What kind of nation we will have for the next two years was determined by the recent election results. This, of course, will be spun as a rejection of President Barack Obama, but if you know U.S. history, you know that it was far more than that.
Directly after slavery, America tried Reconstruction to make the lives of slaves better, but it was doomed from the beginning with a host of government agencies and elected officials actively trying to destroy it; within 12 years, in 1877, it was over. By 1890, we had implemented the Jim Crow system of racial discrimination, and that lasted until 1965. So, for 75 years, African Americans paid taxes and could not use the public facilities we paid for or receive any direct benefits from the city, county and state government.
In the mid-‘60s, we realized that the effects of Jim Crow were negative on black people, so we mandated affirmative action to help remedy the problem. This was another program under siege from the very beginning, with whites saying they were being forced to hire and do business with incompetent people. Then we added every white disadvantaged group that we could think of to the amendment, and most of the money funneled away from the black community.
Within 20 years affirmative action was dead and all of the programs designed to uplift the black community were decimated by the mid-80s. The Central Area Motivation Program in Seattle, the first and one of the last of the poverty programs, was changed to an immigrant-based program called Centerstone more recently.
Obama’s election was supposed to be the final test to prove that America had turned the corner on race. But after six years of the first African-American president, we just elected a Congress and Senate as close to Jim Crow as you can get in modern times.
‘A bastion of white power’
Somewhere in this process of creating a multi-racial society, white voters got buyer’s remorse and decided to go back to the status quo. Don’t believe the hype about low black-voter turnout; the real culprit was white voters, who — in spite of a booming Wall Street, lower unemployment in decades, the deficit at an all-time low and the Affordable Care Act — were convinced that Obama was still the worst president in modern history.
We have seen the same process before in America. We take one big step forward, followed by three or four big steps backward. We are a country that has visualized itself as a bastion of white political and economic power, and we have a difficult time altering that personal and collective perception.
When Obama speaks to world leaders, many white Americans still feel that he cannot be saying or doing what a white president would do. They believe that the world cannot respect America as a legitimate world power with a black man as commander in chief. So no matter what this president says or does, it will be perceived as less than what a white president would have or could have done.
Now we take our traditional three or four steps back and put the Republicans in control of the Congress and Senate. These same people worked overtime to stop this president from serving the American people, and now they have been rewarded.
By spring of next year, when the Republican agenda is clear, America will be in turmoil because its people believe they have a mandate to strip any benefits accrued by black people and to find a way to give those benefits to corporate America. But it’s the poor whites who will find themselves caught between the politics of race and bread on the table. They want to get rid of Obama without a full understanding of what it would mean for them in the future, and that future looks pretty bleak because you cannot go after poor blacks without getting the poor whites as well.
Bringing out the best
The next two years will test black America’s faith in the country to the max. We will be under siege, with racist police departments emboldened by the new political landscape. How we respond will determine the future of America. I personally embrace the challenge, and I believe African American will be ready to bring out the best in ourselves and find the best in America.
The environment will also be under siege, with corporate interest consuming and monetizing our forests, hills and valleys, while destroying the air we breathe and the water we drink.
I know that I now have two hats: one I wear to find true racial justice in America, and the other to make sure that world we find justice in is still fit to live in. Bring it on.
CHARLIE JAMES has been an African-American-community activist for more than 35 years. He is co-founder of the Martin Luther King Jr. County Institute (mlkci.org). To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.