Prometheus 6

I answered the second one first.

I think keeping a race down is indeed a very different sort of problem than keeping another up. Until very recently, I would have answered, "Making coca-derivatives readily available," but I strongly suspect this alone would be surprisingly ineffective. Since then I've encountered more information that leads me to vote for frequent urban renewal programs organized to shatter Black communities and re-disperse them geographically.

In my answer to your second thought experiment, I suggested that whites had benefitted from maintaining a competitive black meritocracy, since the African American elites were channelled into the global economy, managed the crowded Black labor market, and were ideologically divorced from radical thinking. I think this clashes somewhat with the objective of keeping Blacks down, but bear in mind that a subaltern class of rick Blacks is likely to be very focused on retaining the status quo--with professional elan.

Needless to say, repeated urban renewal programs could be contrived to spare the affluent Blacks.

I think keeping a race down is indeed a very different sort of problem than keeping another up.

Hence the parallel, yet unconnected, questions.

And though both approaches would result in the same relative positioning of the respective in-groups, I think each approach would bring about different societies (not that one would be preferable...).

To utterly destroy a man economically, convince him he has nothing to offer which is worth significant money, and offer him a bare existence without working.

Works on white people too.

- Introduce influences and frivolous distractions that warp one's sense of propriety and self

- Drain communities of employment opportunities, further isolating and reducing one's perception of viable options

- Inundate with images of alcohol consumption, vice and domination of women, as the sole validation of a Black man's happiness and success

- Condemn, but sensationalize risky sexual behavior that leads to illegitimate births, until it slowly becomes accepted

Drain communities of employment opportunities, further isolating and reducing one's perception of viable options

Now, now...,

Let's not be hastily dismissive of those coca derivative franchise opportunities so broadly glorified in the mass media that we principally publish, distribute, and profit from..,

what? wait..., you mean to tell me we don't primarily consume or profit from these mass media glorifications of crimeyness?

What's up with that? Is there a culture war being waged against black folks?

That notwithstanding, shouldn't we have a self-arising and overweening sense of moral and personal responsibility in the face of our deeply engrained societal obligations?

Surely these are sufficiently inculcated in the educational, religious, and mass media influences by which our communities are supersaturated?

Sometimes I just don't know what to make of you people...,

Bah!

Think long-term here, people.

If you want to perpetuate the second-class status of an entire race, you've got to disable each new generation as it arises.

--To whatever extent the law allows, deny their children an education that will allow them to control their own futures.
--Destablize families with a system of social services with incentives for single parenthood. Denote a large percentage of adult men as criminal and unemployable. Keep as many as possible in jails and prisons.
--Co-opt potential leaders who rise above the obstacles put in their way. Allow them to "assimilate" into the dominant culture so they don't cause trouble.

Done deal.

Let me count (some) of the ways:

1. Expropriate the value of their labor for 3 centuries.

2. Provide little, if any, assistance to them when they are finally emancipated.

3. Pass Jim Crow vagrancy laws that resulted in large numbers of former male slaves being incarcerated and, in some cases, being forced to work, again, for free on plantations where they had once been enslaved.

4. Continue to expropriate the value of their labor and now, for good measure, add in the taxes and fees they paid to local, state and national government for another century or so, thus ensuring their communities did not receive government services or protection.

5. Deny them access to capital markets, labor unions, equal education, quality housing, middle management positions in the pubic and private sectors, use government sanctioned violence to destroy their efforts to create their own businesses (e.g. Tulsa, Oklahoma) for a century or more.

6. Use every available means to foster and promote a culture in which poor black people are seen and treated as pariahs, "ghetto hellions" and folks too unruly and undeserving of care and attention.

7. Deny that race has anything to do with the conditions under which large numbers of black people are forced to live every day.

8. Recruit, cultivate and train groups of blacks to act as apologists for these policies. Use the media to promote their views despite the fact that poll after poll shows that the majority of blacks don't agree with the analyses and policies offered by this group.

9. Foster the illusion that the relative difference between white wealth and black wealth is the result of blacks not working hard enough despite the fact that black people have been working hard since the first slaves landed at Jamestown.

10. Redline their neighborhoods for four decades and divert their tax dollars to the very suburbs where they were not allowed to purchase homes and property.

11. Use the cloak of "urban renewal" to remove them from inner cities and resell the seized properties to developers and other profiteers.

12. Have the U.S. Department of Agriculture systematically deny black farmers loans for decades and, finally, when they sue and win the suit, structure the settlement process in such a way that many of them are not able to file a claim (The Clinton Administration. I love Tony Morrison but she should apologize for calling him America's first black president.)

I'm not done but...

To whatever extent the law allows, deny their children an education that will allow them to control their own futures.

Not so fast Quaker! I'm sho' tired of hearing this one...

I am the product of the Chicago Public School System, long assumed to be an inadequate education needed by minorities. However, in my graduating class, it prepared 3 students for full scholarships to eastern boarding schools, and then two of them on to Ivy League colleges.

We took advantage of the education provided us and it prepared us equal to any white suburban, tax rich, school district.

2) Racist Criminal Justice Problem-Sphere

If we can say that the weak job-market and unemployment dynamics over the past 30-odd years have stymied stable social patterns among African-Americans in the “static-stratum,â€� we must also say that the American racist criminal justice system has ravaged the lives of “static-stratumâ€� African-Americans. Without a doubt, the past four decades of a corrosive high unemployment rate among African-Americans – especially young males – created an extremely destructive dynamic whereby African-American society was beset by an abnormal number of crime-committers, many pushed into crime by their condition of social-economic-personal desperation.

This criminal dynamic in Black communities, in turn, provided a pretext for racist-inspired criminal justice elements to fashion a unique post-Civil Rights era American “crime-control systemâ€�. Namely, one whose overwhelming concern has been to use America’s massive prison system – the largest in any democratic country – to harness working-class and poor African-American males (working-class and poor Latino-Americans as well), to render them quiescent or docile. After three decades existence, this racist-inspired “crime-control systemâ€� has been reinforced by a massive prison-construction industry.

Inevitably, the everyday operation of the post-Civil Rights era America “crime-control systemâ€� has ravaged the lives of working-class and poor African-Americans through widespread police brutality and the execution of draconian drug laws, the latter involving fraudulent arrests and convictions. A survey of the attributes comprising the racist application of criminal justice to African-Americans by Professor Manning Marable of Columbia University reported that at the end of the 1990s there was an astronomical prison-incarceration for African-Americans. This meant that nearly 50% of prisoners in federal prisons were African-Americans. Marable observed that this incarceration rate “even surpassed that experienced by blacks who still lived under the apartheid regime in South Africa [by 1990].â€�

Moreover, the federal-level prison incarceration rate for African-Americans was replicated at the state level, especially in states with large Black populations. Marable used data on New York state, showing that “In New York, a state in which African Americans and Latinos comprise 25 percent of the total population, they represented 83 percent of all state prisoners by 1999….â€� Marable especially identified the role of draconian drug laws as part of the explanation of the high incarceration rate for Blacks and Latinos in New York, noting that “94 percent of all individuals [were] convicted on drug offences.â€�

Marable concluded his discussion by relating the stark racist dynamics surrounding New York’s incarceration rate for African-Americans in particular. As Professor Marable put it: “The pattern of racial bias in these statistics is confirmed by the research of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which found that while African Americans today [2000] constitute only 14 percent of all drug users nationally, they are 35 percent of all drug arrests, 55 percent of all convictions, and 75% of all prison admissions for drug offences.â€� Thus, it is patently clear, I think, that the U.S. criminal justice system’s so-called “drug warâ€� facets alone render it a racist system. How else can the massively race-skewed arrest, conviction, and incarceration rates be explained? African-American opposition to the racist features of the criminal justice system must be raised to the level of a moral imperative. This means that a major African-American social movement challenge of today’s racist criminal justice system must be a political imperative of the 21st century Black elite.

Dr. Martin Kilson keeping it real again in part II of Probing the Black Elite's Role for the 21st Century