America Behind the Color Line (46 page)

Kalais is sharp and quick and witty: in another world, he could have been a successful entrepreneur, a lawyer, or a doctor. Instead, he has been in and out of jail for the better part of his life.

It may be too late for Kalais, but some young men, all juvenile offenders, are being given a second chance. I visited the Evening Reporting Center at the Westside Association for Community Action. Instead of going to jail, these teenagers have been sentenced to the Pretrial Service Program in the Department of Probation and Court Services of the Cook County Division of Juvenile Justice. After three weeks they will be reassessed. Gang rivalries disappear here, replaced by counseling, homework with tutoring, recreation, socializing, nurturing. It’s three times cheaper to keep a young man on this program than to send him to jail, and it has a 91 percent success rate.

Seventeen-year-old Jason Smith entered the program after being arrested for possession of a loaded semiautomatic handgun. First arrested at the age of twelve, he had been a member of a gang and dealing since he was thirteen, and had quickly climbed the drug hierarchy. Around the time he turned fifteen, he was given his own “set.” I asked him what that meant.

“A set is a street, sometimes by a school, sometimes by a neighbor’s house, where a person’s spot to sell drugs is designated by gang members. I was out there on the set with three or four guys I had grown up with,” he said. “By the time I was sixteen years old, we were making about $10,000 a week from the crack house in Evanston, between the ten of us. Sometimes I’d go home with $1,000 a day. I started buying clothes and spending money on girls and more expensive cars. I helped my family with the rent and continued buying drugs to sell.”

Jason feared he would probably end up shot or in jail before long, but instead, he ended up before a judge who sentenced him to the Pretrial Service Program. There, something “buried within” helped him turn his life around—to the extent that he is now completing a bachelor’s degree in business and works as a probation officer with the Illinois Circuit Court of Cook County.

Gangs, drugs, teenage pregnancy, the breakdown of the family, white racism, lack of role models, bad choices, nihilism, instant gratification: these are the explanations that the people from the South Side themselves give for the causes of a seemingly inescapable downward spiral of hopelessness that has become synonymous in America with the inner city, despite the fact that most people here are decent, hardworking, responsible—fighting against odds that would have crushed me. It is intolerable—or it should be—that anyone lives like this in America in the twenty-first century. How do we change this?

My generation was raised to seek freedom through education, to use the schools and literacy to “beat the white man at his own game,” as our parents put it. Now, with segregation outlawed, with more equal opportunity in education available than we could scarcely dream of, whose fault is it? The ethos of education and self-help that was drummed into my generation sometimes seems as far away from here as the mass migration of hundreds of thousands of poor southerners that turned this part of Chicago into a black metropolis. A concerted assault on
all
of these problems is the only way to stop the rot in our inner cities. But welfare and other social safety-net programs have been cut dramatically in the last few years. And without federally and state-funded support programs, especially job training, these residents have very little chance of escaping the cycle of poverty.

No one has done more in the past thirty years to generate hope and aspiration among inner-city citizens than the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Jesse’s message is filtering through. Hope
is
alive, even here. But the problem, he laments, is that “people who are living with low roofs on their dreams develop lifestyles to match.”

I attended graduation ceremonies at Chicago’s famous black Du Sable High School. The students come from some of the most deprived backgrounds in America, but they have thrived. This is more than a commencement: it is a victory in a war against terror. Armed with diplomas, the students have embraced Frederick Douglass’s message that the road from slavery to freedom is paved with education—that education is the blackest thing one can do.

Walking through Du Sable’s Hall of Fame, I saw politicians, scientists, entertainers, and community leaders—even Nat King Cole went to school here. So did Mayor Harold Washington. A small, determined minority will always transcend their environment, against the odds, with a strength of will that few of us in more privileged backgrounds can imagine.

But how much hope do today’s students feel about their future? Dr. Emiel Hamberlin, a teacher at Du Sable for thirty-six years, expresses hope tempered with realism.

“I suppose I could get very upset about finding out that a student has dropped out because she’s pregnant or another is in the Cook County Jail because he’s busted for selling drugs,” Dr. Hamberlin told me. “But then I look at the students as they’re walking through the hall, as they’re sitting in the cafeteria and in my classroom, and I wonder, if I was in this community, which one of them would I be? Just which one would I be? If I was dealt a hand of an environment that is so negative, that draws so much energy away, that actually reinforces their negativity so well, and they are successful being negative, then how can I offset it with being positive?”

The bricks and mortar at the Robert Taylor Homes are coming down, a housing project so horrendous that only its destruction could fix it. But can a healthy culture grow on this fallow ground? Racism, economic discrimination, poor medical facilities, substandard schools, drugs, crime, violence: beyond the bricks and mortar, these are the forces still alive and well in the ghetto. In the end, our lives are determined by the choices we make. No white racist forces you to get pregnant at sixteen, or to sell or use drugs. What separates the graduates at Du Sable from the “vocational students” at the Cook County Jail? When we figure that out, can we bottle and sell it? Can a different culture flourish here, where the hopes and dreams of each individual have a chance to grow? Only if we as a society at long last destroy the structural forces of racism and job discrimination that curtail the choices and possibilities of the people who live here. Our people have always had to fight against and conquer tremendous forces arranged against us. We have done so through sheer willpower and an almost naïve belief in the power of education and in the principles upon which this democracy was founded, believing—against the odds—in the promise of an unfettered future. Only if each person here embraces the best of the
black
tradition, and takes refuge from this culture of chaos through education, deferred gratification, and hard work, can we, too, claim our stake in the American dream. For in the end—despite all of the various explanations—there can be no other way.

JESSE L. JACKSON
Restitution, Reinvestment

Today we view slavery as a kind of blur in the history of this country. Yet America is too young for the memory of slavery to be so old. The existence of slavery is too close to be thought of as so far away. When one considers the economic origin of America, it was Africa and her people who subsidized America’s development. After all, two hundred years without wages is an African subsidy to America, redefining what party is “creditor,” and which is “debtor,” in the African-American relationship.

In telling the story of America, we focus on Ellis Island and on the immigrants who traveled here seeking economic liberation—far more than religious freedom, I might add. But we cannot understand Ellis Island in New York unless we understand Gorée Island in Senegal, because it was the wealth derived from the African slave trade that enabled America to become strong enough to attract immigrants.

Unlike other groups who came to America as immigrants, Africans were brought here and enslaved and exploited for economic ends, with the support of a national legal system. In other words, the exploitation of African Americans has been built into the political, legal, economic, social, and cultural structure of America. One cannot simply evolve out of an exploitative status that is so thoroughly structured into the institutions, laws, and culture of a nation.

It is true that immigrants were exploited, but they were able, based upon their skin color, to move beyond it and take on new identities. But because there was such degradation around the issue of race, America was built for two hundred years on African people having no rights that whites were bound to respect, and on whites being able to make full use of Africans for economic advantage. Thus, slavery was about both race and class, because while race was the ideology, greed was the driving force.

We are taught that whites basically came here looking for religious freedom. It’s not really true. Some did, but there were notices posted in Europe that said, if you will go to America, we will give you one hundred acres of free land, and free laborers. The promise of America was both free land and free labor. Europeans may have been scholars, prisoners, entrepreneurs, or oppressed— none of that mattered. No matter what the status may have been in Europe, they came here, in the main, for the promise of free land and free labor.

The existence of slavery was woven into the fabric of the country. It was woven into religion, because slavery could be rationalized as having been ordained by God. It became part of the country’s sociology, part of our scholarly institutions, our politics, our culture, our literature. Race is a deep matter. And each time there’s been some law to change the equation politically, it has never had an economic application. Two hundred years after slavery was instituted in America, it was made illegal, but no one changed any of the economic assumptions, or any of the educational assumptions, of the system that put it in place.

As Frederick Douglass said, “. . . we became free, but then we were free to starve, free without land, free without education, free without compensation, free without reparations; just free.” Those who were “supreme,” who were “seven-fifths human,” lost nothing economically. Those who were considered three-fifths human gained nothing economically. The law changed, but the economic infrastructure did not change. People on the American political left say that poverty is a problem of the economic system. People on the American political right say it’s a problem of individual initiative. What all of those persons fail to do is deal with the matter of historical continuity. Since God started making days, not a single day has been missed. And all things therefore are connected.

Let’s look, for example, at the matter of insurance. When our forebears were enslaved, the slave owners took out insurance policies on them. If a parent died or escaped, the slave owners collected. Insurance companies collected as well, and in turn invested the money in the burgeoning American infrastructure of the 1800s, such as railroads and cities. When American slavery was abolished legally, what did insurance companies do? Those insurance companies that would sell insurance to African Americans—and many of them would not— established race-based premiums, logged on two sets of books, one for “Colored” and one for “White.” African Americans and people of color were forced to pay more for the same insurance policies than those for whites, and more for the policy than it was worth. Consequently, insurance companies developed a system to deny or “redline” access to capital for people of color.

There is continuity between slave-era exploitation by insurance companies and present-day exploitation of African Americans by insurance companies. Therefore, a critical issue of our time is, state by state, which insurance companies maintained slavery-based policies, and which—an even larger number— had race-based policies? How much money did they make on the original premiums, and on any investments they made on that capital? These are very real questions. An analysis of the current disparities in wealth, health, education, and access to capital between African Americans and European Americans rests on historic economic exploitation of people of color in America, particularly African Americans. Thus, America must address its legal history of inequities in order that her creed of equal protection under the law and equal opportunity carries a resonance of reality.

To do so, each state legislature must conduct research to identify exploitative companies, and proceed with legislation to recover what amounts to stolen assets. Recovery is separate from reparations, and relates to stolen property. While the process for reparations may coincide with recovery, each must be viewed distinctly. For example, based on the investments that were made with that stolen property, reparations deal with injury over time and opportunity lost. If today I were to take $50,000 from you and hold it for twenty years, you would lose your house, you would lose your property, you would be unable to send your child to school, and your world would come apart. If you catch me twenty years later, I cannot just pay you; there must be recovery and restitution for the robbery. That is a real issue for African-American people, and it must now take on the dignity, if you will, of legislative action. It cannot just be seen as something that the mad people on the margin talk about. The fight for research, recovery, restitution, and reparations must be systematized, as was the process which robbed so many for so long. The process must be mainstreamed.

Another example of historical continuity is the connection between the Revolutionary War fought by enslaved Africans in St. Domingue and the expansion of America. In 1799, the French general Napoleon ordered an army to St. Domingue to put down a rebellion by colonized slaves. Waging and winning a war of attrition over several years, the enslaved Africans eventually established the first republic in the Western Hemisphere and named it Haiti. We now know that the defeat of the French armies in St. Domingue, Napoleon’s most prized possession overseas, was a major factor in his decision to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States.

The land from this purchase, extending from New Orleans up to Montana, doubled America in size. Without the Louisiana Purchase, America would not have been able to expand westward. Likewise, railroads would never have been built. Later, the U.S. government, under the Railroad Act, gave away all railroad properties—thousands of acres, six miles extending on either side of the tracks—to whites only. Consequently, the prosperity of the South, the settling of the West, the building of the railroads, all were triggered by the work and deeds of Africans and Chinese, whether they were coming from Africa or from the Caribbean or China. Thus, the exploitation of race has been a huge factor in the development of America.

In many ways, the tentacles of oppression that suck the blood and energy of African Americans are still real though less obvious. For example, every day, the media projects African Americans as less intelligent than we are, less hardworking, less patriotic, and more violent. In some sense it helps set a certain negative, limited parameter of our human value. We speak of the humiliation of police profiling, but the more basic profiling for the masses of our people is much more humiliating. African-American people, like me, pay more for insurance. We pay more for our home mortgages, we pay more for bank loans, and we pay more for our automobile financing. Predatory exploitation is a multibillion-dollar industry driven by race. In some cases, entire zip codes are used to exclude; sometimes they use other schemes, such as “payday loans.” But if we pay more for less, and get fewer services, and live in stress, then we do not live as long.

If I were writing a
Freedom Symphony
in four movements, the first movement—the dominant movement—would reflect the abolition of slavery as an institution, by law, although we had no educational rights and no economic rights. The second movement would be about the end of legalized racial segregation, which was another phase of economic exploitation. The third movement would be about access to the right to vote for all citizens, a movement and struggle unto itself. But one can be out of slavery, out of legal segregation, have the right to vote, and still starve to death, because none of those movements dealt with the economic infrastructure. They were all about our legal status; about changes to the law. None of them put forward any plan for economic recovery or economic restitution or economic restructuring.

American “apartheid” was ended as a matter of law, but unless one has some plan to offset the economic denial and exploitation, then the racial denial continues. Therefore, the fourth movement of the
Freedom Symphony
is the quest for economic restructuring, restitution, and recovery. It is the mastery of the financial system under which we live. By and large, the wealth of this country is within the private sector, which represents 80 percent of all jobs. That is why in the fourth movement of the symphony, we must now become shareholders and not just sharecroppers.

Being a shareholder in America’s growth and development requires personal responsibility. Personal initiative and discipline, punctuality, a thirst for educational excellence, valuing preparation over pregnancy, and abstinence from mind-altering drugs have to do with will. However, the structural crisis afflicting African Americans cannot be ameliorated exclusively through the agency of individual will. For example, if you have a size 9 foot and a size 8 shoe, individual initiative and manipulation of your toes will not keep you from damaging your feet. There’s a structural context for your individual efforts, and in time, walking with a size 9 foot in a size 8 shoe will increase your pain so much that you will give up; you will just stop walking. You’ll spend your time trying to anesthetize your pain, whether with drugs or other forms of gratification. You will figure that since you cannot change the structural context, short-term fun is easier than preparing for your future. For the economically exploited and oppressed, life is not worth fighting all the time. Some rationalize they will never possess a size 9 shoe for their size 9 foot, and relinquish hope.

The real struggle has to be about structural change. Why are we so good as African-American people in golf, football, basketball, baseball, track, and tennis? These sports require the most of any human being in terms of correlating more than cognitive skills. To be a professional athlete, you must be the best in the whole world, exceeding others of whatever race, class, or religion anywhere. Why are we so good in these endeavors? Some would say because African Americans have an athletic genetic superiority. The answer is rooted in the structure of American society. Whenever the playing field is even and the rules are public and the goals are clear, we can advance to the next level. Who becomes the best basketball player in Boston is determined by objective criteria: who gets the most rebounds, shoots the most points, makes the most assists, and plays the best defense. Who becomes president of Harvard University is very subjective. Anyone who watches a basketball game can see how the players handle the ball. The president of Harvard is chosen behind closed doors.

African Americans do not do as well in situations where decisions subject to cultural influence are made in private. We do better when the playing field is even. In some sense, we are making more progress in the army than in the society as a whole, because at least if you have more stripes than the other person, they must respect status that is born out of the structure of stripes and bars and leaves.

The mission of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition is to defend, protect, and gain civil rights, by leveling the playing field in every aspect of American life and spreading peace around the world. The point, it seems to me, is that America has too quickly defined the civil rights struggle as having ended back in the days of civil rights protest and activism. What is Rainbow’s objective? It is to even the playing field. Is there even access to medicine? No. Is there even access to who may be a judge? No. Is there even access in who may run for governor? No. Is there even access in who will receive construction contracts? No. Most of the field in America is yet uneven. Where the field is uneven defines our agenda.

The most basic step within the goal of economic restructuring is access to education, because strong minds bring strong change. Think about the slavery system. The slave owner had the right to rape the woman on his property, anytime he wanted. Had the right to hang the black man for trying to escape brutal work conditions, or for striking a white man, or for lying with a white woman. African Americans lived under degrading conditions and under the slave owner’s rights. Wouldn’t let you go to church, his rights. If a slave master were caught teaching you to read or write, even he could be punished, because even in slavery, they knew that strong minds break strong chains.