenium. Let the past go. If we don't then the people gathering wealth and power will continue and the rest will be too preoccupied arguing about things which should be be allowed to be over. Until then, we stay pawns in the game.
Even to this day, the emotions run very deep. The pain is very real.
And the socio-economic disparities remain.
This is not just the case in the United States--but also in such Latin American countries as Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
Why is this so? Why does slavery still haunt us?
And how can we move forward as a nation?
.
I'm not going to read through this entire thread because I'm lazy and thanks to GTA, my attention span is pretty much gone. So this is just for you OP.
First, OP, we all know you're a census hoarder, in fact, this thread is really just a big intervention for you. But before we get to that, whip out that 1910 US Census you have sitting there and tell me what you see.....Ok, you see that about 90% of the black population in the US still lives in the South, keep that in mind.
Now, Southern Apologists hate it when they feel like the South's being picked on. I'm not picking on the South, but historically, it's a pretty racist place. That's not in anyway suggesting the North was all like "Come to us black people, we love you! We'll treat you right!" No, no, no. Absolutely not. The one thing about the 1910 Census is that the white people in the North were probably pretty glad that most black people didn't live in the North, because they were pretty racist too, it's just that their racism against black people would manifest itself in (usually) different ways later on in the 20th century. But moving on...
Ok, so as I'm sure other people have already pointed out in this thread, black people weren't exactly doing all that great in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Sure, they were technically free and enjoyed some improvement while the Union Army stuck around and enforced reconstruction, but that didn't last long. Soon, the ex-Confederates were running the show again and black people were pretty much placed in the realm of permanent peonage.
And if you ever read "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen, you'd see that in the late 1800s-early 1900s blacks weren't exactly all that welcome in many smaller cities and towns in the North either. That can even be applied to major northern cities. You think blacks settled in Harlem because they just really, really liked the northern end of Manhattan? No, it's because they weren't all that welcome in the other parts.
So, fast forward a little. The Great Depression and WW II see black people moving to the North and West in large numbers to find work and for war work. While they don't see much in the way of de jure segregation outside the South, they see plenty of de facto secgregation when it comes to housing (in Loewen's book, there's a picture of an angry white mob destroying the furnishings of a black homeowner just after WW II....in Cicero, Illinois).
Now, let's add a few ingredients to this disgusting stew we're making. First, African slavery was primarily based upon and undergirded by notions of white supremacy, or racism. That racism didn't go away just because slavery ended (obviously). Anti-black racism essentially came to permeate white culture. Don't believe me? Check this out:
Click on caricatures and get ready to be repulsed. Images like the ones shown absolutely permeated white culture in the late 1800s-early 1900s and for even longer. Hasn't anyone ever seen uncensored Warner Brothers' cartoons from the 30s and 40s? I have the complete collection of the early Disney Silly Symphonies cartoons and in one (late 30s), a black "mammy" archetype uses the "n word" while shooing a cat away. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, I had to rewind and play it again several times just to make sure I wasn't mishearing it, but I wasn't.
Historian Daniel Boorstin talked about America from the perspective of the working, often ingenuous institutions that were created. One might say that some of those institutions were and possibly remain racist. Ask yourself the following:
Are cops racist?
Do blacks get a fair shake in our justice system compared to whites (especially in terms of sentencing)?
Have blacks been the last ones hired, first ones fired?
Have blacks had a tougher time getting loans and credit than white people even when they had similar or even better credit scores?
Ok, so let's get back on track here. So blacks move into Northern cities and what happens? Whites move out. Now that didn't happen to all of them, but it happened to a lot of them (St. Louis, East St. Louis, Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gary, etc, etc). There's a name for this, white flight:
Certainly the presence of black people wasn't the only reason millions of whites abandoned the cities for the suburbs, but it was a reason for some of them. Black people being less economically mobile than whites (and some white suburbs flat out refusing to sell to blacks), this left many cities without their tax base, but with an infrastructure to keep up, so decay set in. That means worse schools, less jobs, less opportunities, more crime, more broken families, etc.
Now someone might say "but what about the black community itself? Don't they bear any responsibility for their own situation, or is it all just blame whitey?" Slow down buster. First, the black intelligentsia has been debating how blacks should behave and whether assimilation was worth it or even possible at least going back to when W.E.B. DuBois criticized Booker T. Washington. Second, there's no shortage of people within the black community today who engage in a debate over cultural issues the black community faces (fatherless families, conspicuous consumption, self-defeating behavior, etc. see: Cosby, Bill; and McGruder, Aaron). At the same time, others might argue that some of this is situational and that increased black prosperity would erase many of these problems.
But there's also the underlying problem of racism among whites. Yes, I'm going after whitey now, deal with it. Well not really. Essentially what I would say, is that whites haven't exactly made it easy for blacks to assimilate. I would say this is a direct cause of the backlash in the black community when it comes to dealing with black people who "act white"
And the debate within the black community over assimilation, how to go about doing it, whether its even desirable or not, and what possible alternatives there are to assimilation.
But I know someone will take issue with the notion that in 2013, whites could be racist. Well a lot of them are. Anyone can go to Google images and type in "racist tea party signs" and see for yourself. Now I'm not picking on the tea party, I know that they're overwhelmingly not racists, it was just the first easy example that popped into my head (I already told you I was lazy). The fact is that race-baiting and racism are still around and this is compounded by the fact that blacks can be sensitive enough to racism, discrimination and prejudice (based upon, you know, history) that they may very well often misread white people and see it when it's not even there. And you can't compare the black experience to the Asian, Native American or Hispanic experiences. They're all unique and what's different in this case is that whites have always had a special, particular virulent form of racism reserved especially for black people. In other words, the failure of blacks to assimilate has a lot (but not necessarily everything) to do with whites and white attitudes towards blacks (attitudes whites generally didn't have when it came to other groups, even 1800s anti-Chinese racism was largely economically motivated).
When it comes to economics, I suppose had there been a real radical reconstruction after the war and the white South (and the white North) had been forced to accept equality, and if the freed slaves had been given their 40 acres and a mule, the black community might be more prosperous today, but it didn't happen. Even during the post Civil War era when black colleges sprang up and more black people went to college, that did little to bring greater wealth to the black community as a whole. Look at it like this: Say it's 1900 and you're a black medical doctor. Think you're going to get a high paying job in a white hospital or get some good-paying white clients? Think again. You'll be serving the black community. You'll be better off, but poorer than your white peers because the black community started off poor so they couldn't pay their doctors much. Or say you're a railroad engineer and it's 1920 and you're in the North. It's a good paying job, but you're being paid less than your white peers and because you can't buy a house in a white community, you have to live far away from work and spend the extra dough and time commuting. You can make the economic pie bigger (or higher, whatever), but wealth can't just be made up out of thin air, you need an injection of wealth of some kind first and the black community never really had that. Today, it takes the form of weak and not terribly effective programs like Affirmative Action, which the political right uses as a cudgel to bash the left with (because in Race Baiting 101, the final was 100% of your grade and the right aced it). And so on. And all this does is to reinforce resistance to assimilation.
You ask how to move on. Who knows? It starts with a dialogue and by dialogue I don't mean mostly angry white people complaining about black people. I mean it starts with white people listening to black people. We can't reward people who engage in race baiting (scare/anger white people) for cheap political gain. We need to discuss as a national community how to move forward and come to some kind of consensus so everybody gets on board. That's going to mean moving the ball forward for black people economically, and not just black people, all poor people. Unless that happens, I think gains made by the black community will be small and come at great cost, like they're fighting in the trenches on the Western Front in WW I.
I'm not going to read through this entire thread because I'm lazy and thanks to GTA, my attention span is pretty much gone. So this is just for you OP.
First, OP, we all know you're a census hoarder, in fact, this thread is really just a big intervention for you. But before we get to that, whip out that 1910 US Census you have sitting there and tell me what you see.....Ok, you see that about 90% of the black population in the US still lives in the South, keep that in mind.
Now, Southern Apologists hate it when they feel like the South's being picked on. I'm not picking on the South, but historically, it's a pretty racist place. That's not in anyway suggesting the North was all like "Come to us black people, we love you! We'll treat you right!" No, no, no. Absolutely not. The one thing about the 1910 Census is that the white people in the North were probably pretty glad that most black people didn't live in the North, because they were pretty racist too, it's just that their racism against black people would manifest itself in (usually) different ways later on in the 20th century. But moving on...
Ok, so as I'm sure other people have already pointed out in this thread, black people weren't exactly doing all that great in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Sure, they were technically free and enjoyed some improvement while the Union Army stuck around and enforced reconstruction, but that didn't last long. Soon, the ex-Confederates were running the show again and black people were pretty much placed in the realm of permanent peonage.
And if you ever read "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen, you'd see that in the late 1800s-early 1900s blacks weren't exactly all that welcome in many smaller cities and towns in the North either. That can even be applied to major northern cities. You think blacks settled in Harlem because they just really, really liked the northern end of Manhattan? No, it's because they weren't all that welcome in the other parts.
So, fast forward a little. The Great Depression and WW II see black people moving to the North and West in large numbers to find work and for war work. While they don't see much in the way of de jure segregation outside the South, they see plenty of de facto secgregation when it comes to housing (in Loewen's book, there's a picture of an angry white mob destroying the furnishings of a black homeowner just after WW II....in Cicero, Illinois).
Now, let's add a few ingredients to this disgusting stew we're making. First, African slavery was primarily based upon and undergirded by notions of white supremacy, or racism. That racism didn't go away just because slavery ended (obviously). Anti-black racism essentially came to permeate white culture. Don't believe me? Check this out:
Click on caricatures and get ready to be repulsed. Images like the ones shown absolutely permeated white culture in the late 1800s-early 1900s and for even longer. Hasn't anyone ever seen uncensored Warner Brothers' cartoons from the 30s and 40s? I have the complete collection of the early Disney Silly Symphonies cartoons and in one (late 30s), a black "mammy" archetype uses the "n word" while shooing a cat away. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, I had to rewind and play it again several times just to make sure I wasn't mishearing it, but I wasn't.
Historian Daniel Boorstin talked about America from the perspective of the working, often ingenuous institutions that were created. One might say that some of those institutions were and possibly remain racist. Ask yourself the following:
Are cops racist?
Do blacks get a fair shake in our justice system compared to whites (especially in terms of sentencing)?
Have blacks been the last ones hired, first ones fired?
Have blacks had a tougher time getting loans and credit than white people even when they had similar or even better credit scores?
Ok, so let's get back on track here. So blacks move into Northern cities and what happens? Whites move out. Now that didn't happen to all of them, but it happened to a lot of them (St. Louis, East St. Louis, Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gary, etc, etc). There's a name for this, white flight:
Certainly the presence of black people wasn't the only reason millions of whites abandoned the cities for the suburbs, but it was a reason for some of them. Black people being less economically mobile than whites (and some white suburbs flat out refusing to sell to blacks), this left many cities without their tax base, but with an infrastructure to keep up, so decay set in. That means worse schools, less jobs, less opportunities, more crime, more broken families, etc.
Now someone might say "but what about the black community itself? Don't they bear any responsibility for their own situation, or is it all just blame whitey?" Slow down buster. First, the black intelligentsia has been debating how blacks should behave and whether assimilation was worth it or even possible at least going back to when W.E.B. DuBois criticized Booker T. Washington. Second, there's no shortage of people within the black community today who engage in a debate over cultural issues the black community faces (fatherless families, conspicuous consumption, self-defeating behavior, etc. see: Cosby, Bill; and McGruder, Aaron). At the same time, others might argue that some of this is situational and that increased black prosperity would erase many of these problems.
But there's also the underlying problem of racism among whites. Yes, I'm going after whitey now, deal with it. Well not really. Essentially what I would say, is that whites haven't exactly made it easy for blacks to assimilate. I would say this is a direct cause of the backlash in the black community when it comes to dealing with black people who "act white"
And the debate within the black community over assimilation, how to go about doing it, whether its even desirable or not, and what possible alternatives there are to assimilation.
But I know someone will take issue with the notion that in 2013, whites could be racist. Well a lot of them are. Anyone can go to Google images and type in "racist tea party signs" and see for yourself. Now I'm not picking on the tea party, I know that they're overwhelmingly not racists, it was just the first easy example that popped into my head (I already told you I was lazy). The fact is that race-baiting and racism are still around and this is compounded by the fact that blacks can be sensitive enough to racism, discrimination and prejudice (based upon, you know, history) that they may very well often misread white people and see it when it's not even there. And you can't compare the black experience to the Asian, Native American or Hispanic experiences. They're all unique and what's different in this case is that whites have always had a special, particular virulent form of racism reserved especially for black people. In other words, the failure of blacks to assimilate has a lot (but not necessarily everything) to do with whites and white attitudes towards blacks (attitudes whites generally didn't have when it came to other groups, even 1800s anti-Chinese racism was largely economically motivated).
When it comes to economics, I suppose had there been a real radical reconstruction after the war and the white South (and the white North) had been forced to accept equality, and if the freed slaves had been given their 40 acres and a mule, the black community might be more prosperous today, but it didn't happen. Even during the post Civil War era when black colleges sprang up and more black people went to college, that did little to bring greater wealth to the black community as a whole. Look at it like this: Say it's 1900 and you're a black medical doctor. Think you're going to get a high paying job in a white hospital or get some good-paying white clients? Think again. You'll be serving the black community. You'll be better off, but poorer than your white peers because the black community started off poor so they couldn't pay their doctors much. Or say you're a railroad engineer and it's 1920 and you're in the North. It's a good paying job, but you're being paid less than your white peers and because you can't buy a house in a white community, you have to live far away from work and spend the extra dough and time commuting. You can make the economic pie bigger (or higher, whatever), but wealth can't just be made up out of thin air, you need an injection of wealth of some kind first and the black community never really had that. Today, it takes the form of weak and not terribly effective programs like Affirmative Action, which the political right uses as a cudgel to bash the left with (because in Race Baiting 101, the final was 100% of your grade and the right aced it). And so on. And all this does is to reinforce resistance to assimilation.
You ask how to move on. Who knows? It starts with a dialogue and by dialogue I don't mean mostly angry white people complaining about black people. I mean it starts with white people listening to black people. We can't reward people who engage in race baiting (scare/anger white people) for cheap political gain. We need to discuss as a national community how to move forward and come to some kind of consensus so everybody gets on board. That's going to mean moving the ball forward for black people economically, and not just black people, all poor people. Unless that happens, I think gains made by the black community will be small and come at great cost, like they're fighting in the trenches on the Western Front in WW I.
"Myth 5. Before the Civil War, all African Americans were slaves.*
—*"In fact, about half a million African Americans were free in 1860 and about four million were slaves. The myth supports the notion that African-American ethnic traditions descend from the slave experience. But most of today’s African-American ethnic traits descend from the literate, civically active free Black communities of antebellum Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Such traditions include the AME church, church-centered neighborhood communities, ethnic self-identity and pride, even the term “African American” and the principles of hypodescent and the earliest one-drop rule. Those traditions were forged by such men as: Paul Cuffee, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Martin Delaney, and Frederick Douglass, of whom only the latter was ever a slave. Many families of the Black communities of the Northeast had no slave ancestry, descending from colonial African indentured servants before slavery (lifelong hereditary forced labor) was adopted in British North America. In contrast, ethnic traditions in the Lower South, where most slaves were, resembled today’s Latin America, where most free citizens were mixed to some extent, almost everyone (slave or free) was of the same ethnic self-identity, and a single sharp color line did not exist."
I'm not going to read through this entire thread because I'm lazy and thanks to GTA, my attention span is pretty much gone. So this is just for you OP.
First, OP, we all know you're a census hoarder, in fact, this thread is really just a big intervention for you. But before we get to that, whip out that 1910 US Census you have sitting there and tell me what you see.....Ok, you see that about 90% of the black population in the US still lives in the South, keep that in mind.
Now, Southern Apologists hate it when they feel like the South's being picked on. I'm not picking on the South, but historically, it's a pretty racist place. That's not in anyway suggesting the North was all like "Come to us black people, we love you! We'll treat you right!" No, no, no. Absolutely not. The one thing about the 1910 Census is that the white people in the North were probably pretty glad that most black people didn't live in the North, because they were pretty racist too, it's just that their racism against black people would manifest itself in (usually) different ways later on in the 20th century. But moving on...
Ok, so as I'm sure other people have already pointed out in this thread, black people weren't exactly doing all that great in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Sure, they were technically free and enjoyed some improvement while the Union Army stuck around and enforced reconstruction, but that didn't last long. Soon, the ex-Confederates were running the show again and black people were pretty much placed in the realm of permanent peonage.
And if you ever read "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen, you'd see that in the late 1800s-early 1900s blacks weren't exactly all that welcome in many smaller cities and towns in the North either. That can even be applied to major northern cities. You think blacks settled in Harlem because they just really, really liked the northern end of Manhattan? No, it's because they weren't all that welcome in the other parts.
So, fast forward a little. The Great Depression and WW II see black people moving to the North and West in large numbers to find work and for war work. While they don't see much in the way of de jure segregation outside the South, they see plenty of de facto secgregation when it comes to housing (in Loewen's book, there's a picture of an angry white mob destroying the furnishings of a black homeowner just after WW II....in Cicero, Illinois).
Now, let's add a few ingredients to this disgusting stew we're making. First, African slavery was primarily based upon and undergirded by notions of white supremacy, or racism. That racism didn't go away just because slavery ended (obviously). Anti-black racism essentially came to permeate white culture. Don't believe me? Check this out:
Click on caricatures and get ready to be repulsed. Images like the ones shown absolutely permeated white culture in the late 1800s-early 1900s and for even longer. Hasn't anyone ever seen uncensored Warner Brothers' cartoons from the 30s and 40s? I have the complete collection of the early Disney Silly Symphonies cartoons and in one (late 30s), a black "mammy" archetype uses the "n word" while shooing a cat away. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, I had to rewind and play it again several times just to make sure I wasn't mishearing it, but I wasn't.
Historian Daniel Boorstin talked about America from the perspective of the working, often ingenuous institutions that were created. One might say that some of those institutions were and possibly remain racist. Ask yourself the following:
Are cops racist?
Do blacks get a fair shake in our justice system compared to whites (especially in terms of sentencing)?
Have blacks been the last ones hired, first ones fired?
Have blacks had a tougher time getting loans and credit than white people even when they had similar or even better credit scores?
Ok, so let's get back on track here. So blacks move into Northern cities and what happens? Whites move out. Now that didn't happen to all of them, but it happened to a lot of them (St. Louis, East St. Louis, Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gary, etc, etc). There's a name for this, white flight:
Certainly the presence of black people wasn't the only reason millions of whites abandoned the cities for the suburbs, but it was a reason for some of them. Black people being less economically mobile than whites (and some white suburbs flat out refusing to sell to blacks), this left many cities without their tax base, but with an infrastructure to keep up, so decay set in. That means worse schools, less jobs, less opportunities, more crime, more broken families, etc.
Now someone might say "but what about the black community itself? Don't they bear any responsibility for their own situation, or is it all just blame whitey?" Slow down buster. First, the black intelligentsia has been debating how blacks should behave and whether assimilation was worth it or even possible at least going back to when W.E.B. DuBois criticized Booker T. Washington. Second, there's no shortage of people within the black community today who engage in a debate over cultural issues the black community faces (fatherless families, conspicuous consumption, self-defeating behavior, etc. see: Cosby, Bill; and McGruder, Aaron). At the same time, others might argue that some of this is situational and that increased black prosperity would erase many of these problems.
But there's also the underlying problem of racism among whites. Yes, I'm going after whitey now, deal with it. Well not really. Essentially what I would say, is that whites haven't exactly made it easy for blacks to assimilate. I would say this is a direct cause of the backlash in the black community when it comes to dealing with black people who "act white"
And the debate within the black community over assimilation, how to go about doing it, whether its even desirable or not, and what possible alternatives there are to assimilation.
But I know someone will take issue with the notion that in 2013, whites could be racist. Well a lot of them are. Anyone can go to Google images and type in "racist tea party signs" and see for yourself. Now I'm not picking on the tea party, I know that they're overwhelmingly not racists, it was just the first easy example that popped into my head (I already told you I was lazy). The fact is that race-baiting and racism are still around and this is compounded by the fact that blacks can be sensitive enough to racism, discrimination and prejudice (based upon, you know, history) that they may very well often misread white people and see it when it's not even there. And you can't compare the black experience to the Asian, Native American or Hispanic experiences. They're all unique and what's different in this case is that whites have always had a special, particular virulent form of racism reserved especially for black people. In other words, the failure of blacks to assimilate has a lot (but not necessarily everything) to do with whites and white attitudes towards blacks (attitudes whites generally didn't have when it came to other groups, even 1800s anti-Chinese racism was largely economically motivated).
When it comes to economics, I suppose had there been a real radical reconstruction after the war and the white South (and the white North) had been forced to accept equality, and if the freed slaves had been given their 40 acres and a mule, the black community might be more prosperous today, but it didn't happen. Even during the post Civil War era when black colleges sprang up and more black people went to college, that did little to bring greater wealth to the black community as a whole. Look at it like this: Say it's 1900 and you're a black medical doctor. Think you're going to get a high paying job in a white hospital or get some good-paying white clients? Think again. You'll be serving the black community. You'll be better off, but poorer than your white peers because the black community started off poor so they couldn't pay their doctors much. Or say you're a railroad engineer and it's 1920 and you're in the North. It's a good paying job, but you're being paid less than your white peers and because you can't buy a house in a white community, you have to live far away from work and spend the extra dough and time commuting. You can make the economic pie bigger (or higher, whatever), but wealth can't just be made up out of thin air, you need an injection of wealth of some kind first and the black community never really had that. Today, it takes the form of weak and not terribly effective programs like Affirmative Action, which the political right uses as a cudgel to bash the left with (because in Race Baiting 101, the final was 100% of your grade and the right aced it). And so on. And all this does is to reinforce resistance to assimilation.
You ask how to move on. Who knows? It starts with a dialogue and by dialogue I don't mean mostly angry white people complaining about black people. I mean it starts with white people listening to black people. We can't reward people who engage in race baiting (scare/anger white people) for cheap political gain. We need to discuss as a national community how to move forward and come to some kind of consensus so everybody gets on board. That's going to mean moving the ball forward for black people economically, and not just black people, all poor people. Unless that happens, I think gains made by the black community will be small and come at great cost, like they're fighting in the trenches on the Western Front in WW I.
A lot of your claims are largely inaccurately myopic views of a very complex situation and a variety of diverse nuances and experiences.
I suggest you read this link which debunks lots of the nonensical urban legends and urban myths:
I'm not going to read through this entire thread because I'm lazy and thanks to GTA, my attention span is pretty much gone. So this is just for you OP.
First, OP, we all know you're a census hoarder, in fact, this thread is really just a big intervention for you. But before we get to that, whip out that 1910 US Census you have sitting there and tell me what you see.....Ok, you see that about 90% of the black population in the US still lives in the South, keep that in mind.
Now, Southern Apologists hate it when they feel like the South's being picked on. I'm not picking on the South, but historically, it's a pretty racist place. That's not in anyway suggesting the North was all like "Come to us black people, we love you! We'll treat you right!" No, no, no. Absolutely not. The one thing about the 1910 Census is that the white people in the North were probably pretty glad that most black people didn't live in the North, because they were pretty racist too, it's just that their racism against black people would manifest itself in (usually) different ways later on in the 20th century. But moving on...
Ok, so as I'm sure other people have already pointed out in this thread, black people weren't exactly doing all that great in the decades immediately following the Civil War. Sure, they were technically free and enjoyed some improvement while the Union Army stuck around and enforced reconstruction, but that didn't last long. Soon, the ex-Confederates were running the show again and black people were pretty much placed in the realm of permanent peonage.
And if you ever read "Sundown Towns" by James Loewen, you'd see that in the late 1800s-early 1900s blacks weren't exactly all that welcome in many smaller cities and towns in the North either. That can even be applied to major northern cities. You think blacks settled in Harlem because they just really, really liked the northern end of Manhattan? No, it's because they weren't all that welcome in the other parts.
So, fast forward a little. The Great Depression and WW II see black people moving to the North and West in large numbers to find work and for war work. While they don't see much in the way of de jure segregation outside the South, they see plenty of de facto secgregation when it comes to housing (in Loewen's book, there's a picture of an angry white mob destroying the furnishings of a black homeowner just after WW II....in Cicero, Illinois).
Now, let's add a few ingredients to this disgusting stew we're making. First, African slavery was primarily based upon and undergirded by notions of white supremacy, or racism. That racism didn't go away just because slavery ended (obviously). Anti-black racism essentially came to permeate white culture. Don't believe me? Check this out:
Click on caricatures and get ready to be repulsed. Images like the ones shown absolutely permeated white culture in the late 1800s-early 1900s and for even longer. Hasn't anyone ever seen uncensored Warner Brothers' cartoons from the 30s and 40s? I have the complete collection of the early Disney Silly Symphonies cartoons and in one (late 30s), a black "mammy" archetype uses the "n word" while shooing a cat away. I couldn't believe it when I saw it, I had to rewind and play it again several times just to make sure I wasn't mishearing it, but I wasn't.
Historian Daniel Boorstin talked about America from the perspective of the working, often ingenuous institutions that were created. One might say that some of those institutions were and possibly remain racist. Ask yourself the following:
Are cops racist?
Do blacks get a fair shake in our justice system compared to whites (especially in terms of sentencing)?
Have blacks been the last ones hired, first ones fired?
Have blacks had a tougher time getting loans and credit than white people even when they had similar or even better credit scores?
Ok, so let's get back on track here. So blacks move into Northern cities and what happens? Whites move out. Now that didn't happen to all of them, but it happened to a lot of them (St. Louis, East St. Louis, Detroit, Flint, Buffalo, Baltimore, Seattle, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Gary, etc, etc). There's a name for this, white flight:
Certainly the presence of black people wasn't the only reason millions of whites abandoned the cities for the suburbs, but it was a reason for some of them. Black people being less economically mobile than whites (and some white suburbs flat out refusing to sell to blacks), this left many cities without their tax base, but with an infrastructure to keep up, so decay set in. That means worse schools, less jobs, less opportunities, more crime, more broken families, etc.
Now someone might say "but what about the black community itself? Don't they bear any responsibility for their own situation, or is it all just blame whitey?" Slow down buster. First, the black intelligentsia has been debating how blacks should behave and whether assimilation was worth it or even possible at least going back to when W.E.B. DuBois criticized Booker T. Washington. Second, there's no shortage of people within the black community today who engage in a debate over cultural issues the black community faces (fatherless families, conspicuous consumption, self-defeating behavior, etc. see: Cosby, Bill; and McGruder, Aaron). At the same time, others might argue that some of this is situational and that increased black prosperity would erase many of these problems.
But there's also the underlying problem of racism among whites. Yes, I'm going after whitey now, deal with it. Well not really. Essentially what I would say, is that whites haven't exactly made it easy for blacks to assimilate. I would say this is a direct cause of the backlash in the black community when it comes to dealing with black people who "act white"
And the debate within the black community over assimilation, how to go about doing it, whether its even desirable or not, and what possible alternatives there are to assimilation.
But I know someone will take issue with the notion that in 2013, whites could be racist. Well a lot of them are. Anyone can go to Google images and type in "racist tea party signs" and see for yourself. Now I'm not picking on the tea party, I know that they're overwhelmingly not racists, it was just the first easy example that popped into my head (I already told you I was lazy). The fact is that race-baiting and racism are still around and this is compounded by the fact that blacks can be sensitive enough to racism, discrimination and prejudice (based upon, you know, history) that they may very well often misread white people and see it when it's not even there. And you can't compare the black experience to the Asian, Native American or Hispanic experiences. They're all unique and what's different in this case is that whites have always had a special, particular virulent form of racism reserved especially for black people. In other words, the failure of blacks to assimilate has a lot (but not necessarily everything) to do with whites and white attitudes towards blacks (attitudes whites generally didn't have when it came to other groups, even 1800s anti-Chinese racism was largely economically motivated).
When it comes to economics, I suppose had there been a real radical reconstruction after the war and the white South (and the white North) had been forced to accept equality, and if the freed slaves had been given their 40 acres and a mule, the black community might be more prosperous today, but it didn't happen. Even during the post Civil War era when black colleges sprang up and more black people went to college, that did little to bring greater wealth to the black community as a whole. Look at it like this: Say it's 1900 and you're a black medical doctor. Think you're going to get a high paying job in a white hospital or get some good-paying white clients? Think again. You'll be serving the black community. You'll be better off, but poorer than your white peers because the black community started off poor so they couldn't pay their doctors much. Or say you're a railroad engineer and it's 1920 and you're in the North. It's a good paying job, but you're being paid less than your white peers and because you can't buy a house in a white community, you have to live far away from work and spend the extra dough and time commuting. You can make the economic pie bigger (or higher, whatever), but wealth can't just be made up out of thin air, you need an injection of wealth of some kind first and the black community never really had that. Today, it takes the form of weak and not terribly effective programs like Affirmative Action, which the political right uses as a cudgel to bash the left with (because in Race Baiting 101, the final was 100% of your grade and the right aced it). And so on. And all this does is to reinforce resistance to assimilation.
You ask how to move on. Who knows? It starts with a dialogue and by dialogue I don't mean mostly angry white people complaining about black people. I mean it starts with white people listening to black people. We can't reward people who engage in race baiting (scare/anger white people) for cheap political gain. We need to discuss as a national community how to move forward and come to some kind of consensus so everybody gets on board. That's going to mean moving the ball forward for black people economically, and not just black people, all poor people. Unless that happens, I think gains made by the black community will be small and come at great cost, like they're fighting in the trenches on the Western Front in WW I.
Slavery had nothing to do with race or racism. Slavery was largely colorblind and matrilineal. In fact a significant portion and possibly close to majority of Africans that came to the new world came FREE or as indentured servants but most often times free, and NEVER enslaved.
Many slave owners were mixed race and/or black.
Also many WHITE people were also slaves and most whites were not slave owners.
Also there was no collective one droppist mentality or idea of who is black in older generations further back so many ppl considered black today often were not considered black back in older times since one drop rule was only legally practiced in some southern states between 1931 and 1967. Mulatto and other separate mixed race modes of identity categories were recognized on the USA census until 1930. Jim Crow segregationist one droppism is what did the ultimate damage. The one drop rule is what did the damage and it was some delusional AA and black identified elites that came up with it and Jim Crow adherents adapted it in the late second half of Jim Crow and shattered U.S. American equality and aspirations. Jim Crow segregationist one droppism is the elephant in the room. Smh
And each area of the country had their own perceptions and of course ppl of color, mixed race, and blacks all had different perspectives and were never a homogenous monolith.
So that is something that one has to consider in their analysis.
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