BACKGROUND
I grew up in the first age of desegregation. My parents went to segregated schools. They lived in a city with black and white neighborhoods, separate bathrooms, water fountains, and blacks in the back of the bus. My generation started school during the transition from legal segregation to integration. I grew up in a time when Martin Luther King was alternately a hero or a rabble-rouser, depending on who you talked to.
In my elementary years, there were a few blacks in my predominantly white school. It didn’t seem like they were treated any differently than the rest of us. We learned the same lessons, ate the same food at lunch, played on the playground together. We became friends with them. Nevertheless, there were some differences. The black kids acted out in school. The white kids didn’t.
Back in the 1960s, it wasn’t uncommon for a teacher to leave the classroom unattended for a few minutes to run to the office to make a phone call or get something she needed for the class. That’s unheard of now, because the kids would be having oral or anal sex under the desk, practicing what they learned in health class. I recall one occasion where the teacher left the class for not even three minutes. In that three minutes, the black kids put on a show like you wouldn’t believe. They threw paper, pencils, jumped on desks, and even one of them swung like a monkey from the fluorescent light fixture. A fellow black lookout posted himself at the door, watching for the teacher to come back down the hall. When he saw her, he hissed loudly (probably loudly enough for her to hear), “TEACHER!!!!”
The black kids quickly ran back to their seats just in the nick of time, but when the teacher entered the door, there were still pieces of notebook paper wafting down in the air and the overhead light fixture was still rocking back in forth. Clearly there was some mayhem that had just ended. The teacher berated us and demanded to know what was going on. Nobody said a word. You see, all the white kids knew that the black kids were bigger and more aggressive. If we snitched, they would beat us up when recess time came.
Aggressiveness is probably the biggest difference I saw between white and black students in those days. that and sexual maturity. The black kids were physically bigger, stronger, and tougher than us. They were more prone to violence. Perhaps that is because that’s what they grew up around. They also were much more sexually savvy than us. As a third-grader, we white kids still thought the stork brought babies, whereas the third-grade black girl already had a 38D bustline and was already having periods. By sixth grade, the black boys were growing goatees and the girls were already having sex and getting pregnant. It was shocking to us white kids, whose homes were more Puritanical.
When I was in high school, my father’s work transferred him to a distant state where there were very few black people. There, I saw another minority (Native Americans) who were the targets of racial discrimination. That behavior made me question my own racial assumptions and, ever since then, I have tried to understand and mitigate them with reason and rationality.
THE PROTESTANT ETHIC
That reference to Puritans above is my pivot-point. The heart of white American culture comes from the Puritans. America had a choice of founding mythos. We could have chosen the story of Jamestown as our founding myth, but it’s less than glorious. A bunch of low-level English noblemen and merchants sailed to Virginia, expecting to find gold lying around for the taking. They hoped to sail back to England wealthy. They brought no farmers, no women, and no families. They nearly starved to death until Captain John Smith forced them to labor. To survive, some of them ate the bodies of people who died.
That’s not the founding myth of a great republic. Instead, we chose the story of the Pilgrims. They came to America in search of religious liberty. They brought families and transplanted their Puritan culture. They survived in a hostile land by making alliances with Indians and balancing their faith with the need to fight. Their dogged determination, rooted in a belief that America was to be a new Zion, a new promised land, endured. Sociologist Max Weber wrote about the Protestant Work Ethic the Puritans transferred to America. It was an ethos that said that, instead of the love of money being the root of all evil, it was pleasing to God that people engage in thrift and industry to acquire means. Once acquired, he expected them to do good with it and to build up his kingdom.
This ethos shaped America in that it provide a righteous way to become wealthy and still be approved of God. It shaped our attitudes about work, diligence, use of time, thrift, self-denial, and future orientation. Americans won the Space Race and two world wars because of this ethos. It justified us in wrenching the land out of the hands of Native Americans because they were not putting the land to godly use. It also justified the enslavement of blacks because they were believed to not have the internal moral compass that would permit them to lead a free Christian’s life. Right or wrong, the Protestant Ethic shaped American history and its dominant culture.
When slavery existed in America, the Protestant Ethic created what historian Stanley Elkins called the “Sambo” persona. Blacks were considered to be child-like, immature, and unable to take care of themselves without white intervention. One of the reasons slavery persisted so long is that white Southerners feared that emancipation would not only cost them their labor force, but that blacks also were insufficiently “Puritanized” to be able to live according to principles of thrift and self-denial. “Sambo” was helpless and it was the white man’s burden to teach him to be self-sufficient and civilized. (Again, I’m not advocating these positions. I’m merely explaining the historical mindsets of the people of the time. Empathy is necessary for historians.)
In the generation after the Civil War ended, Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Institute and began educating his fellow freedmen. One of the things he had to fight the parents of his students over was that he made the students labor in the fields. The parents argued that they wanted their children freed from the demands of hard labor by educating them. Booker T. Washington was trying to instill in them the Protestant Ethic in addition to teaching reading and computation. He taught useful trades and thrift. Washington believed that blacks would gain respect of white Americans when they earned it through fully mastering the principles of success embodied in what we now call the Protestant Ethic.
One of the things Booker T. Washington despised was black hucksters who, seeking to avoid a life of labor, declared themselves ministers of the gospel. In many cases, these so called ministers could not even read the Bible, but they set up churches in storefronts and proselyted converts. They passed the plate to make their bread, not by the sweat of their brow. Many of these so-called ministers then moved on into the halls of Congress. Education was often scorned by blacks because it was an attempt to become “white.” Educated blacks were called “Uncle Toms” and “house Negroes.” Booker T. Washington understood that freedom for blacks meant freedom from forced servitude, not freedom from the need to labor.
Generations of slavery in America had taught blacks a different ethos. Instead of thrift and industry, it taught them to steal, feign illness or injury, and sloth. When the dreadful whip threatened to enforce compliance, that compliance was given with sullenness and sloth. Slaves would shuffle instead of walk to the fields. They would break tools. Sometimes the barn or the tool shed might burn down ‘accidentally.’ Sometimes the master’s family would become ill from food poisoning. Modern historians focus on narratives of resistance to slavery, not Elkins’ passive “Sambo” characterization.
As a white historian, I have to acknowledge the wrongs of white Americans. Slavery destroyed the black family. Whereas the Protestant Ethic aspired to a Judeo-Christian patriarchy, where selfless fathers labored to provide for his wife and children, the slave-owners sold black fathers away from plantations and, when the children were old enough, they were sold away from their mothers. The white planters often impregnated their own slave women in order to have more slaves. The love of money and power corrupted the Protestant Ethic in great measure from the Puritans’ aspirations. Slavery created a black family structure which was matriarchal in nature, one in which men did not play a role other than to sire children. One of the means of transmitting the culture of passive resistance was the use of B’rer Rabbit fables, which taught generations of young, enslaved black children that it was OK to lie, cheat, deceive, steal, and engage in trickery to gain an advantage. Those were skills of successful resistance that they needed to endure and survive slavery.
After emancipation, when blacks entered into the mainstream culture, did those values of dishonesty, dissimulation, and deception serve them well? Not at all. They rejected the Puritan Ethic and held fast to the ethic of B’rer Rabbit. Instead of gaining the confidence of white Americans, they fostered distrust. Does black culture cling to those values today? Do black families teach and encourage their children to get over on “Whitey?” A white manager or business owner might complain of black employees not pulling their own weight compared to their white co-workers. White teachers complain that they get pushback from their black students who resist being educated in the principles of the white Protestant Ethic. They get called racist and the kids are continual discipline problems. Do black parents, clergy, entertainers, and cultural icons teach children self-denial and future orientation as a means to success?
The common culture of the United States is the white Protestant Ethic. It is challenged by blacks and Hispanic immigrants. A black person who adopts it and succeeds, like Clarence Thomas, is disparaged by his own people for attempting to act white. Latinos largely come from a Roman Catholic culture, which does not include the Protestant ethic as a component. The Hispanic solution, especially among illegal immigrants, has been to develop a separate, under-the-table economy that only has minimal contact with the mainstream economy. Having not come into America as slaves, Hispanics kept the traditional patriarchal family intact. Slavery hindered the development a patriarchal system among African Americans. The restoration of the patriarchal black family was further decimated by the welfare state, which was intentionally designed to keep black men from shouldering their roles as fathers and providers. Patriarchy is largely panned by liberals and feminists, yet the intact patriarchal family can be shown historically and statistically as the best preventative against poverty.
CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE ROOTS OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM
In the history of the United States, there have been moments where reconciliation and unity between blacks and whites could have taken root. In each case, they were snuffed out by elites. Historian Howard Zinn rightly portrays the story of the nation as one of class struggle between the moneyed elites and the yeomanry. That struggle took place early in colonial times. The following events merit deeper study than the superficial explanations I will offer here, but I hope to establish the pattern and the reader can flesh it out on his or her own, if interested.
In 1619, the first African twenty or so slaves were brought by Dutch slave traders to Jamestown. At the time, nobody could have imagined that they would be the vanguard of some ten million people who would be forcibly taken from Africa and brought to serve as slaves in the Americas. The door of history swings wide on its hinges. At the time, slavery was not an institutionalized evil. Many of those first slaves labored alongside working farmers as indentured servants and they were eventually granted their freedom. Many readers will know of the Angolan Anthony Johnson, who began as a servant, gained his freedom, and won a court case granting him the right to own slaves. He became relatively wealthy and employed slaves on his plantation. When did slavery become inseparably bound up with race?
Seventy years after the founding of Jamestown, about the space of a generation or so, the Virginia Colony had become relatively stable. Englishmen began to spread into the western frontiers. The elites, including Governor Berkeley, were involved in the lucrative fur trade with the Indians. There were occasional skirmishes between settlers and the Natives, but the Crown wanted peaceful, profitable relations. Nathaniel Bacon tried to work his way into the trade, but he was blocked by the Governor. Bacon claimed the Governor allowed Indians to attack white settlers because it allowed him and other elites to maintain a monopoly on the fur trade. The conflicts with Indians and with the Governor resulted in Bacon forming a militia and going to attack Jamestown. The militia was the first time that a coalition of lower-class whites, indentured servants, and blacks ever challenged the Colonial elites.
This struck deep fear into these elite Englishmen whose ancestors grew up in a nation where landed gentry controlled everything. The very notion of the lower classes combining against them caused an almost existential panic. Bacon’s rebels burned Jamestown. Bacon died during the rebellion and nearly two dozen of his militiamen were hung. The House of Burgesses responded by passing a fateful law that shaped the black experience in America for the next four centuries. They changed slavery into a permanent legal status and made it inheritable. In other words, slaves became chattel—no longer human. They became property, like a horse or a chair. They had no legal human rights whatsoever. This was a unique instance. In South America, although slavery was still onerous, manumission was common. Many of the Spanish intermarried with freed slaves and created a new class, the Mulattoes. Catholic Spain respected a Papal Bull that declared slaves were human, had souls to be saved, and should be treated accordingly. From Bacon’s Rebellion onward, no slaves in America enjoyed such a status. Even worse, their children were condemned to the same fate for generations to come. This was the outcome of the first attempt by common white and black people to challenge the powers-that-be.
Over a century later, John Brown attempted to start a race war to free the slaves. His poorly-planned attack on Harper’s Ferry and his inability to inspire enough slaves to join his revolt ended with his capture, trial, and ultimately, his execution by hanging. Which class of Americans shuddered at the prospects of what could have happened had Brown succeeded? The white, Southern Democrat aristocracy. Once again, the elites defeated an attempt by the white yeomanry to join with African Americans.
Jump ahead to the Jazz Age. America had transformed into an industrial nation. Theodore Roosevelt and other presidents had expanded the United States into an empire. Part of that expansion included the nation’s strategic entrance into the opium trade. In the decades before the Jazz Age, white housewives became addicts by the tens of thousands. A US Ambassador to the Philippines, who later became a Senator, was the big drug lord of the region. While this was going on, social changes in America began to occur because of the emergence of Jazz.
In the black diaspora from the South to the industrial cities of the North in the late nineteenth century, blues traveled with them and began to morph into Jazz. Kansas City, Chicago, and New York became hubs of the music’s development. Conservatory-trained white musicians were thrilled by the improvisational brilliance of the black musicians and the infectious swing rhythm was compelling. This led to interracial interactions. The ability of Jazz to cross interracial boundaries was amazing. Soon, white musicians would leave their gigs in Manhattan and go over to Harlem to sit in with black Jazz musicians. White music lovers followed suite and a relaxation of social barriers commenced.
Alarmed at this, white elites sought to curtail this musical intercourse between the races. How was the best way to achieve this? How could they make Jazz something disreputable and distasteful to whites?
Drugs was the answer. The opium market, an unofficial concession of the government, began producing heroin and introduced it into the cities where Jazz flourished. Many black Jazz musicians were already using marijuana, a fact that is evident in many of the songs titles of the era. Even the great Ella Fitzgerald had a hit with a song titled, “Wacky Dust.” Very quickly, many black musicians became heroin addicts and the arrests began. The drug was used to drive a social wedge between black and white Jazz fans. The spread of heroin played a major role in killing the popularity of Jazz. The elites managed again to negate a period of growing unity between whites and blacks. Why? Did they recall the lesson of Bacon’s Rebellion?
Not surprisingly, this same story repeats itself during the 1970s to the 1990s. Following the turbulent Sixties, a period of social detente occurred, facilitated again by popular music. Seventies hits like “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Ball of Confusion,” “Love Train,” and other songs spoke of a social awakening, and a desire to find reconciliation. Opposition arose to the Vietnam War, not only against the morality of the war itself, but also the practice of granting the sons of white elites exemptions from the military draft. Into the Eighties, this trend continued and accelerated when Hip-Hop music emerged. Although it began, like Jazz, as a unique artist expression of black culture, white fans soon embraced it.
The elite powers-that-be once again felt threatened by the potential of blacks and whites finding unity. As in the Jazz Age, drugs became the weapon of social dissolution. In the Eighties and into the Nineties, the US government waged an invisible war in Central America, supporting the right-wing Contras against the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Part of that operation involved sending guns and ammunition to the Contras in El Salvador, Columbia, Panama, and other countries in the region. The CIA hired shady contract pilots to run the weapons to the war zone. Part of the deal with the contractors was that they would come back to the United States from these covert missions and not face scrutiny from US Customs. Seizing the opportunity, those contractors filled their empty planes with cocaine for the return trip. Many of these planes recovered at a remote civil airport in Mena, Arkansas. State troopers testified that they often met planes at Mena to pick up envelopes full of money and transport them to the Governor’s Mansion. Who was the Governor of Arkansas at the time? None other than Bill Clinton.
Others were connected or at least had knowledge of this operation, including Olivier North and Bob Dole. It went on for years and cocaine use became epidemic in America. When Bill Clinton became President, an odd confluence of events seemed to unfold. The fashionable white elites in America’s cultural centers, like the infamous Studio 54, began to indulge heavily in white powdered cocaine. In the ghettos of Los Angeles, Oakland and other centers of Hip-Hop culture, crack cocaine use soared.
When Bill Clinton took office, he pushed through a crime bill with several facets. One of those was mandatory sentencing, which removed judges’ discretion in punishing offenders. Another was the “three-strikes” laws, which imposed inordinately large sentences on repeat offenders of minor crimes, like bouncing checks. The third was the intentional imposition of harsh sentences for crack cocaine dealing and usage, while the penalties for white powdered cocaine were considerably more lenient. Hillary Clinton referred to black criminals as “super-predators.” After the law was passed, Clinton was praised as being the “law and order president,” and thousands of blacks went to prison for long sentences. The last piece of this puzzle included the privatization of maximum security prisons and contracting them out to companies like Wackenhut Security. (Hold on. This comes together shortly.)
During this time Clinton also pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. This treaty removed trade barriers between the US, Mexico, and Canada. Many manufacturers began moving operations to Mexico to save labor costs and compete with cheap labor exploited by Asian manufacturers. To keep some products being produced with a “Made in America” label, some manufacturers contracted with the private prisons to produce their goods. Prisoners were paid twenty cents and hour to make these products and promised time off from their sentences. Additionally, the prisons then garnished some of the wages from the prisoners to pay for their “room and board” in prison. The result was that American prison labor became competitive with the “coolie wages” of the Asian manufacturers. In just a few years, the confluence of the crime bill, private prisons, the CIA-backed influx of cocaine, and NAFTA, the United States had the largest incarcerated population of any industrial nation on the planet. The great majority of those prisoners was black. Ironic it is that, in 2008, Texas Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson declared to the House Black Caucus that Clinton "took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president."
As with Jazz, Hip-Hop became associated with illicit drug use and the seedy “gangsta” underworld. This reinforced the divisions between whites and blacks once again. The social gains and unity hoped for in the music of the Seventies died, just like it did in the Jazz Age.
SUMMARY
This essay summarizes the background of white perceptions of the racial tensions of our time, the history of how racism became institutionalized in early Colonial America, and how racial enmity has been stoked by the elites and the organs of the state, which are controlled by the elites. Today, in the Trump Administration, the phrase “drain the swamp” has profound meaning. President Trump is deliberately misrepresented by a hostile, elite-controlled news media, the corporations that dominate social media, and his political opposition.
During his Administration, great strides were made to improve black unemployment and to restore the manufacturing sector in black-dominated areas like Detroit. The elites have struggled mightily to stop this progress. The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic reversed those gains. There is emerging evidence that the virus was genetically-modified in a Wuhan lab, financially supported by the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Gates Foundation, and George Soros. Recent riots over the death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of the police have been stoked by Antifa, a radical anarchist organization funded by white elites, (including globalist billionaire George Soros). If we understand history, we will see that the divide between the lower class whites and blacks in America is promoted and sustained by white elites in both political parties, but more particularly the globalist elites in the Democrat Party.
How do we find reconciliation and peace between the races in America? How do we overcome systematic racism? Would reparations be enough? Would a separation of races and the establishment of black states help? If so, how could this work, given the opposition of any white citizens in those areas? Can black American culture ever compete with white culture without its embracing the Protestant Ethic--the engine of white economic dynamism? What can repair the damage of generations of slavery, it’s economic effects, and the destruction of the black patriarchal family? Can we effectively remove the influence of the wealthy elites who profited from slavery and who have used their power to maintain the status quo for centuries? These questions will linger unanswered and hostility between blacks and whites might never be defused for generations to come.
As we try to process the recent nationwide rioting, do we see the hand of the moneyed elites fostering division? Have we not seen white radicals from Antifa organizing and stoking the literal flames of conflict? Are not white, upper-class, college-educated young adults, dressed in black, faces masked, going about scrawling graffiti promoting violence? Do we not see white elites funding and promoting the violence? As we can discern from the past, whose interests does it serve if blacks and whites fight one another? Who does Trump truly challenge? The Deep State? Who is the Deep State? What has been the pattern throughout American history when the hegemony of the elites is challenged by the yeoman white and black communities?
Personally, I believe the reconciliation can only occur using the gospel of Christ as a meeting point. We could agree to accept the blood of Christ as the ultimate “payment” for offenses committed by both whites and blacks in the struggle for justice. From that single point of agreement, forgiveness and reconciliation can begin. I pray for forgiveness of my own latent racist feelings even as I seek rationally to understand and mitigate them. As a white man, I can only acknowledge that God made me to be white, even as he made some to be black or any other race. I cannot apologize for my whiteness and I should not have to, any more than a black man or woman need apologize for how God created him. We are all in the image of God and; therefore, that should be motivation enough to learn how to love and serve one another as best as we can, repenting and forgiving faults as we go.
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