How to Self Shackle.

Just in time for the public school year!*

Teach your sons and daughters -- Once enslaved, always enslaved.** Make sure they know that all of the equal opportunities available to them today, are nothing compared to what's been taken from ... them in the past. Give them reasons to "drop out" before they've even begun to compete. Plus, look at that last line.

We start with a group of people living as slaves for 250 years, in a nation that eventually bills itself as the land of liberty and free labor. We take what should be their wages and transfer them to someone else. For the last hundred years of that epoch we forbid them from marrying, and throughout we randomly sell off their kids, some of whom are actually our kids. We forbid them to learn to read. We subject them to random but frequent acts of sexual violence. We pass laws against that minority of them who are to achieve freedom ranging from bans on everything from voting to gun-ownership to serving on juries.

We then are forced to grant them freedom, but we pass more laws against them structured to keep them from exercising any sort of political power. We subject them to the most prolific and wide-ranging campaign of home-grown terror in American history. We burn down their schools, and in some sections of the country are so ardent in our enmity toward them that we actually attack education for poor whites, for fear that it may help blacks by mistake.

We enact policies at virtually every level of government, and virtually every sector of society, with the intent of keeping down the values of their homes, keeping them from competing with us for jobs, keeping them from ever ending up in any kind of supervisory role over our ilk. We mobilize the entire culture arsenal in an effort to portray them as pariahs, mocking them in movies, singling them out in virtually every human function from drinking to eating, from swimming to dancing, from copulation to defecation.

We do this for roughly 300 years. And then we develop a conscience, and for about 30 years we try to make up for what we've done, before deciding that our efforts constitute reverse racism. And then we sit around wondering why it is that a disproportionate share of black people can't live in a nice neighborhood.

This is the unsexy story of anti-black racism. I've spent the past 20 years hoping to find my way around it and discover some hidden secret narrative that would better explain the color line. There is none. This is it. I understand that this will not get fixed in this generation. It took 250 years to get rid of slavery. I'm not pessimistic -- I just think that war is long, and I have no expectation that it will end in my lifetime.

Make sure they always know that the white people -- the teacher, the coach, the authority figure -- is working warring against them, no matter how much it seems they are working and perhaps sacrificing themselves to help children succeed.

Remember to teach them daily: it's a White Man's world. We just let you live here and enjoy these privileges ... until the day we decide to take them away. (Nevermind teaching them about inherent Constitutional rights afforded to all American citizens today -- white founding fathers. What do they know about anything?? Just busy jumping our ladies is all...)

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* No wonder so many parents, those who commit -- often, even before they are born -- to putting their own offspring first -- are seeking other schooling options for their own. Meaning the school district dictates the location of the house you buy, and people realize that if they want better schools, you don't demand it ... you work for it, and pay for it. You build the programs you want; you sit on the school boards, or at least attend the meetings, and determine the level of education your children receive.

Sadly, it only takes one with an inherited attitude or two, at "war" with the world, to disrupt the classroom and hold others back. I'm glad schooling is localized, and I wish those stuck in public schools with other people's children who don't much value "non-specialized" education (ie/ non "black" studies, or "slave narrative history of the U.S.") but mastering the basics first, were able to homeschool or opt out via "choice" vouchers to direct their tax payments toward educationally beneficial programs.

It's not a color thing,
it's an educational attitude thing.


** ADDED: Music for the occasion... Already Gone.

So often in time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key.