The past is always with us
20th July 2015 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
greater union personal loans Editor
There’s an old adage that says who we are is who we were.
That idea has been on my mind a great deal of late as the nation and cities like New Orleans debate the removal of Confederate battle flags, statues of Confederate heroes and other symbols of racial hatred and division.
Who we are as a people is largely shaped by who we were, the lives our ancestors lived, the challenges, disadvantages and opportunities they faced, and the decisions they made about the way they would live out their lives.
As the Eastern European origin of the word “slave” attests to, Black people in the U.S. were not the first or only people to ever endure slavery. The Japanese enslaved Koreans, the Roman Empire enslaved Anglo-Saxons and so on.
But the slavery Blacks in America survived was arguably unlike any form of human bondage endured by a people before or since. We were kidnapped and transported across an expansive ocean, ripped away from our ancestral homeland and essentially out of history. We were beaten into submission, robbed of our languages and bought, sold and traded on the auction block like cattle. We were not allowed to learn to quick loans montel williams read or establish families and for many enslaved Africans the only release from lives of servitude was death.
The forces that created such a harsh environment for enslaved Africans are still at work in America today. Every effort is still being made to ensure that European Americans maintain power over people of color by any means necessary.
American slavery never died —it simply evolved into other forms of oppression and economic exploitation including sharecropping, Jim Crow laws practice, use of cheap labor in underdeveloped countries and mass incarceration.
With every passing generation, Black America appears to be evolving into a watered-down version of its former African self. While there are obviously exceptions, the watering-down effect is by design and not an anomaly. Draconian laws, unequal justice, economic bias and gun- and drug-trafficking are decimating communities of color.
Institutions like the Black family, the Black Church and Black schools are under constant attack from the larger society. Domestic terrorists are shooting up and burning down Black houses of worship, “privatization” has wrested control of public schools from the communities they are supposed to serve, unarmed Black men, women and children are being murdered by those sworn to protect and serve, and the criminal justice system payday loans with ssi debit card continues to harvest Black bodies as fuel for the ever-growing prison-industrial complex.
It’s hard to disagree with those who say Blacks are facing the same kind of white backlash and racial violence that they did after Reconstruction.
While the white masses are also showing signs of struggling in America, that’s also by design. The same one percent that is calling the shots in America today are descendants of the one percent who crafted the United States Constitution and decided that Black people were three-fifths human and had no rights that whites were bound by law to respect.
At the end of the day, we have to accept the fact that we live in a nation that was founded as a republic intended solely for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) and that the growth, development and prosperity of this nation has always depended heavily on the subjugation and exploitation of Red, Black, Brown and Yellow people.
Every law and article of the Constitution was meticulously crafted to give Europeans an unfair advantage over other ethnic groups.
Voting rights were never intended to extend to poor whites, women or people of color. While the Constitution observed that “all men are created equal,” it websites for cash loans was designed to place all decision-making power in the hands of wealthy white male landowners.
Becoming white was the steep price that European immigrants paid for the privilege of being a card-carrying member of the winning team in America. But in order for Europeans to be white, we had to be Black. As the late, great James Baldwin noted during a 1985 lecture at LSU, Europe’s lower classes fled poverty, famine, monarchy rule and religious persecution, “determined that somebody else would be the nigger.”
It has to be a severe blow to the collective ego and psyche of White America to finally see a day when a sizable number of the inhabitants and lawmakers of this land have decided that it is time to remove enduring symbols of white supremacy from public places.
What does removing these symbols of white supremacy mean? It means that while America has light years to go before it can call itself a civilized nation or a democratic republic, it is at least attempting to take baby steps in the right direction.
Once the Confederate flags and statues come down, as well as monuments to other slave owners and genocidal advocates like John McDonogh and Andrew Jackson, we nail salon cash advance can begin the painstaking, protracted process of dismantling systemic racism, economic exclusion and unequal justice.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get that done before the dawn of the 22nd century?
In the meantime, vote some questions for y’all. Here we go:
• If New Orleans Mayor Maurice “Moon” Landrieu had the moral conscience and integrity to remove the Confederate flag from City Council Chambers in 1969, why did it take his son more than five years in office — some 46 years after the Confederate flag was removed — to even think about starting a discussion about removing the uptown New Orleans monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and why did jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis have to tell the mayor that it was time for the Robert E. Lee statue at Lee Circle to come down?
• What do you think about author Ned Sublette’s suggestion that Lee Circle be renamed to honor Dessalines, one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution?
• With that in mind, if the City of New Orleans is looking for other suggestions for the renaming of Lee Circle, why not consider honoring the memory and bravery of Toussaint L’Ouverture, splut payday loan who successfully led the Haitian Revolution and prompted a defeated Napoleon Bonaparte to sell the Louisiana Territory to the burgeoning United States for a mere fraction of what the land was worth, thereby laying the foundation for a thriving New Orleans and an expansion of the USA?
• Why haven’t any of the city’s Black elected officials over the past few decades even thought about erecting a monument to honor the enslaved Africans killed during and after the 1811 slave revolt, the largest uprising of enslaved Africans in U.S. history and a revolt that was conceived by enslaved Africans who gathered in Congo Square?
• Does the fact that some Africans sold men, women and children to European slave traders and the fact that some Blacks in the “New World” bought and owned enslaved Africans make U.S. slavery any less offensive and egregious?
• Why are so few people talking about the fact that John McDonogh owned slaves and donated some of his ill-gotten gains to an all-white public school system?
• Should the Andrew Jackson statue in Jackson Square in the French Quarter be part of the discussion about racist monuments in New Orleans since he owned slaves special loans and recommended that Native Americans be given blankets used by smallpox patients to decimate the indigenous population?
• If Tulane University founder Paul Tulane bought, owned and sold enslaved Africans and made huge profits from slavery, should a majority-Black city and its residents be forced to allow the university to continue to operate without paying property taxes?
• When is Tulane going to come clean with full disclosure of its past association with slavery a la Brown University?
• Why are Black elected officials who have not said a single word about the economic exclusion of Blacks, police misconduct and the Recovery School District’s plans to build a school for Black students atop a toxic landfill suddenly enthusiastic and vocal about the removal of statues of Confederate generals and leaders from public places in New Orleans?
• Is anyone out there surprised by the Data Center’s new study, which found that the post-Katrina demolition of 5,000 public housing units and the increased use of housing vouchers did very little to disperse or reduce poverty in New Orleans?
This article originally published in the July 20, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
