A nation of immigrants and slaves

Immigration has been on my mind a lot lately, given ongoing talk of Trump's wall and the recent rise in bias incidents aimed at immigrants around the country.

I live in a city with a large immigrant population. Many of my neighbors in the city are here without documentation. So last night, I shared a short essay on Facebook on the welcome my ancestor Benjamin Nye received when he arrived on these shores in 1620. It was standard fare for the argument: We are a nation of immigrants, and should welcome other immigrants as we were.

This morning an acquaintance of mine left a comment on my post. "We are not only a nation of immigrants," he reminded me. "We are also a nation of slaves. Not everyone shared the American dream, though we all share in the American experience."

As Fahim reminded me, his ancestors didn't come here looking for a new beginning and the promise of freedom. They arrived in the cargo holds of ships. America wasn't William Bradford's city on a hill for them; it was a place where they were beaten and even hanged, until as late as the 1950s. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

It's true that Lincoln officially ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation and that the United States declared the practice unconstitutonal with the Fourteenth Amendment. It's also true that no proclamation or constitutional amendment can alter a practice as deeply entrenched in the culture and society as slavery was.

Thus the United States gave up on Reconstruction after 10 years, and pent-up resentment over the loss of white status led to all manner of repressive measures intended to return blacks in the South to the place they held prior to the Civil War, within the constraints of the new laws. Sharecropping was just another form of slavery, as were prisons like Parchman Farm. Voter suppression and poll taxes kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, and soon returned control of the Southern states and their congressional representation to whites, after a brief period of black representation.

And of course the Ku Klux Klan and its reign of terror drove those blacks north who could make the journey, to seek not better economic opportunities but basic survival. Up North, black laborers were viewed as unwanted competition by white laborers who within a generation or less after immigrating could assimilate because they looked a lot like their neighbors.

So yes, in the days of Jim Crow justice, blacks were free, but it wasn't much different from the days of slavery. Technically it was no longer illegal to teach blacks to read and write, but their schools were badly underfunded, dilapidated and worse. They were equal in the eyes of the law, but they still couldn't use the same bathrooms, drinking fountains or restaurants as whites, let alone other public facilities.

As recently as the 1950s black Americans could be and were executed without benefit of a trial in a public lynching. Then there's what happened in places like Greenwood, Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, when black neighborhoods became prosperous.

The 1960s saw some progress, but it was far more limited than we prefer to believe. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation laws to be unconstitutional, the South saw a wave of public pools closed and private swimming clubs being opened, and white parents withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in private schools that were based on church membership or required tuition that lower-income black families couldn't afford.

Pictures of lynchings embarrassed the Southern states, so greater efforts were made to give blacks a trial. The death penalty to this day remains much higher for blacks than it is for whites, as are the number of false convictions. So lynching is still a thing. We've just given it a civilized gloss.

Blacks also are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites for the same offenses, and with much heavier penalties. Poll taxes were declared illegal, but now that the federal oversight afforded by the Voting Rights Act has been removed, Southern states have passing voter ID laws to fight nonexistent voter fraud in areas with higher concentrations of minorities.

And, lest we forget, one of the effects of our country's reliance on fines to punish misdemeanors is that we have created a revenue stream for municipalities and an incentive for municipal government to impose late fees on those who don't pay their fines promptly. I'm sure you remember the Justice Department's findings in Ferguson, Mo. Justice officials said the city had been treating the black community like an ATM.

On it goes. We've made progress in our nation in terms of racial equality and justice, but it's come against a strong current of white resistance.

I really see one way forward, to make the past be as past as we want it to be, and that's to acknowledge it properly. When I was growing up we learned in school about some figures from African American history, like Harriet Tubman, Grandma Moses and George Washington Carver, and of course Martin Luther King Jr. That's pretty much it. Slavery got one paragraph in my fifth-grade history textbook and it was pretty much "Yeah, the Revolution didn't free the slaves, but we took care of that eventually, so it's all good."

Even then my education was limited. We memorized a few key phrases from "I Have a Dream," but never even looked at "Where do we go from here?" or "Letters from a Biringham Jail," much less learned about Malcolm X. We learned about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, but never about the head injury her abusive owner gave her, or that liberty when it came after the Civil War did not allow her to ride in "white cars" on trains. I didn't know anything about Frederick Douglass until I was in my 30s beyond "He's the guy with the hair."

None of the Framers was black, but there were black people in the halls of power back then. They had names like Jupiter, Sally Hemings and Oney Judge. They too are America. So are the contrabands and the 54th Mass. Colored Infantry who fought in the Civil War, or Varnum's Continentals in the Revolution. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

If we learn their stories, and the rest of black history, like we've been learning white history, and elevate these heroes like we've elevated others; if we acknowledge the horror of what our nation did to thousands of women like Harriet Jacobs as a matter of routine, then maybe -- maybe -- we one day can say these things are past.

It's going to be a long haul.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Breaking it down for Steven King

Steven King has an interesting question.

King, R-Iowa, was part of an MSNBC panel discussion on Monday afternoon, hosted by Chris Hayes, along with Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire; and reporter April Ryan. Discussion turned to the predominantly white makeup of the Republican Party, and King objected. The problem? He's tired of this whole “old white people business.”

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about?” King asked. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Hayes asked.

“Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of Western civilization.”

Hayes cut off the discussion immediately, undoubtedly hoping to stop an ugly discussion before it grew even uglier. (He since has conceded that he might have made the wrong decision.) But let's give King some credit. He has tried to initiate an important discussion on race in our country. What noteworthy contributions have non-whites made to the United States, to the West and to human civilization in general? It's only fair to ask.

For starters – and this is an easy one – black labor powered the engine of the North American economy for about two centuries. Black slavery began in 1619 when colonials brought African slaves to Virginia to work the plantation fields, but it was really in the 1660s that slavery grew and hardened into a hereditary institution in which blacks would work, and whites would reap the benefits of that labor.

For the next two centuries, blacks would receive only the barest compensation for labor that consumed their every waking hour for six days a week, while their stolen wages fattened the wealth of the white families that owned the labor camps where they toiled. (In our genteel way, we call these “plantations.”) It's safe to say that without stolen labor artificially suppressing the price of cotton, the American economy never would have been as powerful as it was by the time of the Civil War.

But I'm sure that King is tired of hearing about slavery, so let's not dwell on that. We'll also overlook the cultural contributions of black performers such as Sidney Poitier, Paul Robeson, Diana Ross and Louis Armstrong; the very existence of jazz music and spirituals that have been mainstays in church or around campfires for generations, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”; and cultural icons like Bugs Bunny, largely derived from Gullah stories of Brer Rabbit.

We also should discount the contribution of the black and Chinese laborers who built the railways out West. I'm sure King wouldn't count that as significant, since anybody could have built railroads or paved roads. The real movers and shakers were the tycoons who owned the businesses and who received millions of dollars from the efforts of these laborers. God's eyes are on the workers, but it's the wealthy who matter to us.

Should we focus on people like Daniel Hale Williams, the first person to successfully complete open heart surgery? Williams was black, but perhaps he won't count for King, because Williams only pioneered a new lifesaving procedure in medicine and didn't actually discover a new field of medicine.

Other such inventions and innovations include blood banks, the refrigerator, the electric trolley, the dust pan, the comb, the mop, the brush, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, traffic signals, the pen and the pencil sharpener.

Still, these are mere inventions, King might object. That Kenmore refrigerator is important, and you miss it when it stops working in the heat of the summer, but that's not as foundational to civilization as the very notion of democracy.

Alas, it is not. So let's look at the foundations, and see where they lie.

Agriculture began around 9,000 BCE far from Europe, in the fertile crescent, where farmers started to raise wheat and barley; and around 8,000 BCE in South America, with the first potato farmers. Cultivating crops may mark the start of human civilization, since agriculture allows formerly nomadic people to settle down and begin to see one spot of land as home.

As agriculture improves, the land begins to support more people in smaller areas. Cities are about as foundational to civilization as we can get, and the first known cities were nowhere in Western Europe, Eastern Europe or the United States. The oldest cities arose in ancient Sumer, around 7500 BCE. Writing first appeared around 3200 BCE, in Sumeria and in Egypt. China developed its first writing around 1200 BCE.

There was approximately nothing going on in Europe at this time. Greece was in decline and had entered a period called the Greek Dark Ages, and everything else we've learned of the rest of Europe we've had to deduce from graves.

Back to those ancient cities. Living in close proximity to one another often gives rise to other innovations. With space at a premium, there is a need to stack people atop one another more efficiently.  So architecture also may be said to have originated in Sumer, along with government and means of records-keeping.

That also means that economies (and economics) began in Sumer, although money wouldn't come along for several centuries. Lydia, a city-state located in present-day Turkey, generally is credited with minting the first coins in the seventh century BCE, but it was the Tang Dynasty of China that gets credit for inventing paper currency in 740 BCE.

King also claims credit on behalf of Christianity, for its contributions to Western civilization. It's worth remembering that Christianity isn't actually a European or Western religion. It began in the East, and embraces many Eastern ideals such as the union of body and spirit, and judging a man on his actions rather than on his words. The gospel was preached in Africa before it reached Europe, and the biggest churches today are in Asia, not the United States. How anyone could link this to white people is beyond me.

So, there you have it, Mr. King. I'm no historian, but while I'll agree that European and American societies have gifted the world with tremendous literature, music, art, philosophy, science and God knows what else, I'm not sure there is any basis to your claim that we've done more than any other race, color or ethnicity. Discount the black contribution to America, and you erase America. Discount Africa and Asia, and you've just erased human history.

Tired of this whole “old white people business?” Then come on out and join the rest of the human race, Mr. King. There's a whole lot going on out here, and you don't want to miss out.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

New Jersey owes an apology for role in slavery

Should New Jersey apologize for its roll in slavery?

Invariably when this issue surfaces, as at the federal level a few years ago, someone objects on the grounds that slavery ended throughout the nation 140 years ago. All the slaveowners are dead, and every person who once was a slave has died. There is no one left, the argument goes, to apologize to, nor anyone left who owes an apology.

My concern is that the apology won't go far enough, that it will merely be an intellectual statement of guilt but will not do anything to indicate true repentance or a desire to right the wrongs.

Those arguments miss an important truth. The sins of the fathers are visited upon their sons. Slavery ended in the blood and fire of the Civil War, but it swiftly was replaced by more than a century of segregation and jim crow justice, and by a dark legacy of racism. Even today, when we have a serious contender for the presidency who is black, opportunities and education remain measurably slanted on a racial basis. The sin that led to the institution of slavery remains.

One of the common responses to this sort of proposal is to argue that African Americans are better off than they would have been had they been born in Africa. Who can say for certain? We only know the story we have, not the story that might have been told.

The current state of many African nations is due in some part to their own role in the slave trade, and the heightened conflicts and predation that went into capturing people to sell as slaves. If the pre-existing conflicts had not been exacerbated by the slave trade, perhaps those nations would be stronger and more cohesive than they are now.

However, all things being equal, I'd have to say that they probably are. I remember back during the Rwanda genocide, reading an op-ed piece by a columnist whose ancestors entered the United States not through Ellis Island but in some unnamed port, not looking forward to a life of freedom and opportunity but to one of brutal exploitation and degradation. Yet as this fellow looked at the mutilated bodies floating down the river, he was glad that they had come, because if they hadn't, he wouldn't be living where he was.

If it's true that some of America's contemporary wealth and state of advancement is due to the labor provided by slaves in the South before the Civil War, and in the Northern states before they proclaimed their own emancipation, it's also true that both blacks and whites have received those economic benefits.

God does bring good out of evil, and he can even sew a silk purse from a pig's ear. But that doesn't mean that the evil doesn't continue to exact its toll, nor that the silk purse does not in some manner remain a pig's ear.

For the apology to be more than empty words, it needs to be accompanied by some meaningful action: a stronger commitment to schools in urban areas, for instance; greater incentive for business and industry to invest in our inner cities; and a greater celebration of the African American culture than token nods its way with Black History Month and Kwanzaa. I

t's great that kids today know prominent black performers like Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey; it'd be much better if their knowledge extended back to Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Hines, Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Huston, to say nothing of the many blacks who have contributed to America's politics, military, civics and everything else.

If the New Jersey government really wants to make good on an apology for slavery, what it will need is to make a deliberate effort to serve the black community and elevate it to equal footing alongside the Caucasian community.

"Our ancestors debased yours, and it was wrong. To correct the heritage we received from them, we will now abase ourselves before you and serve you."