Part Four
The African American/Black and Brown people/People of Color
In part three, we discussed the continued struggle by the NAACP, the National Urban League, The Black Panthers, and Black civil rights activists such as Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who demanded liberty, equality, and freedom for all. We also saw what happens when American capitalism and White supremacy are threatened; Blacks are murdered and imprisoned, and their livelihoods are destroyed. Then, there were the groundbreaking Supreme Court rulings in education and transport.
In 2001, 21% of Blacks over twenty-five had no high school diploma, and 34% had a high school degree. One-third of the adult foreign-born Blacks had less than a high school diploma, and another one-quarter had a high school degree. 22% of Blacks were employed in the service industry, 18% were operators, fabricators and labourers, and 1% were in farming, forestry and fishing. 88% of Blacks lived in metropolitan areas, and 52% lived in central cities. 95% of the foreign-born Blacks lived in metropolitan areas compared to 79% of native-born Blacks. Foreign-born Black immigrants in the U.S. selected areas where earlier immigrants from the same ethnic groups had established enclaves. Ethnic networking was often a significant feature of the hiring process in these labour markets. Native-born Blacks were less likely to migrate to urban areas where foreign-born migrants were concentrated because the latter rarely complained about low wages and lousy working conditions as they were unaware of labour laws. As a result, the labour market in these metropolitan areas was characterised by lower wages and fewer low-end jobs. 26% of foreign-born Blacks lived in the South, 18% in Florida and 12% in Texas, and the numbers grew in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. It was reported that New York City had the most prominent Black population (2.3 million) of any state in the U.S.
The historic election of the first U.S. Black president, Barack Obama, triggered expressions of deep White racist resentment on the one hand and an implied radical change of the plight of Black people on the other. The presidency had great symbolic power; however, the office of the presidency commissions a site of White normativity that hinders a Black president from tackling issues of race, racism and White supremacy radically. Today, we look to Blackness not only as White construction, representation or an illusion but rather as a substantive identity with a history of resistance that is not limited to White racism or unconnected to the historical experience of enslavement. Black bodies, even those that are defenceless, are still perceived as violent, in excess, to be disciplined, kept in check and continue to be executed. The murder of young unarmed Blacks is linked to a larger political and social context of White privilege and the process of racialisation. One where the Black body is deemed the damned of the earth is treated like excrement and refuse. Black Lives doesn’t matter because Black bodies live in a world where White terror, White injustice, White microaggressions, and White power structurally dominate.
In 2014, 23 states had an all-White state supreme court bench; in 2015, 83% of federal law clerks were White compared to only 4% Black, and only 1% of law firm partners were Black. In 2019, 73% of sitting federal judges were men and 80% White. 81% of the assistant U.S. attorneys were White, compared to 8% Black, and in 2021, only 1 out of 9 Supreme Court justices is Black. It is as a result of these numbers that Black people in the U.S. distrust the judiciary. According to the 2014 Pew Research Centre Survey, 68% of Blacks received disparate treatment when they came before White judges compared to Whites. Black men were six times more likely to be incarcerated than White men, with one in every twelve Black men in their thirties being incarcerated. Hoping to address some of these disparities, during his 2007 campaign speech, Obama suggested that he would consciously select judges who represented a variety of backgrounds and experiences.“We need someone on the bench who’s got the heart, the empathy to recognise what it is like to be a young teenage mum, and the empathy to understand what it is like to be poor, African American gay or disabled or old and that is the criteria by which I will be selecting my judges”.
In 2014, Blacks made up 2.3 million of the 6.8 million correctional population, even though they only made up 13% of the total population. Blacks were incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of Whites, with 35% of those executed over the last 40 years being Black. Some of the effects of incarceration are that inmates are 5 times more likely to be infected by HIV than the general population and suffer from loss of rights, including voting, securing federal benefits, or getting a job, which may lead to mental health illness and death. In 2020, there was a 73% increase in COVID-19-related deaths, with the five most significant virus clusters inside correction facilities. A critical point to note is that the private prison business model in the U.S. is dependent on more and more people being incarcerated. Some of the largest corporations on Wall Street benefit from penal labour, where wages are less than $1 per hour for up to 12-hour workdays. 2014, the Texas Correctional Industry was valued at $88.9 million, and inmates are unpaid in Texas. It has been suggested that incarceration in the U.S. is the new Jim Crow.
In the 2020 presidential election, Black voters stepped up in key battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Wisconsin. They overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden and the first African and South Asian American vice President Kamala Harris, by 87% to Donald Trump’s 12%. Another record turnout was that of young people, with 40% being Black millennials or Generation Z in urban centres such as Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Detroit and 88% of Black voters under 30 voting for Biden compared to 9% for Trump. It should be noted that young people and Black people have fuelled every significant movement in the U.S. on the frontlines, defining what change looks like, and the power of their vote and voice was heard loud and clear in the 2020 election.
In 2021, we saw the historic conviction of former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin in the lynching of George Floyd, a verdict that the parents of Emmett Till and others did not get. Could this be a turning point in policing? Time will tell. In Britain, Black people account for 3% of the population but 8% of deaths in custody, which points to the disproportionate system of suspecting, arresting, convicting, imprisonment, and sometimes killing of Black people. Since 1969, just one police officer has been convicted for their role in the death of someone in their care. In conclusion, activists such as Black Lives Matter, Black Voters Matter, and others are keeping the pressure on and pushing for bold changes that would lead to the equity, justice, and freedom that many, including Dr Martin Luther King, hoped for. However, one should not underestimate American capitalism, which has historically thrived because of White supremacy, enabling an elite few, mainly White families, to maintain power and wealth. In turn, as long as power remains in the hands of the elite few, America’s socioeconomic system can be marshaled to support and advance the agendas of White supremacy. For the Blacks, Black political, economic, and social gains have the power to effect meaningful change and threaten the power structure of White-dominated American capitalism.
The fight has to continue…….
References
Briggs, V, M. (2003) The Economic Well-Being of Black Americans: The Overarching Influence of U.S. Immigration Policies.
Jones, M, A (1983) The limits of Liberty: American History 1607-1992, Oxford University Press.
Meacham, J (2019) The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Random House.
Onyenubi, G, Root, D, Faleschini, J, (2019) Building a More Iinclusive Federal Judiciary, Centre For American Progress, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/courts/reports/2019/10/03/475359/building-inclusive-federal-judiciary/
Yancy, G (2006) Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America.
https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/county-county-youth-color-key-democrats-2018
https://naacp.org/resources/criminal-justice-fact-sheet