Project Logic Ga

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an important book.  The following notes restructure my views on Blacks in America from the past relative to moving forward… read this and let the concepts sink into your mindset.

There is a basic assumption in this country, one black people are not immune to, which holds that if blacks comport themselves in a way that accords with middle-class values, if they are polite, educated, and virtuous, then all the fruits of America will be open to them. In its most vulgar form, this theory of personal Good Negro Government denies the existence of racism and white supremacy as meaningful forces in American life.

page 22   When political strategists argue that the Republican Party is missing a huge chance to court the black community, they are thinking of this mostly male bloc – the old guy in the barbershop, the grizzled Pop Warner coach, the retired Vietnam vet, the drunk uncle at the family reunion. He votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels – in fact, he knows – that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him.

page 54  Implicit in the notion of code-switching is a belief in the illegitimacy of blacks as Americans, as well as a disbelief in the ability of our white peers to understand us.

page 67 The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest – $74 billion in today’s dollars- and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country’s exports.

“White men,” wrote Mississippi senator and eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, “have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist were white men to fill the positions here occupied by the servile race.”

page 85  America is literally unimaginable without plundered labor shackled to plundered land, without the organizing principle of whiteness as citizenship, without the culture crafted by the plundered, and without that culture itself being plundered.

page  138 The poet Lucille Clifton once put it succinctly:

They act like they don’t love their country

No

What it is

Is they found out

Their country don’t love them.

page 140 “When our laws, our leaders, or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expression of patriotism,” Obama said in Independence, Missouri, in June 2008.

page 152  I subscribed, like most, to the theories of the sociologist William Julius Wilson: that the decline of the kind of industrial-high-paying low-skill jobs that built America’s white middle-class had left large numbers of young black men unemployed, and the government made no real effort to ameliorate this shift. An array of unfortunate consequences issued from this swift – family poverty, violent streets, poor schools.

page 158 Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth – the home of a decreased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle.  Blacks in the middle class often brought with a generational debt – an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids.  And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung.

The sin of slavery did not stop with slavery.  On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime in a long-tradition of crimes, of plunder even, that could be traced into the present day. And whereas a claim for reparations for slavery rested in the ancestral past, in was now clear that one could make a claim on behalf of those who were very much alive.

page 163 The Case of Reparations… Deuteronomy 15: 12-15

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.  And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.  And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD they God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

page 168  From 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal.  Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

page 176 “A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,” wrote the Quaker John Woolman in 1769, “and that if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them.”

page 179 The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time.  The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer.  To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte.  If Thomas Jefferson’s genius matters, then so does his taking of Sally Hemings’ body.

page 186  Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics – jobs heavily occupied by blacks.  When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.

page 200 To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism a la carte.

page 201  And this destruction did not end with slavery.

page 202  Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge – that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.   …that American prosperity was ill gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts.

page. 206  All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken.  “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me.  “It’s because of then.”

page  215  The most direct example in my life of the price we black people paid for living under the weight of someone else’s purpose – of being a disposable prop in someone else’s national sage – was my friend Prince Jones, murdered by a police officer shortly after I’d left Howard.

page 231 In absolute terms, America’s prison and jail population from 1970 until today has increased sevenfold, from some 300,000 people to 2.2 million.  The United States now account for less than 5 percent of the world’s inhabitants – and about 25 percent of its incarcerated inhabitants.  In 2010, a third of all black male high school dropouts between the ages of 20 and 39 were imprisoned, compared with only 13 percent of their white peers..

page 240 Just as ex-offenders had to learn to acculturate themselves to prison, they have to learn to re-acculturate themselves to the outside.  But the attitude that help one survive in prison is almost the opposite of the kind needed to make it outside.  Craig Haney, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who studies the cognitive and psychological effects of incarceration, has observed:

A tough veneer that precludes seeking help for personal problems, the generalized mistrust that comes from the fear of exploitation, and a tendency to strike out in response to minimal provocations are highly functional in many prison contexts but problematic virtually everywhere else.

page 249  When the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson Police Department in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, it found a police force that disproportionally ticketed and arrested blacks and viewed them “less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue.” This was not because the police department was uniquely evil – it was because Ferguson was looking to make money.

page 250 Gunnar Myrdal, 1944: “Such persons are a danger to the Negro community. Leniency toward Negro defendants in cases involving crimes against other Negroes is thus actually a form of discrimination.”

page 257 Surveys have concluded that blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates.  And yet by the close of the twentieth century, prison was a more common experience for young black men that college graduation or military service.

page. 258 Deindustrialization had presented an employment problem for America’s poor and working class of all races.   Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks.

page 275  For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm.  Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years.  The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration – a period that overlapped with Jim Crow.  This provides a telling geographic comparison.  Under Jim Crow, blacks in the South lived in a police state.  Rates of incarceration were not that high – they didn’t need to be, because state social control of blacks was nearly total.  Then, as African Americans migrated north, a police state grew up around them there, too.

page 280 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 1964.  His point was simple, if impolitic: Blacks were suffering from the effects of centuries of ill treatment at the hands of white society.  Ending that ill treatment would not be enough; the country would have to make amends for it. “It may be that without unequal treatment on the immediate future there is no way for (African Americans) to achieve anything like equal status in the long run,” Moynihan wrote.

page 318  Power was what mattered, and what characterized the differences between black and white America was not a difference in work ethic, but a system engineered to place one on top of the other.

page  328  According to Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University who studies economic mobility, black families making $100,000 a year or more live in more disadvantage neighborhoods than white families making less than $30,000.  This gap didn’t just appear by magic; it’s the result of the government’s effort over many decades to create a pigmentocracy – one that will continue without explicit intervention.

page 322  Obama: “speak to the hurt, and the sense of injustice, and the self-doubt that arises out of the fact that (African Americans) are behind now, and it makes us sometimes feel as if there must be something wrong with us – unless you’re able to see the history and say, “It’s amazing we got this far given what we went through.”

page 334  For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery haunted the South.  And more than a century after Brown v. Board of Education, schools throughout much of this country remain segregated. There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people.  The presidency of Barack Obama is no different.  One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same level as a white individual, and yet also say that the number of black individuals who actually qualify for that status will be small.

page 350  Black workers suffer – if it can be called that – because it was and is our lot.  But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry.  And so an opioid epidemic is greeted with a call for treatment and sympathy, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic is greeted with a call for mandatory minimums and scorn.

page 350  On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy: The white laborers of the South are all of them men who are employed in what you would term the higher pursuits of labor among you.  It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white laborer.  Menial services are not there performed by the white man.  We have none of our brethren sunk to the degradation of being menials.  That belongs to the lower race – the descendants of Ham.

page  354  “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts,” wrote Senator Barack Obama in 2006:

Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.

page 364  The first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base.  An entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating Obama.  It was thought by Obama and others that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio.  Trump’s genius was understanding that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the presumed favorite of another.

page  365  It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president.”