One of the tale-tell signs of White Supremacy are having different rules for different people. Whenever you see this in public policy, the hairs on your back should start to go up. The G.I. Bill or The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (as it was formally known) provided a wide range of benefits for World War II veterans. The G.I. Bill provided low-cost mortgages for homebuyers, low-interest loans to start businesses, it offered cash for veterans to pay for college tuition and even monies towards getting a high school diploma or vocational education. The G.I. Bill even paid their living expenses while they were going to school as well as unemployment benefits while they looked for work.
Historians actually credit the G.I. Bill for creating the White American middle class that we know today. By 1956, roughly 2.2 million white veterans had used the G.I. Bill’s education benefits in order to attend colleges or universities, and an additional 5.6 million used these benefits for some kind of training program. Millions of white veterans benefitted from the G.I. Bill.
The problem was the G.I. Bill was NOT offered to Black veterans.
So while the G.I. Bill itself wasn’t white supremacist, how it was applied certainly was.
Truth be told, the G.I. Bill actually increased racial inequality between blacks and whites in America. Instead of it helping create a Black middle class like it did for White Americans, it helped facilitate widening the gap between Blacks and Whites.
See? Different rules for different people.
So as Blacks and Latinos were being huddled into East LA, Compton and Watts, with few opportunities to improve their conditions, Black veterans who spilled the same blood, who took the same risks, who served their country just as honorably as white veterans, had to sit and watch white veterans being shown gratitude for their service by allowing them to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and becoming part of the middle class. Good thing Blacks were too simple minded to recognize what was going on. One of the first things that changed after the Watts Riots was how whites perceived Black Americans. White Americans no longer viewed Blacks as “docile”, “cheerful” and “contented”. Blacks had discarded their masks of docile contentment and had stomped them into a thousand little pieces.
Prior to 1966 whites used violence, intimidation, even legal tactics like redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants to keep their neighborhoods all white. As long as their immediate neighborhood was all-white they could tolerate having Blacks in an adjacent neighborhood. But after the 1960s, Blacks were viewed as “angry”, and obviously capable and willing to act on those feelings, living in an all-white community, even in close proximity to a black community didn’t feel safe anymore. With the passing of the Civil Rights Act 1964 America started to really see the phenomenon of White Flight accelerate. Race Riots, not just in Watts, but the ones that followed in 125 other American cities only exacerbated what had already begun in the mid-1940s.
Decisions made in the 1960s and 1970s are still being felt today. The Washington Post reported in 2014 that data shows that 75% of White Americans don’t have a single non-white friend.
Not one.
And of those whites that do have black friends, as opposed to other non-whites like Asians or Indians, those Whites have 91 times more White friends than Black.
Whites make up 77% of the country. Blacks only make up 13%.
I get it.
But I also get that 13 goes into 77 almost 6 times, not 91 times.
Prior to the Watts Riot, Civil Rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for non-violent, civil disobedience as it played very well into this image of Black Americans as being “docile”, especially as a counter to images of angry whites taunting, spitting and punching blacks sitting at lunch counters or as they walked to school.
Imagine if Rosa Parks been kicking, screaming and beating police officers with her purse as they were carrying her off that bus that day.
In that alternate universe Blacks are still sitting in the back of the bus.
But after Watts, that image of the “docile house pet” quickly gave way to an image of a more machismo black, quick to anger, assertive, and prone to lawlessness and violence. And it’s just like John Lennon said, “…once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you.”
This new black image didn’t come without its social consequence. Before segregation was deemed unconstitutional in America, Blacks were for the most part educated in segregated schools that were taught by black teachers and administered by black administrators. But once public schools were integrated, black children found themselves being educated more and more by white teachers and white administrators and that meant being at the mercy of implicit racial biases in ways that they couldn’t have ever imagined.
And here we are 61 years after Brown v The Board of Education and today, in 2015, a black student is three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than a white student. Black students in America represent a staggering 31% of students involved in a school-related arrest. The treatment of Black children as violent problems begins even at the preschool level, where black children represent 48% of children suspended more than once, but make up only 18% of children enrolled in preschool. We see discrepancies like these in 2015 throughout every facet of American society, but none more so than in the American criminal justice system. One of the first things that occurred in Black communities all over the United States after 1966 was a sudden, inexplicable inpouring and availability of illegal drugs. And then on June 18, 1971, Republican President Richard Nixon announced to the American people that the federal government was now waging a “War on Drugs”. Since Nixon announced his “war on drugs”, the incarceration rate of Black Americans has risen three times higher than it was prior to 1966. Blacks are being incarcerated today at a rate six times higher than whites. Today in 2015, one in three Black man can expect to go to prison at some point his lifetime compared to just one in 17 white men. In 2015, Black Americans who make up 13.6% of population of the United States make up 40.2% of its prison population. And yes, John Legend was correct. There are more black men in the American prison system in 2017 than there were blacks living as slaves in 1850. Of course, the narrative you hear today to rationalize this discrepancy in incarceration rates is that Blacks are simply doing more crime. Today polls show that many white Americans view the incarceration rates of blacks as a question of a failure of blacks to take personal responsibility for themselves. There is nothing “racist” about it. Blacks simply do more crime that is what accounts for the discrepancies in incarceration rates. Blacks had been living as freepersons in the United States for 100 years by 1966. If Blacks are more susceptible to being seduced by the lure of criminal activity then why wasn’t this seen prior to 1966? Remember what I said about white supremacy? Different rules for different people. Take crack cocaine for example. “Crack” is the freebase form of cocaine. It first appeared in the mid-eighties, in primarily impoverished inner city neighborhoods in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Remember “crack” is a derivative of cocaine. In other words, no cocaine, no crack. Yet legislators, soon after crack appeared, were quick to pass laws mandating that more time be given to people who were caught in possession of “crack” than in possession of cocaine, which is what crack is actually made from. At the time, cocaine in the 80s was more prevalent in white communities while the cheaper and more addictive derivative was prevalent in non-white communities. It just goes to show that shibboleths still exist in White America regarding Black Americans; the only thing that has changed is the narrative. In addition to high incarceration rates since 1966, laws have been passed that take away a convicted felons right to vote. These laws draw no distinction between people who have been convicted of violent crimes or non-violent crimes. And as a result, in 2015 more black men are excluded from participating in the democratic process than were barred before they passed the fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote. But even as crime rates throughout the United States have dropped over the past twenty years, incarceration rates among black Americans continues on an upwards trajectory with no end in sight.
That doesn’t even make sense.
How can the crime rate be dropping but the incarceration rate of blacks not be reflective of that. What should be most concerning to us is this next fact. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Black Americans are more likely to be arrested and to receive longer sentences for non-violent drug crimes than whites who commit similar or even more serious offenses. Again, even if that shibboleth were true that blacks simply commit more crime than whites, why wouldn’t whites and blacks be doing the same amount of time in jail for the same crimes? And if this is common knowledge, why aren’t we as Americans demanding our elected officials to do anything about it? It reminds me of when Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas travelled to India in 1950 and the very first question he was asked by the Indian press was, “Why does America tolerate the lynching of Negroes?” Why does America tolerate different rules for different people?
What was the answer then?
What is the answer now?
