"The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent."
- Malcolm X
Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate)
refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_rasa)
Racism is an ideology, not a fact. One must first acknowledge this before any of my collective thoughts make any sense - no evidence has ever been collected in any field of science that accurately claims any race inferior to another (historically speaking, claims have been made: most recently, the Nazis). Instead, what we have in front of us is a mirror of ethnocentricity that provides assumptions and pre-disposes the mind to either racial inferiority or racial superiority. In this particular note, I will address Black Americans or both sides of the spectrum.
First, I’ll briefly go through slavery and the Civil War. Dred Scott v. Sandford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford), stated, in short, that any person of African descent could never be an citizen of the United States (overturned by the 13th and 14th amendment in 1866 and 1868; funny enough Mississippi did not ratify the 13th amendment until 1995, wow). This was held up in Supreme Court, making it federal law, so it is completely understandable to see why so many black people would attempt to go north of the border. They were no longer citizens, citizens have no rights, meaning any white citizen could do with them as they wished which included selling them as a “runaway slave.”
The two things to take away from this:
1) Black people were considered property, not people. Again, it is worth noting we are talking about a ruling upheld by the federal government. This does not make it the paradigm of the all people, similar to how the United States often enters war without the consent of most of its’ citizens. Regardless of what you hear, there were plenty of white abolitionists who were against slavery (if you choose to refute this statement please read and offer a citation for proper argumentation). I am trying to be concise so I can not elaborate further.
* Amendments only need 2/3 of the states to ratify to be passed
2) People of power wanted and needed black people to be slaves. Understand, while morality played a part in what started the civil war it is not the sole, nor the most important reason for the war: the most important factor was money. The U.S. census of 1860 claims around four million slaves could be accounted for (http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls) ; however, you must also include the fact that black men were only counted as 3/5 a man and the census did not count children or women. Now with that in mind, a man in the prime of his life was worth $35,200 (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/slaveauction.htm ; I‘d like to note this is honestly the most modest number I have seen but I only have book sources and I want to give you something to look @; if you want to see why the numbers vary so much check out this link: http://econweb.rutgers.edu/rockoff/HowMuch.htm ), multiply by four million, take into account crops lost and the such - here’s the big reason the Civil War was fought.
I will allow the discussions after I post this to further the discussion here. Remember, we are trying to be concise. I have cookies to eat and this is the last day my milk will be any good. Now for the period often forgotten: the Nadir.
na·dir - the lowest point; point of greatest adversity or despair. (dictionary.com)
Honestly, I was unfamiliar with the term “nadir” as it refers to U.S. history. It is a period (later 19th century to about 1920) in which the rights that black citizens gained during Reconstruction were lost again. This is often coined as the period in which racism existed at it’s worse. This would include the more obvious things you knew (lynching, not allowing black people to vote with public violence, ex. shooting them) to some of the more mind-numbing, blatantly ignored facts such as Black Wall Street aka the Tulsa (Oklahoma) Race Riots of 1921 “in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than 75 people and destroying more than 1,100 homes, have completely vanished from our history books” ( Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Lowen). Lowen, in the same book, also mentions how Pres. Warren G. Harding was “proudly inducted” into the KKK during a white house ceremony (point in mentioning this is to make it clear how racist the federal government was; they did not care to protect the rights of black citizens ). Then are the well known Jim Crow laws which enforced “separate but equal” and upheld in the Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson).
Now here’s probably my most controversial point: integration was a step backwards for black citizens. Integration has helped race relations in some facets because it made certain that white and black citizens had to interact; however, it was a failure in each other variable.
1) The civil rights movement began with the paradigm of “equality.” Now read this carefully: “separate, but equal” would be the definition of “equality.” “Integration” is the polar opposite of “equality.” The civil rights movement wanted the government to uphold “separate, but equal” rather than just have it as some cute hearsay.
On September 11, 2006, I was able to speak to Harry Belafonte, one on one, after a dinner following a speech he gave concerning the responsibility of the youth (this was at the University of Tennessee; I was on the Black Cultural Programming Committee). He reiterated to me what he said during the speech: Martin Luther King Jr. felt as if he made a mistake promoting integration; he used the metaphor of a burning house to say he was leading black people to a bad spot. Belafonte then asked him, “Well what do we do?” Martin Luther King Jr. then responded: “We become firefighters.”
*King Jr. would be assassinated three days later in Memphis, TN.
Equality says, “ You have your thing, we have our thing. It’s no disrespect to you and yours.”
Integration says, “Your stuff is better. Can we please can use your stuff?”
Now if you disagree then you would have to address why you never saw white kids bussed to black schools for too long; that is enough to address that refutation.
2) “Integration” implies that “the white folks stuff is better” by default resulting in a lot of issues with black self-esteem later.
3) Black neighborhoods, universities, and businesses had no choice but to be nit tight. They had to take care of one another. At the very least, black businesses knew they would receive at least a certain amount of revenue. Integration throws that out the window. A lot of black people left to go where with white people were and the money left with them. This results in a gradual erosion of these social necessities.
I would love to go into more detail (like how this is incredibly similar to the history of the Native American) but this is already long and there is more to say. I will make one last observation and then conclude...