Imagine for a second that you are shopping at your neighborhood grocery store. You are picking up bread, ice cream, and some diet drink because you are watching your calories. (Note the ice cream) As you turn the corner with your cart, you confront a gunman. He is going to shoot you because you are Black. He is not shooting you because you lied to his boss and took his job. He is not going to shoot you because you stole his woman. Nope. He is going to shoot you because of your race. This is America.
The refrain that Blacks have heard for the past 50 years is that it is not all about race.
Well, it is.
The reason that we have ghettos in the US is because of race. The reason that Blacks did not get GI loans that injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the middle and lower classes in the 1950s was because of race. The reason that Blacks could not move out of the ghetto to the nice area of town was because they could not get loans to buy homes in those nice neighborhoods—because of Black Codes, under which banks agreed not to loan money to minorities who wanted to buy homes in nice neighborhoods. The reason that minority children find it harder to get ahead is because their schools are not quite as good as those in the nicer neighborhoods.
The reason only 1.7% of all US farmers are Black is because of race. In 1920, 1 million Black families made up 14 percent of all farmers; now there are not even 36,000—because between 1910 and 1997, they lost 90 percent of their property due to official, racist government policy. (White farmers lost only 2 percent in the same period.)
According to the most recent US Census data, the average annual income for Blacks is around $45,000. The average income for Latinos is $55,300 and for non-Hispanic Whites it’s $35,000. WHAT? Oh, wait. That’s not right. For non-Hispanic Whites, average income is almost $75,000!!! (For the math-challenged, that’s one-and-two-thirds higher than Black incomes.)
So, when I hear these White supremacists shouting at the top of their lungs that they are losing everything. I have to wonder what in the heck are they talking about. I’m sorry that they don’t have a great union job. Those jobs were shipped overseas, but I did not do that. There was no minority who spearheaded shipping jobs overseas. That was corporate American. Who runs corporate America? Oprah? Nope. Kenneth Chenault, former head of America Express and a Black man? Nope. It was a bunch of rich White guys. Right?!?!
Oh, and the other reason there are so few union jobs is because unions were deliberately busted beginning in 1982. Under the Republican president (and former union head and former Democrat) Ronald Reagan, who destroyed the Air Controllers Union and, with his party colleagues, went on to undermine every other work-force union in the country.
So, how out of touch with reality do you have be, in order to walk into a grocery store, thinking that Black and Brown people are the cause of your problem? The slaughter in Buffalo represents mind control, brain-washing or whatever you would like to call it.
