ADOS

http://bostonreview.net/race/garrett-felber-missing-malcolm-x

The Missing Malcolm X | Boston Review
Garrett Felber
18-23 minutes
Nov 28, 2018

14 Min read time

Image: Marion S. Trikosko/Wikimedia Commons

Our understanding of Malcolm X is inextricably linked to his autobiography, but newly discovered materials force us to reexamine his legacy.

More than fifty years after his death, Malcolm X remains a polarizing and misunderstood figure. Not unlike the leader he is too often contrasted with—Martin Luther King, Jr.—he has been a symbol to mobilize around, a foil to abjure, or a commodity to sell, rather than a thinker to engage. As political philosopher Brandon Terry reminded us in these pages on the fiftieth anniversary of King’s death this year, “There are costs to canonization.” The primary vehicle of canonization in Malcolm’s case has been The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which has been translated into thirty languages and has been widely read—by students and activists alike—across the United States and abroad.

“The Negro” is a fragment of the book Malcolm intended to publish—a book that would be virtually unrecognizable to readers of the autobiography today.

The project first took shape in 1963, when Malcolm signed an agreement with journalist Alex Haley to co-author the book for Doubleday Press. (It was the first book for both writers.) The contract stipulated that Malcolm would have ultimate say over the final version: “Nothing can be in the manuscript, whether a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter, or more that you do not completely approve of.” But Malcolm would never see the final book, which was published instead by Grove Press after his assassination in 1965. Fearing it would be too controversial, Doubleday withdrew its contract after Malcolm’s death in what biographer Manning Marable called the “most disastrous decision in corporate publishing history.” The book sold six million copies by 1977 and would later serve as the basis of Spike Lee’s influential 1992 biopic. It has shaped generations of activists and helped to define our collective understanding of race in the United States. The book is viewed as a crystallization of Malcolm X’s political vision, yet that vision is all too often overshadowed by—or conflated with—the man himself, portrayed in the book as a charismatic leader defined by dramatic personal transformation and tragedy.

That understanding—both of the person and of the politics—now stands to be reexamined. This summer previously unpublished materials that had been seized from a private collector, who acquired them at the sale of Haley’s estate in 1992, were auctioned to the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The items acquired include various notes from Malcolm, a draft 241-page manuscript of the autobiography with handwritten corrections and notes from both Malcolm and Haley, and—perhaps most importantly—a previously unpublished 25-page typewritten chapter titled “The Negro.” (This week, the Schomburg Center made these items available to the public by appointment.) There have long been rumors of three missing chapters among scholars; some think Haley cut them from the book following Malcolm’s assassination because their politics diverged or the book had transformed during his tumultuous last year. Whatever the reasoning, “The Negro” is a fragment of the book Malcolm intended to publish—a book that would be virtually unrecognizable to readers of his autobiography today. We will never fully know that book, of course, but “The Negro” chapter forces us, finally, to engage with it.

icon_separator.svg


The published book charts a series of personal transformations: from his birth in Omaha, Nebraska, as Malcolm Little to his nickname “Detroit Red” (he had reddish hair) in Harlem, then “Satan” while he served time in prison, to Malcolm X when he embraced the Nation of Islam, and finally, after making the pilgrimage in 1964, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Spanning five hundred pages and nineteen chapters, including an expansive epilogue by Haley, it is a story of dramatic metamorphosis. Malcolm Little, born one of seven children in 1925 to disciples of Pan-African activist Marcus Garvey, was imbued with black self-reliance during his childhood in Lansing, Michigan. His father, Earl, was killed under suspicious circumstances—many suspect the Black Legion, a white hate group—when Malcolm was six years old. When his mother, Louise, was admitted to a mental institute in 1938, Malcolm first went to foster care and then to his half-sister’s home in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Traveling back and forth between Roxbury and Harlem, the young Malcolm met musicians and entertainers and became involved in a life of petty crime before being arrested and sentenced to 8–10 years for a string of home robberies. In prison, the published autobiography relates, Malcolm undergoes a religious and political awakening that culminates with his conversion to Islam; he became the chief minister of Harlem’s Temple No. 7 in 1954. Seven years later, he was named the Nation of Islam's national representative and had become its public face. The book concludes at a dizzying pace as Malcolm experienced the turmoil of his ouster from the Nation of Islam, his founding of two independent organizations (Muslim Mosque Inc., and the Organization of Afro-American Unity), his travels abroad in 1964, and eventually his assassination in early 1965.

Malcolm had hoped to subvert the generic conventions of autobiography that elevate the singular, private person over the collective, political public.

Haley originally intended this narrative arc—comprising the full scope of the published autobiography—to fill only three brief chapters that would merely serve to introduce the book’s main author. According to the original chapter outline, after the biographical details, Malcolm would tell the story of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad’s life in a lone transitional chapter before writing the bulk of the book: eleven speech-like essays on a range of topics, including “The Liberal,” “The Brutal Police,” “The Farce on Washington,” “The Potential Twenty Million Muslims in America,” “Questions I Get Asked” and the Nation of Islam’s ten-point program “What We Muslims Want. . . What We Believe.” While these themes appeared in many of Malcolm’s speeches and were interspersed throughout the final book, the chapters as originally titled were never realized.

Instead, Haley delivered “The Negro” to Doubleday in October 1963. A month and a half later, after Malcolm called President John F. Kennedy’s assassination a case of the “chickens coming home to roost,” Elijah Muhammad publicly chastised Malcolm and forbade him from public speaking for three months, which proved to be the most productive period of the autobiography’s writing. Haley would type as Malcolm spoke aloud, gathering napkins he had surreptitiously placed for Malcolm to scribble his thoughts. Around this time, Haley wrote his editor and agent that Malcolm was “tense as the length of his inactivity grows—and it eases him when I come and talk the book with him.”

Malcolm began to reflect more openly about his past, likely ballooning the personal narrative at the expense of the essays, and Haley began to describe the “first half of the book” as “the man’s life story.” With his restlessness producing more material, “The Negro” was now intended to be one of three, rather than eleven, essays for the remainder of the book. The others would be “The End of Christianity” and “Twenty Million Black Muslims”—the three essays serving to summarize Malcolm’s religious and political point of view.

There is rage in “The Negro,” but it is accompanied by reason. It argues for politics over personality.

With the book, Malcolm had hoped to subvert the generic conventions of autobiography that elevate the singular, private person over the collective, political public. Personal storytelling could be a means for collective liberation. Indeed, the weight given to Malcolm’s political vision in the book at times led to tensions with Haley. Just months after Haley and Malcolm signed the contract with Doubleday, Haley requested that his role be changed from “co-authored by” to “as told to.” “Co-authoring with Malcolm X,” he wrote, “would, to me, imply sharing his views—when mine are almost a complete antithesis of his.” He remembered Malcolm scolding him: “A writer is what I want, not an interpreter.”

Malcolm wanted his autobiography to be the story of a people and the social forces that shaped their lives, but in the end it became the story of an exceptional man’s life. Marable’s own Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Malcolm, twenty years in the making, grew out of his frustrations that the autobiography did not accurately represent Malcolm X’s political thought. Both during his life and after his death, Malcolm has often been reduced to a bare vessel of emotion, caricatured as an incisive critic who lacked a solution to the structural racism he so eloquently denounced. The autobiography itself was first marketed this way, as the story of “America’s angriest black man.” James Farmer, one of the “Big Six” leaders of the civil rights movement, once quipped at Malcolm during a debate: “We know the disease, physician, what is your cure?” Marable had speculated that the unpublished chapters would reveal a more holistic political vision, and “The Negro” partly fulfills that hope. Indeed, in its twenty-five pages, Malcolm X both outlines sicknesses and, quite explicitly, offers potential cures.

icon_separator.svg


Haley excitedly wrote that “The Negro” was “guaranteed to upset the NAACP and [White] Citizens Councils, alike.” But the chapter, crucially, is more than just provocation. Today the essay’s title may sound like the product of a bygone era, but to Malcolm the term was always outdated, an ideological fiction of white supremacy. The “Negro,” he wrote, was a “white creation”:

Part of the ‘Negro’s’ survival technique until this day has been to let the white man hear what he knew he wanted to hear from his creation, and to show him the image he wanted to see. And the white man has gullibly believed the Negro survival ruse. It has helped him not have to face the enormity of his crime.

A classic lecture Malcolm gave as minister of Harlem’s Mosque No. 7 traced the root of “Negro” back to the Greek word for death, “nekro.” This folk etymology pointed not only to the Nation of Islam’s conviction that 85 percent of black people were “dead” in the sense that they were “deaf, dumb, and blind” to their own history, but also to its contention that the necessary and proximate death of the “Negro” race would lead to the rise of the Earth’s “original people.”

There is rage in “The Negro,” but it is accompanied by reason. It argues for politics over personality. The chapter is a kaleidoscopic tour through Malcolm’s searing critiques of black political leadership, integration, liberal incrementalism, and white philanthropy. The tone throughout is characteristically pointed, speech-like, and conversational:

One of the white man’s favorite tricks, through his ‘liberals’ and through his puppet ‘Negro leader’ mouthpieces, is to keep flooding the black masses and the rest of the world with propaganda that the black man here is getting better off in America in every way, every day. But the true nature and the true intent of the former slavemaster is glaring every way and every day in the headlines:

You Can’t Enter Here

You Can’t Ride Here

You Can’t Work Here

You Can’t Play Here

You Can’t Study Here

You Can’t Eat Here

You Can’t Drink Here

You Can’t Walk Here

You Can’t Live Here

At the center of Malcolm’s analysis in “The Negro” is the farce of liberal incrementalism. As an identity, “Negro” elevated a few black leaders to speak on behalf of all black people, propping up liberal narratives of incremental racial progress through tokenism and the facade of inclusion. Malcolm argued that racial integration was predicated on a discourse of inferiority: “sittin-in and kneeling-in at the bottom of the ladder, looking up and hollering ‘I’m just as good as you.’” He saw white philanthropy and civil rights leadership as a “black body with white heads.” And for those who said the Nation of Islam preached hate, he reminded that the “white man is in no moral position to ever accuse any black man of hate.”

Buried in the last three pages of the chapter are its greatest revelation. “‘First things come first,’ we are taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm writes. That first step, however, will come as a surprise to many: political bloc strength. Malcolm and the Nation of Islam are often characterized as having been antagonistic to procedural politics—voting, legislation, and the like. But here Malcolm suggested that the black voting bloc could “overnight, take hold of the black man’s destiny in America.” He goes on to credit Muhammad as “advising the black masses to activate America’s greatest untapped source of political bloc strength.” Indeed, a year earlier Muhammad had declared that the future of black Americans “lies in electing our own.” The Muhammad Speaks newspaper claimed that the Nation of Islam might soon endorse candidates and participate in a nationwide voter registration drive in preparation for the 1964 election.


“The Negro” thus complicates narratives of rupture which position Malcolm’s foray into electoral politics as his first major shift after leaving the NOI. Even as Malcolm composed the chapter in 1963, a shift toward black bloc voting, voter registration drives, and black political parties was already underway. The all-black Freedom Now Party had been established in August 1963 during the March on Washington. The next year the activist Fannie Lou Hamer delivered her historic speech on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which sought seats at the Democratic National Convention. Soon after Kennedy’s assassination, Barry Goldwater announced his candidacy as the Republican challenger in the 1964 election, and throughout the election Malcolm would return to one of his favorite folk metaphors: the fox and the wolf. Like Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson was a liberal fox who would eat you with a grin. Goldwater, by contrast, was a vocal opponent of the Civil Rights Act, the wolf who would eat you with a scowl. But both the fox and the wolf, Malcolm was fond of pointing out, belong to the same family. In “The Negro,” he called Democrats and Republicans “labels that mean nothing” to black people. Elsewhere he noted how in the United Nations, there are those who vote yes, those who vote no, and those who abstain. And those who abstain often “have just as much weight.” A sign of political maturity, he believed, was to first register black people, then organize them, and vote only when a candidate represented their interests.

This analysis culminated in one of Malcolm’s most famous addresses, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Delivered in April 1964 shortly after breaking with the Nation of Islam and forming his independent organization Muslim Mosque, Inc., Malcolm told a Cleveland audience, “A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.” Many historians have seen the speech as Malcolm’s first ideological break from the Nation of Islam, an index of his developing political thought. “The Negro,” by contrast, shows this thought as an extension of the Nation of Islam’s political development rather than a departure. Even the title of his speech may have been borrowed from the pages of Muhammad Speaks; in 1962, a front-page story about the struggle in Fayette County, Tennessee, to register black voters was subtitled: “Fayette Fought For Freedom With Bullets and Ballots.”

Similarly, the outline of black bloc voting in “The Negro” was a precursor to Malcolm’s later, more expansive goal of bringing the United States before the United Nations. In 1964, he connected a domestic black voting bloc to a global “African-Asian-Arab” one. “Today,” he urged, “power is international.” Electoral engagement was a tool, but hardly a panacea, for collective liberation.

icon_separator.svg


What significance does this revised understanding of Malcolm X and his autobiography have for social movements now?

By reanimating the autobiography’s original aim to tell the story of a people, not just a single person, the newly uncovered materials let the air out of the persistent myth that we should look—and, by implication, wait—for this generation’s King or Malcolm. This was always a convenient fiction, relying on the marginalization of women and grassroots activists. “The movement made Martin,” as Ella Baker pointed out, “rather than Martin making the movement.”

The new materials emphasize how quickly autobiography shades into hagiography when we erase the collective political context.

Indeed, today’s activists are mostly decentralized, group-centered, and hyper-local. They eschew—in many cases, outright discourage—cults of personality and dependence on a singular spokesperson. They have insisted that they are not leaderless, they are leader-full. Historian Barbara Ransby writes in her new book, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, that “this is the first time in the history of U.S. social movements that Black feminist politics have defined the frame for a multi-issue, Black-led mass struggle that did not primarily or exclusively focus on women.” Today’s activists are as likely to draw on Baker, Assata Shakur, Audre Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective as on Malcolm X.

Some students and activists still bemoan the absence of charismatic leaders, but the new materials emphasize how quickly autobiography shades into hagiography when we erase the collective political context. Malcolm X has come to look exceptional and distinct, disconnected from the political tradition handed down by his parents: his mother Louise wrote for the Universal Negro Improvement Association newspaper Negro World, and his father Earl was a Garveyite preacher. Properly contextualized, these new materials reconnect Malcolm to the intergenerational black nationalist tradition that he hoped his personal story might embody.

The rediscovered material reminds us that Malcolm sought a politics that was collective, and not solely reliant on his—or anyone’s—leadership. Just two months before his assassination, he introduced Hamer to a Harlem audience and pledged they would soon launch a massive voter registration drive to register black people as independents. “Policies change, and programs change, according to time,” he told a crowd that same day. “You might change your method of achieving the objective, but the objective never changes. Our objective is complete freedom, complete justice, complete equality, by any means necessary.”
@deuce king #tangibles2020. No black agenda, no vote.
 
Last edited:
“‘First things come first,’ we are taught by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” Malcolm writes. That first step, however, will come as a surprise to many: political bloc strength. Malcolm and the Nation of Islam are often characterized as having been antagonistic to procedural politics—voting, legislation, and the like. But here Malcolm suggested that the black voting bloc could “overnight, take hold of the black man’s destiny in America.” He goes on to credit Muhammad as “advising the black masses to activate America’s greatest untapped source of political bloc strength.” Indeed, a year earlier Muhammad had declared that the future of black Americans “lies in electing our own.” The Muhammad Speaks newspaper claimed that the Nation of Islam might soon endorse candidates and participate in a nationwide voter registration drive in preparation for the 1964 election.
 
Elsewhere he noted how in the United Nations, there are those who vote yes, those who vote no, and those who abstain. And those who abstain often “have just as much weight.” A sign of political maturity, he believed, was to first register black people, then organize them, and vote only when a candidate represented their interests.This analysis culminated in one of Malcolm’s most famous addresses, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Delivered in April 1964 shortly after breaking with the Nation of Islam and forming his independent organization Muslim Mosque, Inc., Malcolm told a Cleveland audience, “A ballot is like a bullet. You don’t throw your ballots until you see a target, and if that target is not within your reach, keep your ballot in your pocket.”

@deuce king #tangibles2020. No black agenda, no vote.
 
Last edited:
About ADOS
#ADOS was started by the brain trust of Howard graduate and host of the Breaking Brown political show, Yvette Carnell, and UCLA alumnus and attorney, Antonio Moore who hosts the weekly radio show Tonetalks. ADOS—which stands for American Descendants of Slavery—seeks to reclaim/restore the critical national character of the African American identity and experience, one grounded in our group’s unique lineage, and which is central to our continuing struggle for social and economic justice in the United States.

ADOS-Logo2.jpg


In his book, American Slavery, American Freedom, the historian Edmund Morgan concludes that slavery was not a contradiction of American freedom, but rather that slavery was the institution that made white freedom possible. In other words, slavery was not a mistake so much as a precondition for a societal hierarchy which requires descendants of slaves to remain a bottom caste and be made to suffer the necessary failures of a brutal economic system. This was followed by a Jim Crow-era that saw #ADOS become actual contagions that lead to a destruction of wealth; through federally-supported, discriminatory practices like redlining, black presence literally made wealth disappear in communities, all while American whites—and more recently, immigrants— enjoy advantage in a land of apparently equal opportunity that was in fact manufactured on the back of black failure.

According to Yale historian David Blight, “by 1860, there were more millionaires (slaveholders all) living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. In the same year, the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”

Codified by government and exploited by private actors, the creation of an #ADOS underclass served as the financial engine of a nation that never recognized the debt it owed to the group as a result. As such, the #ADOS movement is underpinned by the demand for reparative justice in making the group whole, and as a necessary component in fulfilling the promise of opportunity from which, by design, ADOS have been historically excluded and denied.

The truth of ADOS life is seen nowhere more clearly than the racial wealth gap in this country:

DOS1.jpg


Closing the racial wealth gap requires a New Deal for Black America. President Trump’s assertion during the 2016 Presidential campaign that Black Americans “have nothing to lose” was met with defiance by those on the Left, but the data supported the statement. From over all wealth levels, to home ownership, to student debt levels and beyond African Americans across this nation are suffering. According to a study from Brookings, half of Black Americans who are born poor stay poor. Most Black kids who are born into middle class families are downwardly mobile. And as Duke University economist Dr. William “Sandy” Darity, and co-founder of the ADOS movement, Antonio Moore, along with other researchers observed in their study What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, the concentration of ADOS at the bottom economically is a consequence of lack of wealth transfers and multi-generational oppression, not individual agency or cultural patterns:
DOS2-1024x564.jpg


Dos3-1024x453.jpg


Dos4-1024x687.jpg


Dos5-1024x466.jpg


#ADOS #AmericanDOS sets out to shift the dialogue around the identity of what it is to be African American in an effort to move the discussion from melanin, and properly center the discussion around lineage.
 
https://www.mediaite.com/election-2...man-vote-for-you-when-you-oppose-reparations/

Voter Confronts Beto O’Rourke: ‘Why Should I, as a Black Man, Vote For You When You Oppose Reparations?’
by Tommy Christopher Mar 28th, 2019, 12:59 pm
Former Texas Congressman and current Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was recently confronted by a voter over O’Rourke’s reported opposition to “traditional reparations” for slavery.

On the day of O’Rourke’s campaign announcement, The Associated Pressreported that at a house party in Iowa, the candidate said he “is not in favor of traditional reparations for African-Americans for the legacy of slavery,” although the brief article did not quote O’Rourke directly.

At a campaign event at USC that was held last Friday, but which was just posted online Wednesday, a voter confronted O’Rourke over the report.

Referencing the report, the man asked “Why should I, as a black man, vote for you when you oppose reparations?”

O’Rourke did not deny the report, but instead launched into a four-and-a-half-minute answer that skirted the issue of direct reparations in favor of other remedies, and relied on the advice of “those who are much smarter, and frankly, as a white man, much more experienced in the injustice and the indignities” that he described in his answer:

Thank you for the question, and the opportunity to address one of the most important, and certainly the most foundational issue for this country, a country whose foundation was literally built on the backs of slaves, those who were brought here in bondage from other countries against their will, who effectively had no ability to enjoy the fruits of their labor, the wealth that they help to build. Who, after the end of slavery, were still kept down, were suppressed, were pressed into convict gangs to do work for profit for their white owners, literally worked to death. There was a graveyard just uncovered, a common grave outside of Houston, decades after the end of the Civil War where from the forensic evidence we can see that people were literally worked to death, their muscles torn from their bones.

The consequences of segregation, suppression in our democracy, redlining in the ability to get a mortgage or a loan, if this is a capitalist country, and whether you like it or not, it is, then capital is key, and you have no access to capital. To build wealth, to be able to pass on that house to your child, to help them with the seed capital to start a business, you are denying an entire people, based on their race, the ability to advance in this economy and in this country.

There is 10 times the wealth in white America than there is in black America today, and whatever education you receive, that disparity will continue to be there until we make structural changes. The rate of infant mortality in the United States in 2019 is greater between white women and black women that it was in 1850, 10 years before the Civil War started.

So I say all this to share with you that I begin, and just begin, I will acknowledge, to understand some of the challenges and some of the wrongs that we have committed, and the need for reparation, for repair. I think the best way for us to proceed — and I’ve listened to people who have done incredible work on this, Brian Stevenson, who in Montgomery Alabama helped to build that memorial to peace, to justice —to call out not just our civil rights victories, which I started with at the beginning of my comments, but to talk about lynchings, to talk about brutality, to talk about this state turning against some of its own citizens based on the color of their skin.

He says that the process of reparations begins with the truth, with every single American, regardless of your background or the color of your skin, knowing our common history, and these common facts.

It then goes into repairing these systems that I just described, that are systematically racist. A school system that desperately needs more teachers who look like the students before them, so we can stop punishing kids based on their race, and setting them up for failure over the course of their lives.

A war on drugs that has targeted people of color, to predictable results, producing the largest prison population anywhere in the world.

A healthcare system, a daily life of indignity visited upon African American women and men, a weathering that they have experienced which has produced health consequences that mean shorter lives, diminished lives, because not able to achieve to their full potential in a country that, whether we wittingly want to or not, is keeping them down.

I think if we invest in fixing these institutions in this country, and ensuring that a state like mine, and perhaps a state like yours, we do not use racist voter ID laws to keep people from selecting their representatives, or racially gerrymander them out of their districts in the first place, if we ensure that everyone who has a conviction, after they have paid their price, done their time, can vote, can get ahead, if we expunge the arrest records for non-violent drug crimes in this country, then I think we begin, just begin, to get to some of that repair.

That is the path that I would pursue, after listening to and reflecting on those who are much smarter, and frankly, as a white man, much more experienced in the injustice and the indignities that I just described.

O’Rourke’s comments somewhat mirror those of Massachusetts Senator and fellow candidate Elizabeth Warren, who cited “experts” and “activists” who are “studying” reparations in expressing her support for HR 40, a bill which wouldcreate a commission on reparations.

Although O’Rourke did not express support for that bill, his remarks hint at a possible sweet spot for Democrats on the issue by relying on experts to make judgments about reparations. [\QUOTE]
 
Laura Ingraham Guest: “African-Americans Have Been Here Since 1619 … and Yet We Haven’t Fully Assimilated African-American Citizens”
Pat Buchanan: "There's no doubt there's a greater difficulty in assimilating people from different civilizations, and cultures, and ethnicities and races"

Laura-Ingraham-Radio-Show.png


https://www.mediamatters.org/video/...19-and-yet-we-haven-t-full-assimilated/223277

Laura Ingraham guest: “African-Americans have been here since 1619 … and yet we haven’t fully assimilated African-American citizens”

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): We give 1.3 million green cards, which I think is way too many, every year in the United States. Most Americans polled say -- think it's either -- keep it the same, or lower the number.

PAT BUCHANAN: Well, the point is, in these -- 90 percent of these are folks coming from what you might call the second or the third world. And people are, you know, people are fundamentally, basically good, but there's no doubt there's a greater difficulty in assimilating people from different civilizations, and cultures, and ethnicities and races, in the United States, than their -- than other folks.

And we know this is true, African-Americans have been here since 1619, they've helped build and create the nation, they're part of its culture and history, and yet we haven't fully assimilated African-American citizens.

At the same time, we're bringing in millions and millions of people. We're conducting an experiment, which, you know, it -- to me, I'm a pessimist. I just -- it's not working, it seems to me.

But Ms. Harris, what is she saying, I mean -- she's -- virtually, in the first part of it, comments she made, she's calling for open borders. That's the end of countries. I mean, the world, the United States becomes a giant Mall of America.

INGRAHAM: [LAUGHS] Well, here's what we know for sure. We know that at this clip, America as we know her today will be completely totally transformed, which is, I think, their goal.

BUCHANAN: The Republican Party will be finished.

INGRAHAM: Yeah, the Republican Party will be done. So, most of Central America will have moved to the United States, and Mexico, people will just come and go, but -- although, it's easier to deport people to Mexico.

But once you have that critical mass in the country, and with this birthright citizenship thing, which also Trump said he was going to deal with, then you -- then you're off to the races. And I don't think that -- and I say "races," I mean, like, running races, or horse races.

I don't see how that is going to end up with more freedom, more peace, and more prosperity, and more -- I don't. That's what I'm concerned about. Forget the English language.
 
Laura Ingraham Guest: “African-Americans Have Been Here Since 1619 … and Yet We Haven’t Fully Assimilated African-American Citizens”
Pat Buchanan: "There's no doubt there's a greater difficulty in assimilating people from different civilizations, and cultures, and ethnicities and races"

Laura-Ingraham-Radio-Show.png


https://www.mediamatters.org/video/...19-and-yet-we-haven-t-full-assimilated/223277

"'Shut up and play' to LeBron James" Laura Ingraham?

"Robert E. Lee is among the greatest Americans" Laura Ingraham?

Tell me again how she cares about the total assimilation of ADOS.

Divide and conquer. Third world politics.
 
So this is currently still up as part of The Black Agenda on ados101.com:

America has never atoned for its original sin of slavery in the form of reparations. It is our position that H.R. 40 be passed, and additional supportive measures implemented. We need to gather the data on the level of wealth that was lost as a direct result of slavery, and the era of Jim Crow that followed.

Black Agenda – #ADOS


Yvette and Tone had a different attitude as of Monday (timestamped)


playback is disabled direct link to what the part in talking about

I can't do multiple timestamps but it's mentioned again around 1hr40mins and 1hr50mins with Tone. Apparently they 'discovered' the bill is toothless, old, and needs to be rewritten. For what it's worth, the bill was actually revised and submitted to Congress in 2017:

The HR 40 Primer was produced by the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) with information, assistance, and inspiration of the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC), #40 Acres and More Reparations Strategy Group, and the Black Is Back Coalition (BIBC) for Social Justice, Peace and Reparations
---
Cong. Conyers accepted NAARC’s revisions an introduced the new bill on January 3, 2017 at the start of the 115th Congress.
HR 40 Primer — Seize The Time


Now mind you #ADOS recently started beefing with N'COBRA on the premise that they're old (You don't even have a twitter!), don't matter, and haven't done anything.-- Yet one of the bulletpoints on their agenda is to pass the bill they helped revise and get submitted to Congress #ADOS has also beefed with NAARC member Ray Winbush.



The Black Authority and Tariq Nasheed have also turned on H.R.40. I just wanna know... Wtf happened? Seems like some shadiness and deceitful tactics going on.
 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christ...an-shrink-the-racial-wealth-gap/#6f4a20551721

Only Large Policy Interventions Such As Reparations Can Shrink The Racial Wealth Gap
Christian Weller6:00 am
960x0.jpg

Getty
As this presidential campaign season gets under way, the racial wealth gap is getting a fair amount of attention. African-Americans typically have about one-tenth the wealth of whites. Several presidential hopefuls such as former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro as well as Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have supported the idea of reparations for the descendants of slaves to rectify this massive inequality born out of an unspeakable historic injustice.


A new paper from researchers at the Cleveland Federal Reserve now argues that almost all of the wealth gap between African-Americans and whites is driven by the racial income gap – African-Americans earning about half of what whites earn. One of the main findings of the paper rests on hypothetical scenario that sets African-Americans’ earnings equal to that of whites from 1962 to the present and finds that African-Americans would have had 90% of the wealth of white by 2007. The paper concludes by arguing that addressing the racial wealth gap would require focusing on fixing the racial income gap.

The single focus on income as the driver of racial wealth inequality rests on a model that strips away all of the systematic biases that result in lower incomes for African-Americans. Many of these directly relate to the racial wealth gap and the policy biases that favor whites. After all, income builds wealth, but wealth also generates future incomes and systematic obstacles in building enough wealth hold back African-Americans from getting a fair shot at equal pay. Focusing then only on income ignores the real importance of enacting policies that can quickly close the racial wealth gap, such as reparations.


The racial wealth gap is the result of decades, even centuries of systematic economic barriers to African-Americans’ economic progress . Starting with slavery to the Jim Crow era to today’s mass incarceration, U.S. policy has held back African-Americans and denied them an equal opportunity for centuries. The factors contributing to the racial wealth gap are multitude and their interplay is complex and differs from community to community, from time period to time period. It is virtually impossible to identify one single leading cause for the massive racial wealth gap.

Earning the same money as whites then requires African-Americans to have more wealth to begin with than is currently the case, so that they can actually catch up to whites. After all, current earnings in no small part depend on people’s past opportunities, afforded to them by their families’ wealth. These include, but are not limited to the quality of neighborhoods, schools and colleges. More wealth will allow people to move to better schools, to send their children to better schools, and to support their college education. Many African-Americans do not have these choices because of a lack of wealth. They then cannot gain the income that would give them and their children the same opportunities as whites have.

Additional policy interventions need to occur to make sure that when African-Americans have the same amount of income, they can also build the same amount of wealth as whites. The evidence shows that at comparable income and education levels, for instance, African-Americans have systematically much less wealth than whites. Their incomes often don’t translate into the same amount of wealth because they face additional obstacles such as housing and mortgage market discrimination, resulting in residential segregation and fewer economic educational and labor market opportunities.


The link between higher earnings and more wealth needs to be the same for African-Americans as for whites and that means eliminating systematic biases in housing, mortgage, credit, labor markets and education to begin with. For instance, even when African-Americans enjoy the same opportunities at an education, they often face systematic obstacles in the labor market, which means lower earnings and fewer benefits. A college education for African-Americans still goes along with lower earnings, more unemployment and less wealth than is the case for whites. Systematic obstacles such as outright discrimination, mass incarceration, occupational steering and residential segregation cost African-Americans income right now. Several of these obstacles can be overcome with more wealth that would allow people to move to safer, more diverse neighborhoods, to access similar education opportunities, among other changes.

Policymakers need to consider the challenges of shrinking the racial wealth gap comprehensively. There is no single driver of this gap, but a system that is still heavily stacked against African-Americans . Without massive policy changes it would take African-Americans 260 years to get 90% of the wealth of whites. This just underscores that the massive systematic historic and current hurdles for African-Americans to get ahead will not go away by themselves. Because there are many factors at play here and because this injustice has gone for far too long, addressing wealth inequality will require a large and expeditious approach to fix it. Such a comprehensive approach will likely have to include large-scale reparations for past injustices in some form as an approach to shrink the wealth gap in a meaningful way. The alternative is the continuation of piece meal, gradual approaches that have not made a dent in the racial wealth gap


@deuce king #tangibles2020 #cutthecheck
No black agenda, no vote
 
https://socialequity.duke.edu/sites.../files/site-images/FINAL COMPLETE REPORT_.pdf

What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap


By William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton, Mark Paul, Alan Aja, Anne Price, Antonio Moore, and Caterina Chiopris

Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity Insight Center for Community Economic Development April 2018

Introduction

The racial wealth gap is large and shows no signs of closing. Recent data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (2014) shows that black households hold less than seven cents on the dollar compared to white households.1 The white household living near the poverty line typically has about $18,000 in wealth, while black households in similar economic straits typically have a median wealth near zero. This means, in turn, that many black families have a negative net worth. (Hamilton et al. 2015).

At the other end of America’s economic spectrum, black households constitute less than 2 percent of those in the top one percent of the nation’s wealth distribution; white households constitute more than 96 percent of the wealthiest Americans. Moreover, even among the nation’s wealthiest households, extreme differences persist on the basis of race:

The 99th percentile black family is worth a mere $1,574,000 while the 99th percentile white family is worth over 12 million dollars. This means over 870,000 white families have a net worth above 12 million dollars, while, out of the 20 million black families in America, fewer than 380,000 are even worth a single million dollars. By comparison, over 13 million of the total 85 million white families are millionaires or better (Moore and Bruenig 2017).2

1 Data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances for 2016 indicate that the median black household has ten cents for every dollar held by the median white household, still a staggering disparity. The Survey of Consumer Finances oversamples households at the upper end of the income distribution while the Survey of Income and Program Participation oversamples households at the lower end of the income distribution. Regardless which data set is used, if all vehicles are removed, including the household car, the net worth calculation, the median black household has only about three cents per dollar held by the median white household (Moore and Bruenig 2017).

2 The statistics reported here are drawn from the 2016 round of the Survey of Consumer Finances.


Blacks, while constituting just under thirteen percent of the nation’s population, collectively own less than three percent of the nation’s total wealth (Moore 2015).

Patently, wealth is far more unequally distributed than income. While income primarily is earned in the labor market, wealth is built primarily by the transfer of resources across generations, locking-in the deep divides we observe across racial groups (Shapiro 2004, Gittleman and Wolff 2004, Hamilton and Darity 2010).

In this report, we address ten commonly held myths about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We contend that a number of ideas frequently touted as “solutions” will not make headway in reducing black-white wealth disparities. These conventional ideas include greater educational attainment, harder work, better financial decisions, and other changes in habits and practices on the part of blacks. While these steps are not necessarily undesirable, they are wholly inadequate to bridge the racial chasm in wealth.

These myths support a point of view that identifies dysfunctional black behaviors as the basic cause of persistent racial inequality, including the black-white wealth disparity, in the United States. We systematically demonstrate here that a narrative that places the onus of the racial wealth gap on black defectiveness is false in all of its permutations.

We challenge the conventional set of claims that are made about the racial wealth gap in the United States. We contend that the cause of the gap must be found in the structural characteristics of the American economy, heavily infused at every point with both an inheritance of racism and the ongoing authority of white supremacy.

Blacks cannot close the racial wealth gap by changing their individual behavior –i.e. by assuming more “personal responsibility” or acquiring the portfolio management insights associated with “financially literacy” – if the structural sources of racial inequality remain3

unchanged. There are no actions that black Americans can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the racial wealth gap. For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation produced by the adoption of bold national policies, policies that will forge a way forward by addressing, finally, the long-standing consequences of slavery, the Jim Crow years that followed, and ongoing racism and discrimination that exist in our society today.

Our report indicates that closing the racial wealth gap requires an accurate assessment of the causes of the disparity and imaginative action to produce systemic reform and lasting change.

Addressing racial wealth inequality will require a major redistributive effort or another major public policy intervention to build black American wealth. This could take the form of a direct race-specific initiative like a dramatic reparations program tied to compensation for the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and/or an initiative that addresses the perniciousness of wealth inequality for the entire American population, which could disproportionately benefit black Americans due to their exceptionally low levels of wealth. Indeed, the two strategies -- reparations for America’s record of racial injustice or the provision of the equivalent of a substantial trust fund for every wealth poor American— need not be mutually exclusive.

In what follows, we come to grips with the ten most important, widely held myths about closing the racial wealth gap
 
https://socialequity.duke.edu/sites.../files/site-images/FINAL COMPLETE REPORT_.pdf

Myth 1: Greater educational attainment or more work effort on the part of blacks will close the racial wealth gap

A common-sense hypothesis ascribes disparities in wealth mainly to differences in the level of education. A college degree is associated with higher earnings and more stable employment, even in times of economic crisis (Day and Newburger, 2002; Chung, Davies, and Fitzgerald, 2010). Families with college-educated heads appear to accumulate more wealth than families with heads with lower levels of education over a lifetime. Therefore, higher education often has been touted as the “great equalizer”, as a mechanism to reduce the wealth gap between whites and blacks. According to this logic, we would expect blacks and whites with similar levels of education to display comparable levels of wealth.

Figure 1 summarizes our findings when we compare wealth levels for heads of households with the same educational attainment across racial groups. Both for blacks and whites, median household wealth increases as the head of household obtains higher levels of5

education. However, it is apparent that for blacks getting a college degree, or a graduate degree is far from sufficient to close the wealth gap.

At every level of educational attainment, the median wealth among black families is substantially lower than white families. White households with a bachelor’s degree or post- graduate education (such as with a Ph.D., MD, and JD) are more than three times as wealthy as black households with the same degree attainment.

Moreover, on average, a black household with a college-educated head has less wealth than a white family whose head did not even obtain a high school diploma. It takes a post- graduate education for a black family to have comparable levels of wealth to a white household with some college education or an associate degree (Hamilton et al. 2015 and Meschede et al. (2017), who use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics).

Figure 1: Median Household Net Worth by Race and Education

$70,219

Source: Authors’ calculations, Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP) 2014.



Note: Many of these figures were updated from a prior report entitled Umbrellas Don’t Make it

Rain: Why Studying Hard and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans (Hamilton et al.

2015).

Furthermore, low family wealth can have an adverse effect on the next generation’s educational attainment. Family wealth is a predictor of both college attendance and college completion (Meschede et al. 2017). Black students are more likely to take on student loans and accumulate student loan debt, and they are more likely than white students to drop-out of a university because of financial concerns. Ironically, their wealth position could deteriorate because of their intense motivation to pursue higher education (Shapiro et al 2013).

Another commonly held misconception is that black families have a cultural predisposition to under-value education (Loury 1985, Ogbu 1978). Black parents are alleged to invest insufficiently in their children’s education. However, the best evidence indicates that black families, controlling for household type and socioeconomic status, tend to be more supportive than white families of their children’s education through direct financial support.Black parents who provide some support for their children’s higher education have two- thirds of the median net worth of white parents who provide no support for their children’s higher education. (Nam et al., 2015). For given levels of household income, parental educational attainment, and/or parental occupational status, black youth also get more years of schooling and acquire more credentials than white youth whose parents have a similar status (Mason 1997, Mangino 2010).

While education does not appear to be the great equalizer, it could be argued, alternatively, that hard work can close the wealth gap. Since blacks face a higher unemployment rate than whites at every level of education (Jones and Schmitt, 2014), the difference in wealth ultimately could be due to the difference in employment status. If that were the case, we would observe similar levels of wealth for blacks and whites with similar employment statuses.

But Figure 2 contradicts such an expectation. As one would expect, the median household

wealth is higher for employed families than for unemployed families in both races. However, white households with an employed head have more than ten times higher wealth than similar black households. Furthermore, white households with an unemployed head have a higher net worth than black households with a head who is working full time.

Figure 2: Median Household Net Worth by Race and Employment Status

Source: Authors’ calculations, SIPP, 2014.

In addition, higher levels of household income are not associated with significant reductions in the racial wealth gap. Figure 3 shows how black families have much lower wealth than white families even when they have comparable earnings. In particular, black households in the lowest 20 percent of the income distribution essentially have zero net worth, while the poorest white families have on average $15,000 - $18,000 in net worth. Even belonging to the highest quintile does not make black families as wealthy as whites: their median wealth is approximately half of that of white families in the same income quintile.

The pattern is evident: studying hard and working hard clearly is not enough for black families to make up for their marginalized financial position.



Figure 3: Median Household Net Worth by Race and Household Income Quintile
 
https://socialequity.duke.edu/sites.../files/site-images/FINAL COMPLETE REPORT_.pdf

Myth 5: Greater financial literacy will close the racial wealth gap

Hamilton and Darity (2017) have argued that, all too often, the framing of the racial wealth gap focuses on poor financial choices and decisions on the part of blacks. Evidence put forth to make the case for black financial illiteracy includes blacks’ disproportionate use of alternative financial service products, like payday loans, auto-title loans, and check cashing institutions. These financial services have fees and interest payments that far exceed more conventional options. Other evidence put forth also includes racial variations in portfolio composition in which the blacks have a much larger share of their assets in the form of home equity. Here, blacks are characterized as making the suboptimal decision to invest
in “low-return” housing assets instead of higher yield financial assets (Boshara et al. 2015).9

For many Americans with any significant level of wealth, home equity makes up a predominant amount of their assets. The consumption value of homeownership, including access to schools and other desirable neighborhood amenities, and the tax-preferred status of owning a home, should be considered when examining portfolio shares. Regardless of race, historically a home is the first major asset purchased by most Americans.

The key point is whites generally have more resources to invest at the outset—not only do they invest more in homeownership, they invest more in financial assets too. Basically, whites have more of every asset simply because they have more resources. Hamilton and Darity (2017) have observed that “...attributing the racial wealth gap to a more diverse asset portfolio for whites is ambiguous at best, given that it is wealth in the first place that is associated with having a more diverse asset portfolio.”

The problem with assigning differences in cost of finance and asset portfolios to difference in financial acumen is its directional emphasis. Meager economic circumstances—not poor decision making or deficient knowledge—constrain choices and leave asset-poor borrowers with little to no other option but to use predatory and abusive alternative financial services (Hamilton and Darity, 2017).

A negligible level of economic resources readily explains why blacks, specifically, use more predatory financial institutions. Indeed, Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider’s (2017)


U.S. Financial Diaries (USFD) project reveals that the use of predatory financial products and alternative financial services are often last-resort finance options for economically fragile borrowers after all other options, including borrowing from family and friends, have been exhausted.

As we have noted above, wealth begets more wealth. Higher levels of wealth enable greater access to more favorable terms for credit. Wealth provides individuals and families with financial agency and choice; it provides economic security to take risks and shields against the risk of economic loss. Basically, wealth is cumulative. It provides people with the necessary capital to secure finance and purchase an appreciating asset, which in turn, will generate more and more wealth (Hamilton, 2017). Literally, it takes wealth to make wealth, while blacks largely have been excluded from intergenerational access to capital and finance.

It merits noting, again, that the Gittleman and Wolff (2004) study cited in the previous section, which used panel data long prior to the 2007 predatory subprime mortgage lending crisis, did not find a significant racial difference in asset appreciation rates for households with positive assets, once household income is taken into account. This result emerged despite the well-documented evidence of historical and ongoing housing and lending discrimination (Bocian, Li, and Ernst, 2010; Institute on Race and Poverty, 2009; Oliver and Shapiro, 2006; Katznelson, 2005).

There is also a presumption that, as a result of financial irresponsibility, blacks carry much greater debt than whites, but, this presumption is not valid (Hamilton and Darity, 2017). Tippett and coauthors (2014) find that, overall, a slightly larger share of white families has unsecured debt than black families. Furthermore, after controlling for basic socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, the study finds no significant difference in the value of black and white family unsecured debt holdings.


When unsecured debt is disaggregated into three categories: (1) store bills and credit card debt, (2) loans from a bank or credit union, and (3) “other” types of debts, including student loans and medical bills, it is only the “other” category in which there is a statistically significant racial difference in unsecured debt—21.5 percent for black families and 19 percent for white families. This debt category represents borrowing for school and other critical needs, including medical care (Tippet et al., 2014).

Paul et. al. (2016) demonstrate that among relatively better-off students who are able to attend college, blacks are 25 percent more likely to accumulate student debt and, on average, borrow 10 percent more than their white counterparts. The adverse implications of the liability produced by these racial differences in self-investment debt are compounded by the fact that black students are one-third less likely to complete their degrees, often because of the greater financial burden that precipitated student loan borrowing in the first place. Paul et. al. (2014) found that 29 percent of black students who leave college after their first year do so for financial reasons.10

Student loan debt and mortgage debt traditionally have provided Americans with access to the finance needed to purchase an appreciating asset such as a house or secure a job in the professional or managerial sector. In effect mortgage debt and student loan debt may be considered a form of “good debt,” especially in comparison to other types of debt
like credit card debt, which is often associated with consumption or some good that rapidly depreciates in value (Hamilton, 2017). However, the implication of so-called “good debt” has different meaning, once we consider race and the prevailing framework of subjecting a marginalized racial group to inferior housing and educational products, predatory finance, and labor market discrimination (Hamilton and Darity 2017).

Also relevant is the intensifying context of economic precarity and income volatility in U.S. labor markets, where Americans, and blacks in particular, increasingly have less control of when and for how long they work (Lambert et al., 2013; Hardy and Ziliak, 2014; Hardy, 2016). This makes access to short-term credit, including credit card debt, an essential element in management of household budgets, particularly for vulnerable households without the financial cushion of liquid assets. Pressure to utilize credit cards to balance household budgets in the midst of expense and income volatility continues despite substantial reported disdain for their use (see evidence from a consumer attitude survey published by The Pew Charitable Trusts 2015).

As stated above, it is ultimately racial differences in initial endowments of and access to financial resources that sustain and fuel the racial wealth gap. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts (2015), white families tend to have greater access to mortgages, and credit than black and Latino families. Even when black and Latino homeowners are able to secure mortgages, they experience higher rates of foreclosure and housing distress than white families, in part because they are systematically offered riskier loans. This obviously has implications with regards to Myth 2, that the racial homeownership gap is the “driver” of the racial wealth gap as well.

Furthermore, home equity for black American homeowners has not increased at the same rate as it has for white homeowners largely because home values in the neighborhoods to which blacks have been systematically restricted, have been slow to recover since the
housing crisis. Consequently, they also have generated lower returns on mortgage debt. Other research suggests that inheritances and other intergenerational wealth transfers often benefit white families more than black families.

Greater financial literacy can be valuable if an individual or household has finances to manage. Financial literacy without finance is meaningless. There is no magical way to transform no wealth into great wealth simply by learning more about how to manage one’s monetary resources. While wealth begets wealth, typically no wealth begets no wealth, regardless of how astute a money manager the person may be.
 
This ados thing just wreaks of super paranoid hoteps that are blaming their short comings on everyone, yet they voted for trump because “he’s a business man.”

This is brexit for America and it will pit immigrants against southern and inner city brothas and sistas who have little to no job opportunities and have been getting the short end of the stick for decades.

Reparations were always talked about but the misinformation is what’s really alarming.

Y’all falling for the okie doke..
 
Cuba Calls For Reparations For Descendants Of African Slave Trade

Screen Shot 2019-04-01 at 3.08.04 PM.png


https://popularresistance.org/cuba-calls-for-reparations-for-descendants-of-african-slave-trade/

Madam Chair,

We support the intervention made by the Bahamas on behalf of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

Cuba engaged in negotiations and supported General Assembly resolutions 61/19 and 70/7, which commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, designated this International Day and established the Permanent Memorial. My country attaches particular importance to the annual commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a particularly sensitive issue for the Cuban people.

It would be an unforgivable historic mistake to ignore or intend to forget the past. By introducing the slave trade into the Western Hemisphere, the once colonial powers committed a crime against humanity that does not prescribe.

The major beneficiaries of conquest and colonization, slavery and the slave trade must assume responsibility and provide compensation for the horrendous crimes committed.

Madam Chair,

The report submitted by the Secretary-General leads us to reflect on the importance of implementing the precepts set forth in the Durban Declaration, in particular paragraphs 98 to 102, as well as the activities included in its Programme of Action, relating to teaching and understanding the historical truth behind this tragedy.

Some 1.3 million Africans arrived in Cuba as slaves. They and their descendants were key players in the various stages of our struggles for definitive liberation. The Cuban people are extremely proud of their African roots. From Africa, we inherited the fighting spirit, sensitivity, joy, strength in the face of adversity and love for freedom that characterize Cubans. No other people in the world had contributed as much to forging the Cuban nation as the African people.

On this basis, with the support and active involvement of civil society, the Cuban State has developed a broad program in the field of education and cultural promotion throughout the country from the central levels to the communities. The program aims not only at achieving the widest dissemination and understanding of a problem that is part of our own history, but also at maintaining and strengthening the cultural roots of African descent.

Madam Chair,

We welcome the fact that the report submitted reflects the implementation, under the auspices of the United Nations and at the national level, of a broad program of activities throughout the reporting period, with the active involvement of many countries, including Cuba.

However, this is not enough. More political will is needed, because slavery is not a phenomenon of the past. In the twenty-first century, nearly 40 million people are subject to similar conditions.

Accelerated progress towards fulfilling Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be postponed without intensified efforts to eliminate modern slavery.

The fair request for compensation by CARICOM member states must be addressed.

The special and differential treatment required by developing countries in their international economic relations, particularly African countries, should be applied.

Madam Chair,

Much wealth in today’s world has been produced by the shame and opprobrium of slavery and the slave trade. The international community has a moral obligation to contribute to repair the crime committed and to ensure through educational campaigns targeting present and future generations that such crime is never repeated.

Thank you very much.
 
Liberals Say Immigration Enforcement is Racist, but the Group Most Likely to Benefit From It Is Black Men

JANPENW3OVE5DMYI3ANOJMFV5Y.jpg


Liberals say immigration enforcement is racist, but the group most likely to benefit from it is black men

President Trump’s election victory over Hillary Clinton seemed to herald a new era for border security and immigration enforcement. But his polarizing and occasionally ignorant comments about immigrants have handed his adversaries a convenient pretext for stymying compromise on immigration reform: racism.

Left-leaning advocacy groups and a host of Democrats all too often shy away from the specifics of the debate and instead lean on cries of bigotry, resorting to claims like that of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has described Trump’s approach to immigration reform as an effort to “make America white again.”

Claims that immigration enforcement equals racism ignore the reality that the group most likely to benefit from a tougher approach to immigration enforcement is young black men, who often compete with recent immigrants for low-skilled jobs.

This dynamic played out recently at a large bakery in Chicago that supplies buns to McDonald’s. Some 800 immigrant laborers, most of them from Mexico, lost their jobs last year after an audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Cloverhill Bakery, owned by Aryzta, a big Swiss food conglomerate, had to hire new workers, 80% to 90% of whom are African American. According to theChicago Sun Times, the new workers are paid $14 per hour, or $4 per hour more than the (illegal) immigrant workers.

In this case, and in many others, the beneficiaries of immigration enforcement were working-class blacks, who are often passed over for jobs by unscrupulous employers.

The labor force participation rate for adult black men has declined steadily since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ushered in a new era of mass immigration. In 1973, the rate was 79%. It is now at 68%, and the Bureau of Labor projects that it will decline to 61% by 2026.

In 2016, the Obama White House produced a 48-page report acknowledging that immigration does not help the labor force participation rate of the native-born. It concluded, however, that “immigration reform would raise the overall participation rate by bringing in new workers of prime working age.”

Although the report used the term “new workers,” Democrats may also be tempted by the prospect of new voters. But they should be aware that in courting one group, they risk losing others.

African Americans tend to be a reliable voting bloc for the Democratic Party, but they have repeatedly indicated in public opinion surveys that they want significantly less immigration.

A recent Harvard-Harris poll found that African Americans favor reducing legal immigration more than any other demographic group: 85% want less than the million-plus we allow on an annual basis, and 54% opted for the most stringent choices offered — 250,000 immigrants per year or less, or none at all.

These attitudes are rational.

In a 2010 study on the social effects of immigration, the Cornell University professor Vernon Briggs concluded: “No racial or ethnic group has benefited less or been harmed more than the nation’s African American community.”

The Harvard economist George Borjas has found that, between 1980 and 2000, one-third of the decline in the employment among black male high school dropouts was attributable to immigration. He also reported “a strong correlation between immigration, black wages, black employment rates, and black incarceration rates.”

In a 2014 paper on neoliberal immigration policies and their effects on African Americans, the University of Notre Dame professor Stephen Steinberg argued that, thanks to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, “African Americans found themselves in the proverbial position of being ‘last hired.’” Steinberg also noted that “immigrants have been cited as proof that African Americans lack the pluck and determination that have allowed millions of immigrants from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean to pursue the American dream.”

The struggles of black men obviously cannot all be linked to immigration, but it’s clear that the status quo does not benefit them.

As elected leaders consider changing our immigration laws, the interests of America’s most vulnerable citizens shouldn’t be overlooked. The first step toward honest reform is for the Democratic Party to admit that while liberal immigration enforcement might help them win new voters, it also harms and disenfranchises their most loyal constituency.
 
Reparations Bill Wins New Momentum in Congress

warrenbookerlee_040419getty.jpg


https://thehill.com/homenews/house/437286-reparations-bill-wins-new-momentum-in-house

House legislation to form a commission to study whether black Americans should receive reparations for slavery is getting a significant boost from Democrats on the presidential campaign trail.

Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), the head of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), suggested that action on a reparations measure sponsored by Rep.Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) is all but certain, with Democrats now in control of the lower chamber and the idea gaining prominence on the national stage.

Jackson Lee’s bill would form a commission to study the issue of reparations but does not call for black Americans to receive payments.

“I don’t think there needs to be pressure, we’re in charge,” Bass said. “It’s being discussed, I’m sure we’re going to get there.”

2020 hopefuls including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren(D-Mass.) are backing the legislation. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), another presidential candidate, is a co-sponsor.

And on Wednesday, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) endorsed the idea, a pivot from his earlier statement of opposition to reparations payments.

“Absolutely I would sign that into law,” O’Rourke said of Jackson Lee’s bill during an interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton at his National Action Network convention in New York.

The support from presidential candidates highlights how the idea of reparations is spiking in popularity in Democratic circles — particularly as a large field of candidates jockeys for support from African-American voters.

Former Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) had introduced a reparations bill in every Congress since 1989, but the legislation was given little notice even with the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, in office.

Jackson Lee, who took up the mantle from Conyers, said she’s been talking with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) about holding a hearing on her bill. Nadler is also a co-sponsor, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has put her considerable voice behind the effort. An aide said Wednesday that, if acted upon, the bill would move first through Nadler’s committee before reaching the floor.

“We tried to posture this legislation at the highest level of thought and seriousness. There is no humor. There is no request in the bill for a check or a pot of gold,” Jackson Lee told The Hill as she headed to a CBC meeting in the Capitol.

“I do think it has traction. People are not hesitating to openly support it and push for it. I think we have a very good chance of having a hearing some point.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), a prominent member of the CBC and a co-sponsor of the bill, characterized reparations as a commonsense way for the country to make amends for the historical injustices against African-Americans. The prominence of the issue among 2020 contenders has lent momentum to the effort, he said, “but it’s also a recognition that Africans who were brought here in bondage — that should not have occurred.”

“This country owes a lot [to the descendants of those Africans]. … As to what the remedy is, we need to look at it,” Thompson said, comparing the issue to the Japanese internments of World War II. Congress, decades later, passed legislation offering a formal apology — and $20,000 — to each of the surviving victims of that campaign.

“Obviously, slavery was a greater internment, and so it’s something that has to be looked at, absolutely,” Thompson said.

Not all Democrats back direct reparations payments.

The issue is divisive, and ahead of an election where Republicans and Democrats will be battling over the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio, it has the potential to split Democrats from white working-class votes.

In the presidential race, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has said he does not believe direct payments are the best way to address the needs of “distressed communities.”

“I think what we have got to do is pay attention to distressed communities — black communities, Latino communities and white communities — and as president, I pledge to do that,” Sanders said in interview with “The View.”

Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), a CBC member and the third-ranking House Democrat, has long fought to eliminate racial disparities on jobs, wages, housing and wealth. But he’s repeatedly argued against reparations in the form of cash payments, saying it would simply be too difficult to implement.

“You’ve got to satisfy two problems, one of which is the legality of it and the other is the practicality of it,” Clyburn said in an interview last month.

Clyburn highlighted just one of the thorny questions a reparations panel would have to resolve, noting that mixed-raced people, following the Civil War, had access to certain schooling that black former slaves did not.

“Are mulattoes descendants of slaves? Yes, they are. But they got a leg up,” he said. “So I don’t know how you can fairly deal with that. That’s the practicality part.”

Clyburn is instead pushing for direct investments in the nation’s poorest regions. Known as the 10-20-30 plan, Clyburn’s model operates under the simple premise that federal development dollars are best spent in the areas of greatest need. Under his formula, federal programs must direct at least 10 percent of their funds to communities where at least 20 percent of the population has lived below the poverty line for at least the last 30 years.

On Wednesday, Clyburn and Booker introduced legislation that would expand that model, which already governs parts of federal spending, to a larger swath of programs.

“While genius is spread equally across ZIP codes, opportunity is not,” Booker said.

Jackson Lee’s bill has the same number adopted by Conyers: H.R. 40. That’s a nod to “40 acres and a mule,” the unfulfilled promise that Union leaders made to newly freed slaves in 1865.

She pushed back on the suggestion that disagreements in the Democratic caucus were delaying her legislation.

“There’s no hold up. You don’t move legislation overnight. I would never say there is a hold up,” Jackson Lee said. “The Judiciary Committee has been working on this. And we are very excited of the Speaker taking note of H.R. 40.”

The proposal would establish a committee charged with studying the institution of slavery in the U.S. — from its inception until the end of the Civil War in 1865 — and recommend ways to compensate living descendants.

CBC members pointed out that the idea of reparations is being discussed on the 2020 campaign trail because grass-roots activists are pressing candidates and congressional leaders to take up the issue.

“It’s coming from the streets,” one CBC member said.

In one example, Clyburn was pressed last month by an activist representing the group American Descendants of Slavery.

“Tell Nancy Pelosi to cut the check,” the activist said, in a video posted to Twitter.

Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), the immediate past chairman of the CBC, is a supporter of reparations and the idea of establishing a commission.

“I think it’s a good idea, especially if it’s in the form of education or tuition or something like that. But sometimes you let the experts tell you what they think it should be,” he said. “I think the commission is good because we need to see what the experts say would be the correct remedy.”
 
Could Criminal Records Cost Some ADOS Their Eligibility for Reparations?

Like how felony disenfranchisement cost some people their right to vote? This is the same country that made Trump president after all. I'm only asking because if reparations become an actual possibility then we should be contemplating potential road blocks the powers that be might set in place.
 
Back
Top Bottom