This open letter was written about 7 months ago as a response to another open letter claiming that the African American and Latino achievement gap could be related to Marijuana Use. I am re-posting it today because I want your help in expanding and developing the list of "Institutional Racism" that is feature in the middle of this letter. It is a simple tool for opening a friend or family members eyes to the depths of the oppression inflicted to create the ghettos of America.
The achievement gap very closely follows economic class status, and its relationship to higher education opportunities. It is further exacerbated by socialized racism that has been legally implemented in all of our lives.
Our Contemporary Racism depends more on the propensity for privileged folk (mostly white people) to assume that economically oppressed, mostly ethnic people exist to suffer. As their suffering is collectively taken for granted; the question of why these communities would suffer the ghettos, and epidemic and endemic levels of unemployment, violence, crime, and lower academic achievement is never really asked. Hidden just beyond the neglected question of why, is a horror show of very contemporary legal and social oppression.
The Mechanism of our Societal Racism is in our ability to be okay with the idea that Black and Latino Folk were made to suffer, to accept it as static part of modern life, and not be immediately compelled to understand what happened? and what we can do to help our fellow human brothers and sisters?
- Racial Profiling: an ongoing and very contemporary struggle.
- If you’re only 2 years old, you were alive when lynching wasn't yet a Hate Crime. Lynching became a hate crime in 2009 via the Federal Hate Crimes Legislation aka the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expands the Federal Government’s ability to investigate and prosecute hate crimes if the local/ state government isn't, and expands its protection beyond cases where the victim is involved in a federally protected activities such as going to school or voting, it was just passed in 2009, one year ago. Yes!! before 2009 a racially motivated murder wasn't a hate crime unless the victim was voting or going to school!!!!
- If you're 3 years old, then you've been around for America's most recent lynchings, and White guys are still getting away with Lynching black folk: Brandon McClelland, executed 2008
- If you’re at least 13 years old: you were around to hear about James Byrd, who was Lynched by three white men who tied a chain around his neck, and drug him down the freeway behind a pickup truck, until his head ripped off, in 1998.
- If you're at least 21 years old and lived in a minority neighborhood, your parents wouldn't have been able to get a loan to buy their house due to Red Lining (1934 on through the 1990's), the practice of denying, or increasing the cost of, services such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined areas.
- At least 37 years old and you were around for Negro Removal aka Urban Renewal & Redevelopment. These were policies that allowed developers to get minority communities declared as slums, which would then be Taken through the power of Eminent Domain, and redeveloped for a profit. Urban Renewal was in full swing from the 1940's till 1974 with the adoption of the community block grant model, which switched to the model from community replacement to neighborhood Renewal.
- West Berkeley's Very Own Redevelopment Agency is just closing its doors now. The plan was to clear out the poor and "colored" residential neighborhoods, for commercial redevelopment.
- At least 39 years old and you would have been alive when the last Lawful Racial Segregation was ended. Segregation was law from 1870 through 1970.
- At least 40 years old: You may have heard about COINTELPRO, an FBI Counter Intelligence Program that targeted Martin Luther King, Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, NAACP, and many other Civil Rights Agencies and Leaders from California to Puerto Rico
- "Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association" --Report of The Church Committee
- At least 40 years old, and you might have witnessed the closure in 1971 of Merritt College, the only Berkeley or Oakland Community College located in a black neighborhood, which was later reopened far away from everything except for a few that are wealthy enough that they don't need a community college.
- At least 44 years old: you would have been around for Miscegenation Laws (1691-1967), in California through 1948, just 62 years ago. My mixed buddy's Trevor's parents got death threats for making a "mud baby" when his Czech mom birthed a child with his black dad in Oakland, just 28 years ago.
- At least 46 years old, you would have seen the destruction of African American communities at the hands of the Interstate Highway System, 1956 -- approx 1965. Highways were often built directly through African American Communities, even socially vibrant communities like Black Bottom, Detroit could get labeled as a slum and be cleared away. West Oakland is a classic example where an African American community is surrounded on all sides by freeway.
- At least 47 years old, you would have been alive when residential racial discrimination was still legal, it was finally forbidden by the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the purchase and sale of homes.
- At least 66 years old, and you would have been around for the development of most of our society's most dangerous ghettos: the old housing from the WW2 War Ship Building (1940-1945) shipyards in Richmond, West Oakland, Bay View/Hunters Point, even Marin City, where Tupak Shakur went to finish High School. After the war effort, the federal, state, and local governments saw no value in securing a future economy for the African Americans who fled the south to go find work at the shipyards. The last real investment in many of these communities was the war effort 75 years ago.
- At least 88 years old, and you would have witnessed ETHNIC CLEANSING via the TULSA RACE RIOTS through firebombing from national guard airplanes and wholesale destruction by armed white mobs of 35 blocks of black neighborhood, including Black Wall St. Not an Isolated incident, the Ethnic Cleansing in Tulsa inspired a few years of massacres across the states including the Rosewood Massacre in Florida.
- And I'm not even getting in to events that happened beyond the life times of people living today, such as The Black Codes, U.S. Chattel Slavery, or the Imperial Colonization of Africa, And the Americas
Furthermore, to assume that because there is a Black President, that the problem of racism is over, is to forget that communities have always been divided against each other to enforce oppression. Hence the Field Slave and the House Slave. The existence of a successful black upper middle class does in no way mean that oppression and its amplifier, racism, is over. There are still to this day black folk that use the word "nigger" to describe "low/no class" blacks. Neither are Black Cops, D.A.'s and Judges (Upper and Middle class) any less vulnerable to prejudice against so called "low class" blacks, or their hot rodd'n "hood rich" counterparts. Racism is not over, but we're finally getting to an important apex where it's not the laws of our nation that are directly inflicting the harm, But their social and economic legacy.
At this time in history, we have ended the majority of Laws by which our governments directly endorsed and applied racial oppression. Also, our Federal Government has begun to complete the work of criminalizing "non-state" agents and actions of oppression. We can now begin to earnestly alleviate the Economic and Social damage that was legally inflicted. Thirty, Forty Years From Now, in the balance of empowerment and oppression, we will still be in the Red. We will still be working to lift our fellow man and woman out of the oppression created by our culture. We have work to do.
Work like funding Primary, Secondary and Higher Education; Providing Youth with Summer Jobs; Providing Real Access to Tutoring for all students.
- Simple stuff really, like making sure there are enough resources to make sure we don't have fifth graders that can't read!!!
- Maybe the federal and various other complicit local governments could volunteer to pay damages in the form of college scholarships to our many Oppressed Citizens.
- What we definitely don't need is to pretend that the real problem is that African Americans collectively have a Marijuana problem.
Sincerely, Asa Dodsworth
