Colorblindness - the end of an era?

The more I read about the issue of black lives NOT mattering in our country, the more I learn about the era of Colorblindness.

After the era of the Civil Rights Movement came the colorblindness era, the one which I grew up in and the one which I hope and believe is coming to the end of it's days. I only pray it will not merely be replaced by another disguise, but rather be abolished by truth and reconciliation - giving birth to possibly the era of being woke!

I really appreciate what a fellow Iowan wrote for the Des Moines Register:

"For the last 30 to 35 years, the strategy by mainstream popular culture — i.e. white culture — could largely be summed up as: “I don’t see color.” On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable, almost noble effort. After all, aren’t most of the problems some marginalized groups have faced been because of the color of their skin? So there was an effort to rise above such nonsense and create a “post-racial” society. This should have been commendable, right?

The immediate benefits of this idea cannot be understated, either. A person could avoid the discomfort of addressing race, a topic most white brothers and sisters feel very ill-equipped to address to begin with, altogether. They could avoid dealing with the consequences or fallout of systemic racism; they could let the whole race debacle be water under the bridge through this one idea. No harm, no foul, right?

To our detriment, what resulted from “color blindness” was the quick erosion of the hard-fought progress from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and '70s within the span of a generation. It was systematically disassembled. The movement’s leaders were assassinated, white people fled their communities for the suburbs (i.e. white flight and re-segregation), and the declaration of the “war against drugs” (i.e. systemic incarceration of black men), just to name a few. In the end, such actions left people of color without a clear voice. It left our nuclear family broken, our economic power laid waste.

Second, those of us that seek to break the system have isolated ourselves.The liberal bubble, the city-kids — whatever you want to call ourselves — removed ourselves from the spaces where voices are most needed. The night of the election, my sister texted my family and asked, “Why is Iowa red?” I replied, “None of us live there anymore.”"

The Rev. Derrick Keith Rollins Jr.

It has been said that this change was first made immediately after the Civil Rights Movement when the choice word "segregation" turned into "cracking down on crime." Although it was no longer politically correct to promote segregation - politicians still worked off their racist beliefs by channelling their "new" focus on crime.

John Bell Williams, a Democratic governor of Mississippi at this time, said "This exodus of Negroes from the South, and their influx into the great metropolitan centers of other areas of the Nation, has been accompanied by a wave of crime... What has civil rights accomplished for these areas? Segregation is the only answer as most Americans - not the politicians - have realized for hundreds of years."

Representative Williams failed to see the real reasons for a rise in crime (largely due to the baby boom generation and the spike in number of men 15-24 years old, as well as a spike in unemployment rates). All Williams could see was race and he, and men like him, channeled their racism into new wars with people of color that didn't use explicit racist language. (All information can be found in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow)

Today I got lost in Alexander's book when I picked it up again (having read it over a year ago) and I emerged hours later having re-read a good majority of it. There is just so much information, so much to think about, so much to be outraged over! There is simply so much information that I wish that I could share with you, but you'll just have to read it for yourselves!

I will say these few things, though, pertaining to how colorblindness became the era to which I would grow up in.

Nixon became the next president after Johnson and the first president to disguise his racist views by talking about crime instead. While campaigning, Nixon knew his audience and came up with creative strategies that were racists without using racist vocab. H.R. Haldeman, a key advisor to Nixon, recalls, "He (president Nixon) emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to." Nixon did this by appealing to "law and order." Around this time the media was dealing with the debate on the poor - were they "deserving" or undeserving?" (of welfare and resources/help). Conservatives used racialized imagery (portraying black people negatively) in order to work resentment into the white working-class voters - "many of whom felt threatened by the sudden progress of African Americans." The cost of segregation was being placed on the backs of the lower and lower-middle class whites. They now had "to compete on equal terms with blacks for jobs and status." This made it easy for conservatives to win over this group of white Americans because they were able to convince them that the liberal Democrats who were fighting for civil rights were wealthy and did not have to deal with the aftermath - their children were not as affected by the integration. This succeeded in persuading the "poor and working-class voters to join in alliance with corporate interests and the conservative elite." By 1968, according to the Gallup Poll, 81% agreed that "law and order has broken down in this country," and the majority blamed "Negroes who start riots."

Nixon's party "repeatedly raised the issue of welfare, subtly framing it as a contest between hardworking, blue-collar whites and poor blacks who refused to work. The not so subtle message to working-class whites was that their tax dollars were going to support special programs for blacks who most certainly did not deserve them." Reagan ran his campaign by extending these terms as well. He "echoed white frustration in race neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His "colorblind" rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove."

In 1982, Reagan OFFICIALLY announced his War on Drugs. "Between 1980 and '84:

FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 mill. to $95 million!

Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 mill. to $1,042 million! (by 1991)

DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 mill. to $1,026 million!

FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to $181 million!"

Fundings to hunt down criminals via drugs skyrocketed, while "funding for agencies responsible for drug TREATMENT, PREVENTION, AND EDUCATION was dramatically reduced. The budget of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, for example, was reduced from $274 mill. to $57 million" within 3 short years!! Funds for the Department of education were also cut by $11 million! The effects on the black population was enormous. "As late as 1970 more than 70% of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-collar jobs. Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28%!" THIS, all of this, was and is ANTI-restorative justice. Millions upon millions are being spent to put people behind bars rather than rehabilitate them, and rehab is possible and DOES work!

Portugal had a persistent problem with drug addiction and abuse. They responded by "DEcriminalizing the possession of ALL drugs" and redirected "the money that would have been spent putting drug users in cages into drug treatment and prevention. 10 years later, Portugal reported that rates of drug abuse and addiction had plummeted, and drug-related crime was on the decline."

After Reagan there was Bush Sr. who beat out his opponent by running "the Willie Horton ad."

Clinton then came to office and well.. that escalated quickly (to say the least).

Clinton's "tough on crime" campaign "resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history." Moving beyond crime, Clinton tackled the welfare 'problem' and "created the current racial undercaste." He ended welfare as it was and created TANF that imposes a 5-year limit on assistance and a lifetime ban for any convicted felony. It was said that the cut backs were part of the conservatives' plan to pay debt in the country, but what it really did was take that money that was helping people and once funded public housing and it was used for prison construction. Public housing funds were cut "by $17 billion - a reduction of 61%" - and funds for corrections went up by "$19 billion - an increase of 171%!!!!" This made "the construction of prisons the nation's main housing program from the urban poor!" "Clinton also made it easier for federally assisted public housing projects to exclude anyone with a criminal history." This, obviously, left many many homeless.

By the year 2000, "more than 2 million people found themselves behind bars.. and millions more were regulated to the margins of mainstream society.. where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote." Yet this mass incarceration of people of color was explained in non-racial terms. Colorblindness, rather deception, prevailed.

Some try to justify the number of African American's behind bars by saying so many black men get locked up because they "have much higher rates of violent crime." The problem is, however, that mass incarceration is NOT due to violent crime!

"Murder convictions tend to receive a tremendous amount of media attention, which feeds the public's sense that violent crime is rampant and forever on the rise. But like violent crime in general, the murder rate cannot explain the growth of the penal apparatus. Homicide convictions account for a tiny fraction of the growth in the prison population. In the federal system, for example, homicide offenders account for 0.4% of the past decade's growth in the federal prison population, while drug offenders account for nearly 61% of that expansion... As of Sept. 2009, only 7.9% of federal prisoners were convicted of violent crimes." Not only are there mass amounts of people IN prison (1.6 million), but there are "nearly 7.3 million people currently under correctional control." All of these people "have been swept into the system, branded criminals or felons, and ushered into a permanent second-call status.... The most common offense for which probationers are under supervision is a drug offense... In cities such as Chicago, criminal courts are clogged with low-level drug cases. In one study, 72% of criminal cases in Cook County (Chicago) had a drug charge, and 70% of them were charged as class 4 felony possession." Class 4 felony is the lowest level felony charge and by charging them with such a minor felony they are merely getting them into the system. "Mass incarceration operates with stunning efficiency to sweep people of color off the streets, lock them in cages, and then release them into an inferior second-class status. Nowhere is this more true than in the War on Drugs." The courthouse doors have also been closed to claims of racial bias, meaning you can be as racists as you want to be and get away with it as long as your racism is never expressed through words.

Now that I have summarized Michelle Alexander's chapter on the Rebirth of Caste in her book the New Jim Crow and used countless other quotes from her book in this post, I apologize for such a long winded post. I felt that I couldn't say it any better than the wonderful Alexander and I also felt like the stats and the overview of the state of America that put us where we are today were very very important in understanding how America is where it is. We are 11 days away from inaugurating Donald Trump. A man who has run his campaign on hate. Perhaps the only good thing coming from this is that the veil has been ripped down. The disguise has come off and America has once again shown it's true colors. We are now forced out of our colorblindness to see that we were never EVER colorblind to begin with.

This. Is. Hard.

My generation and those before and after me were raised to believe that the problem of racism was fixed! Fixed by the Civil Rights Movement, and how crushing it is to be fully aware of this lie. Many don't want to believe it. They continue to lie to themselves and the world that it really WAS about crime, not race, while at the same time explaining that black people just commit more crime.

I am thankful for the Black Lives Matter movement and for all other people who have chosen to cut ties with ignorance and start speaking up and taking action. They are the ones in this time and place who are calling a thing what it is (Martin Luther reference). They are the ones promoting the beloved community Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered for. They are picking up this cross of hatred WITH LOVE. They aren't surprised that hate groups still exist all over these 50 states of ours. They have seen all along what we, out of our own comfort, have chosen to ignore and make excuses for. I'm not saying even people of color didn't fall into this trap politics and media have trust upon us, because they did. They were also deceived. But the ugliness is being exposed.. Many people of color won Golden Globes last night for their work in showing the world via hollywood glimpses into the story of the African American's in this country. Change is being made and fought for.

Will you turn your face away, pretend its not there, and make excuses?

Or will you look our monsters in the eyes and call a thing what it is?

I'm with the latter. It's time we face the ugly and make a difference. We owe it to those who lost their lives fighting for it. We owe it to the future generations. We owe it to God - whom created us ALL in God's image.

(Once again please note all quotes came from Alexander's book The New Jim Crow.)