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All black Americans have ever wanted is to hv the same opportunities as everyone else. Not handouts, not giveaways, just left alone to live as Americans & not constantly targeted, preyed upon,robbed. Yet, for those it enslaved, we couldn’t even grant that. wbez.org/shows/wbez-new…
No other group in this country has been as legislated against as black Americans. It is devastating when we look at the dragnet of policies and violence and theft black people have faced since they arrived here in shackles in 1619. No right to the wealth their labor produced...
The land they purchased right out of slavery by saving every extra penny from toiling in white man’s fields, stolen by those same white men. Businesses and entire black sections of town and entire black towns burned to the ground for daring to be prosperous.
Schools burned down for daring to teach black children. Politicians refusing to run water and sewer lines to independent black communities even as they passed laws making it illegal for black people to be in white towns after sundown.
Barred from labor unions. Segregated in the military. Redlined out of the largest producer of wealth in this country by the federal government. Denied access to social security under the New Deal. Conspired against by real estate agents and developers and speculators.
And even today, following the Obama Administration’s record settlements against banks for discriminating against equally qualified black borrowers, black housing wealth has not recovered even as white Americans have recouped their lost wealth and some.
America has never stopped punishing black people for having the audacity to survive slavery.
So when people have the nerve to question why do black people still struggle, why in this land of bounty haven’t black people done better for themselves, I pose the opposite: Under these circumstances, how have we managed to do so *well*?
