Facing the Truth

[Meathead]

No they won't because none of them have endured what blacks have. So you can drop the paternalism too because people in those groups know that what I just said to you is true. We have that support so just stop thinking you can tell someone something. History shows the story and we don't have to soft soap our experience based on your opinion.

Everything is not the same as what blacks have faced. Learn that.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me

 

[IM2]

Oh, you weren't allowed to own a house? Can't own a car?
Weren't allowed an education? Not sure you qualify for anything.
Sounds more like you just want to hold your hand out for the freebies.
Nobody has owned a slave, yet you want to punish them and make them pay....just how greedy you sound.

As this is not only about slavery, you are going to face the truth.

 

[IM2]

Due to residential segregation, African Americans have lived in poor-quality housing throughout American history, exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing risk of infectious disease. Segregated Black neighborhoods have more exposure to hazardous waste, oil and gas production, automobile and diesel fumes, and are more likely to have inadequate public services like sewage lines and drinking water pipes. African Americans are more vulnerable than white Americans to the dangerous effects of extreme weather patterns such as heat waves, made worse by the effects of human consumption and industrial degradation of the environment.

California Reparations study, pg. 11.

Government policies and practices—at all levels—have destroyed Black families throughout American history. After the Civil War, southern state governments re-enslaved children by making them “apprentices” and forcing them to labor for white Americans, who were sometimes their former enslavers. In the past century, state and federal government financial assistance and child welfare systems have based decisions on racist beliefs created to maintain slavery and which continue to operate today as badges of slavery. Government issued financial assistance has excluded African Americans from receiving benefits. In the early 1900s, state governments made support payments every month to low income single mothers to assist them with the expenses incurred while raising children. Black families were generally excluded, despite their greater need. Scholars have found that racial discrimination exists at every stage of the child welfare process. The data show that when equally poor Black and white families are compared, even where both families are considered to be at equal risk for future abuse, state agencies are more likely to remove Black children from their families than white children. As of 2019, Black children make up only 14 percent of American children, and yet 23 percent of children in foster care. Studies have shown that this is likely not because Black parents mistreat their children more often, but rather due to racist systems and poverty. In the 2015-16 school year, Black students were arrested at three times the rate of white students, while only comprising 15 percent of the population in schools. This disparity widens for Black girls, who make up 17 percent of the school population, but are arrested at 3.3 times the rate of white girls. Meanwhile, the criminal and juvenile justice systems have intensified these harms to Black families by imprisoning large numbers of Black children, thereby separating Black families.

California Reparations study, pg. 12

 

[IM2]

During slavery, state governments controlled and dictated the forms and content of African American artistic and cultural production. Advocates argue that this is still true today. After the Civil War, governments and politicians embraced minstrelsy, which was the popular racist and stereotypical depiction of African Americans through song, dance, and film. Federal and state governments failed to protect Black artists and creators from discrimination and simultaneously promoted discriminatory narratives. Federal and state governments allowed white Americans to steal Black art and culture with impunity—depriving Black creators of valuable copyright and patent protections. State governments denied Black entrepreneurs and culture makers access to the leisure sites, business licenses, and funding for lifestyle activities that were offered to white people. State governments built monuments to memorialize the Confederacy as just and heroic through monument building, while simultaneously suppressing the nation’s history of racism, slavery and genocide. States censored cinematic depictions of discrimination while also censoring depictions of Black people integrating into white society.

It is undeniable that the labor of enslaved Africans built the infrastructure of the nation, produced its main agricultural products for domestic consumption and export, and filled the nation’s coffers. Since then, federal, state, and local government actions directly segregated and discriminated against African Americans. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson officially segregated much of the federal workforce. While African Americans have consistently served in the military since the very beginning of the country, the military has historically paid Black soldiers less than white soldiers and often deemed African Americans unfit for service until the military needed them to fight. Federal laws have also protected white workers while denying the same protections to Black workers, empowering private discrimination. Approximately 85 percent of all Black workers in the United States at the time were excluded from the protections passed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—protections such as a federal minimum wage, the maximum number of working hours, required overtime pay, and limits on child labor. The Act essentially outlawed child labor in industrial settings—where most white children worked— and allowed child labor in agricultural and domestic work—where most Black children worked.

Although federal and state laws such as the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act of 1959 prohibit discrimination, enforcement is slow and spotty. Federal and state policies such as affirmative action produced mixed results or were short lived. African Americans continue to face employment discrimination today.

California Reparations study, pgs. 13-14

 

[IM2]

American government at all levels criminalized African Americans for social control, and to maintain an economy based on exploited Black labor. After the Civil War, and throughout segregation, states passed numerous laws that criminalized African Americans as they performed everyday tasks, like entering into the same waiting rooms as white Americans at bus stations or walking into a park for white people. In the South, until the 1940s, Black men and boys were frequently arrested on vagrancy charges or minor violations, then fined, and forced to pay their fine in a new system of enslavement called convict leasing. In the words of the Supreme Court of Virginia, they were “slaves of the state.” During the tough on crime and War on Drugs era, politicians continued to criminalize African Americans to win elections. President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor explained that by “getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, [the Nixon White House] could disrupt those communities… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” The criminalization of African Americans is an enduring badge of slavery and has contributed to over policing of Black neighborhoods, establishment of the school to-prison pipeline, the mass incarceration of African Americans, and numerous other inequities reaching every corner of the American legal system.

California Reparations study, pg. 14

 

[IM2]

The government actions described in this report have had a devastating effect on the health of African Americans. Compared to white Americans, African Americans live shorter lives and are more likely to suffer and die from nearly all known diseases and medical conditions compared to white Americans. When African Americans are hospitalized, Black patients with heart disease receive older, cheaper, and more conservative treatments than their white counterparts. Researchers have found that by some measures, this health gap has grown and cannot be explained by poverty alone, as middle- and upper-class African Americans also manifest high rates of chronic illness and disability. Researchers have linked these health outcomes in part to African Americans’ unrelenting experience of racism in our society. Research suggests that race-related stress may have a greater impact on health among African Americans than diet, exercise, smoking, or low socioeconomic status. In addition to physical harm, African Americans experience anger, anxiety, paranoia, helplessness, hopelessness, frustration, resentment, fear, lowered self-esteem, and lower levels of psychological functioning as a result of racism. These feelings can profoundly undermine Black children’s emotional and physical well-being and their academic success.

California Reparations study, pg. 15

 

[LOIE]

African Americans continue to face employment discrimination today.

More recent stats from the US Employment Opportunity Commission, including 2021 indicates that filed charges of racial discrimination is still in the 30-35 percent rage, not much different from 1997 on. Only disability, retaliation on all statues and Title VII have higher percentages of charges filed.

 

[IM2]

As described in further detail throughout this report, government policies perpetuating badges of slavery have helped white Americans accumulate wealth, while overwhelmingly erecting barriers which prevent African Americans from doing the same. Federal and California Homestead Acts essentially gave away hundreds of millions of acres of land almost for free mostly to white families. Today, as many as 46 million of their living descendants reap the wealth benefits, approximately one-quarter of the adult population of the United States. In the 1930s and 1940s, the federal government created programs that subsidized low-cost loans, which allowed millions of average white Americans to own their homes for the first time. Of the $120 billion worth of new housing subsidized between 1934 and 1962, less than two percent went to non-white families. Other bedrocks of the American middle class, like Social Security and the G.I. Bill, also mostly excluded African Americans. The federal tax structure has in the past, and continues today, to discriminate against African Americans.

These harms have compounded over generations, resulting in an enormous wealth gap that is the same today as it had been two years before the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. In 2019, the median Black household had a net worth of $24,100, while white households have a net worth of $188,200. This wealth gap persists across all income levels, regardless of education level or family structure.

 

[Lisa558]

More recent stats from the US Employment Opportunity Commission, including 2021 indicates that filed charges of racial discrimination is still in the 30-35 percent rage, not much different from 1997 on. Only disability, retaliation on all statues and Title VII have higher percentages of charges filed.

People can bring charges, and I’m surprised that in this new environment of everything being blamed in racism that there hasn’t been an increase.

 

[IM2]

People can bring charges, and I’m surprised that in this new environment of everything being blamed in racism that there hasn’t been an increase.

Everything is not blamed on racism. Only things caused by racism. You're a racist and pretend to be oblivious to it.

 

[JoeB131]

Due to residential segregation, African Americans have lived in poor-quality housing throughout American history, exposing them to disproportionate amounts of lead poisoning and increasing risk of infectious disease. Segregated Black neighborhoods have more exposure to hazardous waste, oil and gas production, automobile and diesel fumes, and are more likely to have inadequate public services like sewage lines and drinking water pipes. African Americans are more vulnerable than white Americans to the dangerous effects of extreme weather patterns such as heat waves, made worse by the effects of human consumption and industrial degradation of the environment.

Okay, funny thing. When my grandparents came over here from Germany, they bought a house in Chicago, in the West Englewood neighborhood. It wasn't affluent housing but it was a community. It was 98% white and 38% foreign born in 1930.

Well, of course, the neighborhood changed in the 1950's, as the white folks moved on to the suburbs... My dad got my grandparents out of there when the found a burglar in their kitchen at 2 AM. Wasn't able to sell the property for another 20 years, so they rented it out..... The renters treated it like crap. by 2000, it was 98% black and a slum.

It didn't start out as a slum, but it ended up as one. If you hear the name Englewood on the news, you are also going to hear about a drive by or some other such nonsense.

 

[MizMolly]

Really? Did that happen in America?

Because that's what this thread is about. And they got reparations.

That was in response to your post, which didn’t specify America only. You also didn’t mention reparations, you said

NO OTHER GROUP has been made to endure what blacks have. That's not whining, it is FACT.

 

[MizMolly]

White women participated in enslavement, they practiced JimCrow, their false accusations of being raped by black men started riots and got black men killed.

Is this thread about slavery and the past?

 

[Lisa558]

Is this thread about slavery and the past?

It’s interesting. The blacks on this thread keep returning to how racist things USED to be, which nobody is refuting. But history is history, and we had the same history in the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, and the 00s. The kids I went to college with, who shared my classes and lived in the dorms alongside us whites, had the same history, but we weren’t constantly banged on the head about it.

So here’s the question: why NOW? Nothing‘s gotten worse for blacks over the last few decades, and in fact have gotten better. Yet all of a sudden, white supremacy and racism is being made to be the major crisis of the country. So again, I ask: why now?

 

[MizMolly]

It’s interesting. The blacks on this thread keep returning to how racist things USED to be, which nobody is refuting. But history is history, and we had the same history in the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, and the 00s. The kids I went to college with, who shared my classes and lived in the dorms alongside us whites, had the same history, but we weren’t constantly banged on the head about it.

So here’s the question: why NOW? Nothing‘s gotten worse for blacks over the last few decades, and in fact have gotten better. Yet all of a sudden, white supremacy and racism is being made to be the major crisis of the country. So again, I ask: why now?

They feel if they complain enough and blame everything negative on white racism then they are candidates for $$ through reparations.

 

[Lisa558]

They feel if they complain enough and blame everything negative on white racism then they are candidates for $$ through reparations.

I agree. It‘s all about the money. And that is also why they are brainwashing our children to think that whites are all racists and blacks oppressed victims. Future votes for reparations.

 

[IM2]

It’s interesting. The blacks on this thread keep returning to how racist things USED to be, which nobody is refuting. But history is history, and we had the same history in the 70s, and the 80s, and the 90s, and the 00s. The kids I went to college with, who shared my classes and lived in the dorms alongside us whites, had the same history, but we weren’t constantly banged on the head about it.

So here’s the question: why NOW? Nothing‘s gotten worse for blacks over the last few decades, and in fact have gotten better. Yet all of a sudden, white supremacy and racism is being made to be the major crisis of the country. So again, I ask: why now?

No, we are talking about how racist things are right now plus the damage that has gone unfixed. There has been nothing all of a sudden. White supremacy and racism has never stopped being a problem. But you are part of that problem so you think things have changed.

So let me explain whatvyou know because you practice it. White racists no longer go around wearing hoods. White racists no longer put up no blacks allowed signs or colored only. They do what you, monkrules, johngatlshrugged and others like you here and elsewhere do.

We're tired of your bullshit.

 

[IM2]

I agree. It‘s all about the money. And that is also why they are brainwashing our children to think that whites are all racists and blacks oppressed victims. Future votes for reparations.

Two affirmative action beneficiaries talking stupid. There will be no voting for reparations. The suit will be filed against the government and probably heard before the supreme court or if people like you keep on, the Hague. Historical fact is not braiwashing and nobody is teaching that all whites are racists. You 2 dumb sows need to go do some research instead of repeating race bait garbage.

 

[cnm]

So man up, because this is the start. The reckoning for America and its relationship with 40 plus million black citizens has come.

No. The US doesn't have the balls for it.

 

[cnm]

I don't feel responsible for what happened 200+ years ago

Interesting. From what time point do you feel responsible for happenings in the US?