From the Shadows into the Sunlight: Making Racial Discrimination Irrelevant

By Rick Kelly

All Americans should welcome the opportunity to move forward into a better future for America and for all Americans while mending ancient wounds from the nations original sin and at the same time seek to remediate the lingering ills and inflicted hardships still present to this day that divides the nation's people such that some Americans still feel relegated to second class citizenship. Courageous people of all faiths, of goodwill, and of conscience can impart heartfelt support for a new emancipation that moves toward freeing both black and white Americans from the racial disharmony and acrimony that surrounds the issue of racial discrimination in America. It is now possible to seek a new direction that promotes self-reliance and economic progress from within the black community by redirecting black earned resources through black individuals not through the endless, ineffective government programs and bureaucracies. It has been more than half a century since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed the racial discrimination and segregation that persists to this day, and the government has clearly failed to abate such daily pathologies. Government poverty and affirmative action programs have not reduced the racial wealth gap that remains virtually unchanged since 1964. The black middle class suffers from consistently higher unemployment rates while also being burdened with increasing high student loan debt and home mortgage debt that reduces the opportunity for home ownership and family net worth growth. President John F. Kennedy in a 1961 speech repeated the time-worn saying that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. This book suggests a new direction of self-reliance and hope with a new emancipation proclaimed for all Americans, if only there is finally the will to put the nation's dark past behind us and move out of the shadows and into the sunlight of a just and moral new future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098042998

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From the Shadows into the Sunlight

Making Racial Discrimination Irrelevant

Rick Kelly

Copyright © 2020 by Rick Kelly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Introduction

Each sunset heralds the prospect for a better tomorrow. But for the new world in America slavery for ages has cast a dark shadow over the bright hope of freedom promised in the US Constitution and documents founding America because freedom was not provided to all those who would come to find themselves on American shores. America itself was to become another painful illustration of the tangled human history of frightening and disheartening oppression existing alongside peaceful and uplifting liberty.

The twentieth century is replete with American history critics who pillory the American founders of 1776. Plausibly, the founders can be compared somewhat to the fictional characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was author Robert Louis Stevenson who depicted the horrors of human nature in his celebrated 1886 novel of that period that explored the opposing extremes of both good and evil that coexist in the same person (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).¹ The same extremes of both good and evil would also be seen struggling for dominance early in the American nation and among the people of America. Therein may lie the ongoing inner struggle of the human conscience that continues as long as humans inhabit this earth.

It was on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.² Yet while those lofty words of the Declaration made a proclamation of liberty for persons, the US Constitution decreed for those African-born persons no recognition as whole persons as the Constitution’s provisions for representation based on population counted slaves as three fifths of all other Persons.³ Thus, during the United States Constitutional Convention in 1787 under the Three-Fifths Compromise, state representation and tax status were determined by counting three out of five slaves as people to be included for the population count by using the ruse of incorrectly or falsely labeling slaves as ‘all other persons’ so the words slaves or slavery would not actually be mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The United States’ principles of liberty declared on July 4, 1776 were compromised by acquiescing to the existence of slavery in the new nation. The founders further compromised their collective consciences with the 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise that denied the personhood of slaves and treated slaves as mere property.

Here, the rule of law and liberty was being established in the Constitution in 1776 along with a perversion of that same law by allowing the deprivation of liberty by slavery. It is unlikely that the world will ever see the complete elimination of the typical contrived self-serving racial distinctions that produced the discrimination against blacks in America.

Nonetheless, this book provides an alternative perspective on the possibilities of a better future for all Americans, a future, which is not some magical Utopian ideal of perfection. It is a future that looks to the pursuit of a truly more perfect union, where the sting of slavery and the ravages of racism fade from being all consuming preoccupations in America. However, this future can only be attained through great human will and hoped for divine forbearance. America possesses the capacity to transcend the shadowy shrouds cast by slavery to provide an awakening to the sunrise of new days relatively free of the effects of past institutionalized discrimination.

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¹. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (New York: Scribner, 1886), Bartleby.com. Accessed July 1, 2006, ww.bartleby.com/1015/.

². The Declaration of Independence [Online]. Accessed July 1, 2006, http://www.ushistory.org/Declaration/document/index.htm.

³. US Constitution, Article I, Section 2 [3]; Article I, Section 9. Accessed July 2, 2006, http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html#A1Sec2.

Chapter 1

An Enduring Problem—A Failure to Correct the Consequences of Institutional Racial Discrimination

It may be that there are no easy solutions to the seemingly enduring depredation caused by the intentional institutional discrimination against black Americans as a group collectively and individually. However, all Americans should recognize that it was white Americans who established slavery for profit and collectively perpetuated discrimination against black people to benefit themselves and their progeny. It is white Americans who collectively are now either unable or unwilling to completely unravel the consequences of discrimination despite the many claimed efforts to do so.

The failure to correct and lessen the effects of past discrimination on black Americans as a group has led to much of the seething discontent and rage of some black Americans today. It is a form of discontent and rage that few white Americans understand because more than two hundred years have pasts since the days of slavery.

Prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act becoming effective, employers could chose employees according to race or any other consideration, which allowed employment discrimination against blacks.⁴ In the US Supreme Court case of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), Chief Justice Warren Burger noted that employment practices that operated to exclude African‐Americans were illegal unless shown to be related to job performance, or justified by business necessity.⁵ However, white Americans still showed only a glimmer of understanding about the effects of employment discrimination against blacks in the past. White cries of reverse discrimination in affirmative action programs designed to remedy discrimination against blacks caused outrage among some white Americans, who pursued civil cases up to the US Supreme Court claiming reverse discrimination" in the late 1970s.⁶ Most important is the fact that even after less than twenty years of the much debated unintended effects of affirmative action on whites, many outraged white Americans still did not fully grasp the similar outrage of some black Americans for over two hundred years of intentional institutionalized discrimination against innocent black people and the members of their families.

Racial segregation in education has also faced legal challenges in previous years in civil cases like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). The US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown case declared unconstitutional those state laws that established separate public schools for black and white students. But similar efforts to remedy the legacy of historically segregated black schools and education are also challenged by white Americans in cases like Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

In the Grutter case, a white female Michigan student who was not admitted to the University of Michigan Law School brought a lawsuit against the University. Grutter, who had a 3.8 GPA and 161 LSAT score, claimed the following: that the University discriminated against her on the basis of race in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 USC. § 1981; that the law school rejected her because the school used race as a predominant factor in student admissions giving minority applicants a significantly greater chance of admission than students with similar credentials; and that the University had no compelling interest to justify the use of race in admissions.⁷

White Americans these days have been separated for decades from the historical institutional system of slavery, enforced segregation, and overt racism established in the past. As a result, many white Americans today feel no responsibility or complicity for slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination against black Americans that was put in place by white people to benefit white Americans. Although the feelings of white Americans today are understandable it does not erase nor correct the damage done to many blacks that persists to this day. The economic and educational disparity between black and white Americans is a documented fact that still defies a solution.

On June 18, 2009, the Washington Times news reported on the US Senate resolution that apologizes to African-Americans on behalf of the people of the United States, for the wrongs committed against them and their ancestors who suffered under slavery and Jim Crow laws and a[c]knowledges the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow laws.⁸ The Senate unanimously passed the resolution yesterday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution and the latest attempt by the federal government to take responsibility for 2 1/2 centuries of slavery.⁹

There were occasions in the twentieth century when the United States paid reparations or considered doing so¹⁰ as remediation for past transgressions. The US Congress had on other occasions made similar apologies to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II and to Native Americans for the many broken treaties. The government’s acknowledgment of these specific past errors also came with controversial belated symbolic recompense. The US Congress in 1983 passed a remediation (remedy) law for Japanese Americans whom the US government had put into internment camps during World War II where Congress established a $1.5 billion fund for the payment of reparations to survivors of the internment camps.¹¹ While money and benefits were allowed for both interned Japanese Americans as individual victims and Indian communities collectively, such compensation is rare and not favored.

Remediation for these World War II interned Japanese Americans revived African-American demands to receive reparations for enslavement.¹²

That the American majority acquiesced in allowing an institutional system of slavery and discrimination to exist in America for centuries, whether intentionally or by omission, has not gone unnoticed and is also a puzzling source of enduring soul searching in the black community. Continued marked disparities between higher white family incomes and lower black family incomes persist, underscoring the fact that much remains to be done in eliminating the vestiges of the problems created by discrimination against blacks. The Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) research and policy brief dated May 2010 said,

New evidence reveals the wealth gap between white and African American families has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation… Using economic data collected from the same set of families over 23 years (1984–2007), we find that the real wealth gains and losses of families over the time period demonstrate the stampede toward an escalating racial wealth gap.¹³

Not surprisingly in the past a Public Broadcast System (PBS) interview with New York University professor Dalton Conley had years before reported,

Today, the average black family has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. That difference has seemingly grown since the 1960s, since the Civil Rights triumphs, and is not explained by other factors like education, earnings rates or savings rates. It is really the legacy of racial inequality from generations past.¹⁴

Dalton Conley also said,

The wealth gaps between blacks and whites aren’t explained by income. In fact, if you compare people at the bottom of the income distribution—say, a family that makes around $15,000 a year, you’ll find that the average black family that earns $15,000 year in income has $0 net worth or is in debt actually. Compare that with the average white family that earns $15,000 a year, and they have a good $10,000 to $15,000 in equity. That means being poor, being at the bottom of the income distribution, really means two different things depending on whether you are black or white.¹⁵

Further, economic commentaries about the plight of blacks in America had appeared even as far back as the 1944 work by Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.¹⁶ In American Dilemma, Myrdal rightly described the economic situation and prospects of black Americans at the close of the Second World War as dark. His work highlighted four barriers to black employment prevalent at the time, namely (1) exclusion of blacks from certain industries; (2) limited mobility or segregation within industries in which they were accepted; (3) relegation to unskilled or undesirable occupations; and (4) geographical segregation, which resulted in little to no black labor in the small cities of the North and a surplus in large northern cities. Myrdal identified race prejudice as a chief explanation of these barriers, citing three ways in which prejudice operated in the economic sphere: (1) the tendency for even well-meaning whites with egalitarian values to resist competition from blacks in their own industries or unions; (2) objections by white customers opposed to being served by blacks in nonmenial positions; and (3) the belief among many white employers that blacks were simply inferior for most kinds of work.

Myrdal described the conditions of economic discrimination against blacks as self-perpetuating, arguing, "the very fact that there is economic discrimination constitutes an added motive for every individual white group to maintain such discriminatory practices (Myrdal 1944, p. 381).

His argument hinged on what he referred to as two mutually reinforcing variables, white prejudice and blacks’ low plane of living, which he believed to interact in a vicious cycle, a situation in which a negative factor is both cause and effect of one or more other negative factors. As he described the cycle, on the one hand, the negroes’ plane of living is kept down by discrimination from the side of the whites while, on the other hand, the white’s reason for discrimination is partly dependent on the negroes’ plane of living (Myrdal 1944, p. 1066). In other words, blacks’ opportunities to transcend their relatively low standard of living were limited or cut off by white discrimination, while at the same time the low standard of living imposed on black Americans led to a host of negative outcomes such as poverty, low levels of education, and health problems, which whites pointed to as justification for continued discrimination."

Modern America has failed to foster the type of independence and self-sufficiency among the underprivileged masses that early colonists both white and black fought mightily to secure. Instead, false philanthropy has fostered institutional dependency and decades of multigenerational welfare addicted casualties, especially among black people.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The institution of slavery exposed a moral blind spot in America that forever stains American history. However, it also should be acknowledged from the start that black Americans owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude to the truly religious and decent white Americans who fought against slavery from its inception and also fought against the aftermath of institutional discrimination throughout the decades that followed.

Even during the early introduction of slavery into America there were those who rejected slavery and began the abolitionists’ movement to abolish slavery in America.

The abolitionist movement was one of high moral purpose and courage; its uncompromising temper made the slavery question the prime concern of national politics and hastened the demise of slavery in the United States.¹⁷ Although even among religious groups there were individuals and groups of people from almost all religious sects who defended slavery, religious organizations like the Quakers (Society of Friends) uniformly opposed slavery and campaigned against it. Also, between 1787 and 1836 the Presbyterian Church made several formal declarations against slavery.

It is said that [t]he movement to abolish slavery has roots in European urban culture, elite European religious and intellectual movements, and African American slave resistance. Yet it was not until the late eighteenth century that all of these forces combined to create a sustained attack on the institution of slavery itself, and not until the nineteenth century that the Atlantic slave trade, and then American slavery, were finally abolished.¹⁸ The American Civil War (1861–1865) ended slavery but at a terrible price to the nation in terms of human lives and damage to the nation’s moral character and conscience.

The American majority’s initial indifference to slavery and institutional discrimination allowed these evils to become an integral part of American society; however, black Americans cannot at the same time leave unmentioned the debt owed to the outnumbered truly religious and decent white Americans who also fought against these evils throughout the decades.

An Abyss of Evils

The condition of blacks in America in1831 was described and analyzed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his historically acclaimed analytical work Democracy In America (De la démocratie en Amérique, 2 vol., 1835).¹⁹ Tocqueville’s writing has been called [t]he most influential study of the United States ever written.²⁰ It is said that Tocqueville’s analysis of race relations in America hundreds of years ago about the psychological and material factors implicit in these relations is as pertinent [today] as when he wrote although the specific data may no longer be exactly the same.²¹

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was born to an aristocratic French Parisian family, embraced the French Enlightenment, and as a judicial official he was interested in liberal institutions.²² Securing a commission in 1831 to study American prisons with Gustave de Beaumont, also a young nobleman, Tocqueville set out for a nine‐month tour of America. Slavery was not an uncommon institution in Tocqueville’s time. Nonetheless, the desperate condition of black people caused Tocqueville to remark that oppression…deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity and that the Negro of the United States has lost even the remembrance of his country.²³ Tocqueville put forward that slaves in America were so isolated that they existed somewhere between the races of Africa and Europe sold by the one, repulsed by the other.²⁴ Slaves in America were seen as without country, custom or family. To Tocqueville the Negro, plunged in this abyss of evils, scarcely feels his own calamitous situation.²⁵

In spite of the situation, Africans brought to American shores persevered through Tocqueville’s pronounced abyss of evil, surviving as a people while countless other slaves (both black and white) of their times were assimilated by their masters or faded into extinction. Slaves in America possessed a stubborn will to survive at a time when they could not even lay claim to their own names. The captivity in slavery of black people stood in stark contrast to the mounting declarations of the colonists for freedom from Great Britain amidst the exposure to the limitless wilderness and liberty of America’s immense territory.

An American Dilemma

Another foreign observer, Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) in 1944 published another acclaimed commentary on race in American,

An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.²⁶ Myrdal’s research saw the American race problem as a moral dilemma, concluding that legal segregation and the racial caste system were inconsistent with the American creed and its commitment to freedom, equality, and democracy.²⁷ Myrdal published his work during the somber background of racial genocide and world changing events of World War II (1939–1945).

Myrdal had one advantage over Tocqueville in compiling his study of race in America in 1944 and that was because Myrdal’s research team included some of the leading black intellectuals of the era—Ralph Bunche (1904–1971), Kenneth Clark (1914–2005), E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962), Charles S. Johnson (1893–1956), and Ira Reid (1901–1968).²⁸ These distinguished black Americans added true life black perspectives on life in America for black people, which combined with the perspective of the non-American Swedish Myrdal, enhanced the independence and objectivity of the research.

In 1944 Ralph Waldo Ellison,²⁹ a noted black American writer, literary critic, and scholar, wrote a review of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. Ellison commented: "The only sincerity to be expected of political parties is that flexible variety whereby they are enabled to put their own programs into effect. Regardless of their long-range intentions, on the practical level they are guided not by humanism as much as by expediencies of power. Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma is not an easy book for an American Negro to review. Not because he might be overawed by its broad comprehensiveness; nor because of the sense of alienation and embarrassment that the book might arouse by reminding him that it is necessary in our democracy for a European scientist to affirm the American Negro’s humanity."

Ralph Ellison further noted the following: Both the Left and the New Deal showed a far less restrained approach to the Negro than any groups since the Abolitionists. The Left brought the world view of Marxism into the Negro community, introduced new techniques of organization and struggle, and included the Negro in its program on a basis of equality. Within its far more rigid framework the New Deal moved in the same democratic direction. Nevertheless, for all their activity, both groups neglected sharp ideological planning where the Negro was concerned. Both, it might be said, went about solving the Negro problem without defining the nature of the problem beyond its economic and narrowly political aspects. Which is not unusual for politicians, only here both groups consistently professed and demonstrated far more social vision than the average political party.³⁰ Although Ellison and fellow novelist Richard Wright initially viewed Marxist socialism as an alternative path to equality for blacks both later expressed disillusionment with the Communist Party.³¹ The flirtations of blacks with socialism mirrors black frustration with both the Republican and Democratic political parties in America. This frustration was evidenced by the election of black congressman Ron Dellums, who retired from the US House of Representatives in 1998, described as the first openly Socialist Congressman since World War II.³² Dellums received a post graduate M.S.W. degree in 1962 from the often-described leftist institution the University of California, Berkeley.

America and Bastiat’s The Law

The French revolution of February 1848 found France rapidly descending into socialism. Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850) was a French economist and writer who as a Deputy to the French Legislative Assembly sought to explain the misleading notions put forward by the advocates of socialism. Bastiat like his fellow countryman de Tocqueville was able to recognize the dangers of that time and Bastiat wrote many commonsense observations that have stood the ultimate test of time for many hundreds of years.

In June of 1850 Frenchman Bastiat published a work titled The Law, where he wrote about the gift of life, the purpose of The Law, the fatal tendency of mankind, and "the complete perversion of the law.³³ To Bastiat life was a divine gift that was entrusted to us with the responsibility of preserving, developing, and perfecting it.³⁴ People were to apply their abilities to all that nature provided and create goods for use. This ceaseless work and effort were considered the course of human existence.

Then what is the very purpose of the law? Frederic Bastiat believed the law was the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.³⁵ For Bastiat thought each individual possessed a natural right-from God-to defend his person, his liberty, and his property.³⁶ Thus life, liberty, and property were the keystones of human civilization and progress. Life, liberty, and property were said to have come before the law and the law in turn was created to preserve them. According to Bastiat’s view a government only derives the collective right of lawful defense from the individual’s natural rights. In essence, the government must ensure that the law promotes justice and not pervert it. Slavery in America and universal slavery in general were complete perversions of the law violating the rights of life and liberty of those enslaved.

The Complete Perversion of the Law

³⁷

The cause of much suffering and injustice was mankind’s complete perversion of the law in the view of Frederic Bastiat. He felt that unfortunately the law is not always used for its proper functions of protecting life, liberty, and property.³⁸ When the law is used in direct opposition to its own purpose it annihilates the justice that it was supposed to maintain; it limits and destroys rights, which was its real purpose to respect.³⁹ Bastiat felt that the unscrupulous wish to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others without risk and they have converted plunder into a lawful right, in order to protect their plunder.⁴⁰ Besides slavery, misuse of the law also allowed the evils of segregation, and Jim Crow Laws to persist for decades, and the use of the law to deny the protections supposedly provided by the law.

According to Bastiat, the law has been perverted by the influence of two entirely different causes: stupid greed and false philanthropy.⁴¹ Bastiat said there was a common fatal tendency among people, who when they can wish, to live and prosper at the expense of others.⁴² Bastiat pointed to the never-ending history of wars, universal slavery, religious persecution, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies as illustrations that men will resort to plunder whenever plunder is easier than work.⁴³ Therefore, the proper purpose of the law should be to prevent the human tendency to plunder instead of work, which results from stupid greed and false philanthropy. The disturbing words of Bastiat ring especially true today, where some people would rather take from the government the tax money of others instead of working for their own support. Equally disturbing is the government’s false philanthropy of giving away the tax money of others that sometimes fosters generational economic dependence through welfare and other subsidy programs that continually promote self-serving stupid greed.

Legal Plunder and Its Evil Fallout

When the law is used as an instrument of plunder Bastiat called it legal plunder because it is a perversion of the law and is sanctioned by the law.⁴⁴ For Bastiat it was impossible to have a greater evil than the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.⁴⁵Frenchman Bastiat felt that no society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree and he maintained that the safest way to make laws respected is to make the laws respectable.⁴⁶ The law is used to maintain societal order and when enacted by the society’s legitimate law making process people perceive that the law also provides justice. In fact, people may come to believe that the law and justice are synonymous. However, when the law is used to perpetrate injustice eventually respect for the law diminishes to society’s detriment.

From its inception, America has been a nation that claimed it was based on the rule of law not on the whims of Kings like in early England and the law in turn was supposed to give legitimacy to those actions taken by the government in America. However, when the law in America was used to support slavery, segregation, Jim Crow Laws and institutional discrimination then at the same time injustice and legal plunder were woven into the fabric of America leading to the sanctioning of evil. The existence of unjust laws concerning slavery and discrimination proves that morality and law are not always identical and that morality and law do not always happen together. The result of such a contradiction between the law and morality leads to cruel choices by people to lose respect for the law, to develop moral blind spots, or a combination of the two. In any case, both respect for the law and morality are diminished to the ultimate detriment of society. Disrespect for the law and diminished morality often prove fatal to any society.

Coming to Grips with Slavery as a Universal Evil

Slavery has existed throughout history. Most societies have made provisions for it within their structure, and most people have been sources of slaves at one time or another.⁴⁷ Slavery is the most absolute form of human bondage. It has been noted that the widespread enslavement of diverse people for economic and political gain has played a fundamental role throughout human history in the development of nations.⁴⁸ Both ancient Greek and Roman societies utilized slave labor. Later European countries also used slaves. As early as the Middle Ages, Mediterranean cities were supplied with Moorish black slaves from Muslim countries in North Africa.⁴⁹ In comparison, the term slave trade has grown to be associated specifically with the transatlantic or triangular trade that spanned four centuries (roughly between 1518 and 1865), involved three continents (Europe, Africa, and the Americas), and was responsible for human suffering on an unprecedented scale.⁵⁰

Some Americans think the Peculiar Institution⁵¹ of slavery as mostly an American institution exclusively perpetrated by white Europeans on black Africans. However, slavery was a universal evil at that time. People also forget that black Africans in Africa participated in the capture, trade, and enslavement of other black African people. Universally throughout history slavery has shown itself to be an equal opportunity oppression system involving all races being both masters and slaves. Nonetheless, many people for assorted reasons overlook Tocqueville’s accurate observation that black Africans were also deeply complicit in the sale of slaves.⁵² In contrast, some black African leaders have even recognized the past crimes of black Africans procuring and selling fellow Africans during the slave trade to America. Black Africans have even issued an apology to black Americans for the part Africans played in the slave trade. One apology came from the West African nation of Benin. Present day Benin was once ruled by the Kingdom of Dahomey in a region that was referred to as the Slave Coast from as early as the seventeenth century due to the large number of slaves shipped to the New World during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.⁵³ France took over the country after the abolition of slavery and renamed it French Dahomey. In 1960, Dahomey gained full independence from France, bringing in a democratic government for the next 12 years.⁵⁴ Unfortunately, from 1972 until 1990, the country was called the People’s Republic of Benin led by a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship, which led to repression and the collapse of the economy.⁵⁵ In 1991 the country became the Republic of Benin and multiparty elections were started.

As reported in 1999, the president of the African nation of Benin, Matthieu Kerekou had a message for African Americans: His compatriots are sorry for their ancestors’ complicity in the slave trade and in December, he’s going to tell them that at a special Leadership Reconciliation Conference on his soil.⁵⁶ Part of slavery’s ugly historical stain is that black Africans sold other black Africans into slavery. President Kerekou says intertribal hostility over the slave trade still exists today and many of his people have never seen descendants of their forebears who were shipped off to the Americas.⁵⁷ Tribal animosity was common in Africa and rival tribes made war where the victors often took prisoners as bond servants who were later often sold to white slave merchants. Brian Johnson is an African American who lives in Virginia and heads a US sponsoring group called COMINAD (Cooperative Missions Network of the African Dispersion), which works with many black churches. Johnson says, the realization that blacks sold other blacks into slavery has been hard for many African Americans to handle.⁵⁸ This made it difficult to just hold the white man responsible, Johnson said, This creates some problems in our own psyche that we have to deal with another angle to this and it makes it difficult. It’s not [merely] a black/white thing.⁵⁹

The Paradox in America

Edmund S. Morgan, a well-known scholar of history in early America, called the concurrent contradictory developments of slavery and freedom the central paradox of American history in his 1975 book titled American Slavery / American freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.⁶⁰ Later, in 1985 Derrick Bell, Harvard Law School’s first tenured African American professor, also commented on what he termed the American contradiction. Professor Bell, also a civil rights lawyer, wrote The framers made a conscious, though unspoken, sacrifice of the rights of some in the belief that this forfeiture was necessary to secure the rights of others in a society embracing, as its fundamental principle, the equality of all.⁶¹ Bell put it succinctly saying the framers, while speaking through the Constitution in an unequivocal voice, at once promised freedom for whites and condemned blacks to slavery.⁶²

Early American historian Morgan framed the rise of slavery in Colonial Virginia against the backdrop of armed, dangerous freedmen who were formerly indentured servants who were bought and sold like slaves until their indentured time was up and these servants were then released as freedmen. Professor Morgan indicated African slaves were present in Virginia since around 1619 but the death rate was extremely high among slaves as well as indentured servants up until the time slavery was officially recognized around 1661.⁶³ There was growing resentment by the landless lower-class freedmen against the land-owning planter upper class. This resentment by the armed freedmen colonists erupted into open violence against the Virginia governor and land owners in the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion.⁶⁴ The fear of armed English freedmen colonists appeared to be at the forefront of concerns that turned the land-owning planter upper class Aristocrats to what was considered a safer procreating slave population system as Virginia’s labor-intensive tobacco industry exploded bringing wealth to landowners and the King of England.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Observations of Religion in America

Alexis de Tocqueville observed and recognized the influence of religion in America saying in 1831 Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it.⁶⁵ Tocqueville offered these further observations:

Religion is often unable to restrain man from the numberless temptations which chance offers; nor can it check that passion for gain which everything contributes to arouse; but its influence over the mind of woman is supreme, and women are the protectors of morals. There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is more respected than in America or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated, In Europe almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and fluctuating desires.⁶⁶

Hitherto no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.⁶⁷

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other; and with them this conviction does not spring from that barren, traditional faith which seems to vegetate rather than to live in the soul.⁶⁸

America, Tocqueville argued, offered Europeans an opportunity to learn how the excesses of majority rule might be tempered…Expecting to find that popular passions had run amok without an aristocracy, the Frenchman instead discovered the stabilizing effects of American law, religion, and the family.⁶⁹

Tocqueville attacks the corruption and anti-religion sentiments brewing in France saying There are persons in France who look upon republican institutions only as a means of obtaining grandeur; they measure the immense space that separates their vices and misery from power and riches, and they aim to fill up this gulf with ruins, that they may pass over it…When these men attack religious opinions, they obey the dictates of their passions and not of their interests. Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.⁷⁰ Despots and anarchists first seek to destroy faith and hope so they can replace them with dependency and desperation.

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⁴. Kermit L. Hall, Reverse Discrimination (The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, 2005), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed July 24, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O184-ReverseDiscrimination.html.

⁵. Ibid.

⁶. Ibid.

⁷. Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003).

⁸. Kerry Picket, Senate’s Slavery Apology includes reparations caveat (Washington Times, June 18, 2009). Accessed June 16, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com.

⁹. Krissah Thompson, Senate Backs Apology for Slavery (Washington Post, June 16, 2001). Accessed June 19, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com.

¹⁰. Carl P. Parrini and James I. Matray, Reparations (Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2002), Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved July 20, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3402300133.html.

¹¹. Carl P. Parrini and James I. Matray. Reparations (Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, 2002). Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved July 22, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

¹². Ibid.

¹³. Thomas M. Shapiro, Tatjana Meschede, and Laura Sullivan, Racial Wealth Gap Brief V5 May 2010. Retrieved July 20, 2011, iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/Racial-Wealth-Gap-Brief.pdf.

¹⁴. PBS Interview with Dalton Conley Associate Professor New York University, April 2003 California Newsreel. Accessed July 20, 2011, http://www.pbs.org/race.

¹⁵. Ibid.

¹⁶. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944).

¹⁷. Abolitionists, The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition (2008), Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved July 22, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-abolitio.html.

¹⁸. Sue Peabody, Slavery and the Slave Trade, Europe, 1450 to 1789, Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (2004), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed July 16, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

¹⁹. Democracy in America, Dictionary of American History (2003), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed July 22, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

²⁰. Ibid.

²¹. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), volume 1, Introduction xcix.

²². Paul S. Boyer, Democracy in America, The Oxford Companion to United States History (2001), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed July 24, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

²³. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), volume 1, Introduction xcix, p. 332.

²⁴. Ibid.

²⁵. Ibid., 333.

²⁶. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944).

²⁷. American Dilemma, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2008), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed August 3, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

²⁸. Ibid.

²⁹. Ralph Waldo Ellison. Encyclopedia of World Biography (2004), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed December 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

³⁰. Ibid.

³¹. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison (1952), Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Accessed March 27, 2012, http://www.en.wikipedia.org.

³². Maurice Isserman, A Brief History of the American Left, Democratic Socialists of America (June 2, 1998). Accessed April 3, 2016, http://www.dsausa.org.

³³. Fredrick Bastiat. The Law, trans. Dean Russell. New York: Foundation for Economic Education Inc. (1972).

³⁴. Ibid., 5.

³⁵. Ibid., 6.

³⁶. Ibid., 6.

³⁷. Ibid., 8

³⁸. Ibid., 8.

³⁹. Ibid., 9.

⁴⁰. Ibid., 9.

⁴¹. Ibid., 9.

⁴². Ibid., 9.

⁴³. Ibid., 10.

⁴⁴. Ibid., 12.

⁴⁵. Ibid., 12.

⁴⁶. Ibid., 12.

⁴⁷. Sue Peabody, Slavery and the Slave Trade, Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (2004), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed July 16, 2011, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

⁴⁸. Slave Trade. Dictionary of American History (2003), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed May 28, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

⁴⁹. Ibid.

⁵⁰. Ibid.

⁵¹. The Peculiar Institution, U.S. History (2008). Independence Hall Association, Philadelphia. Accessed, June 6, 2012, http://www.ushistory.org.

⁵². James DeWolf Perry, Reparations and African complicity in the slave trade, Tracing Center April 23, 2010. Accessed April 3, 2016, http://www.tracingcenter.org.

⁵³. Benin The documentary—Definition of Pain, The History Talk (n.d.). Accessed April 3, 2016, http://www.en.the historytalk.com.

⁵⁴. Ibid.

⁵⁵. Ibid.

⁵⁶. Rusty Wright, West Africans to African-Americans: We Apologize for Slavery," Probe Ministries (1999). Accessed April 10, 2005, Probe, http://www.probe.org/docs/Apol-Slavery.html.

⁵⁷. Ibid.

⁵⁸. Ibid.

⁵⁹. Rusty Wright, West Africans to African-Americans: We Apologize for Slavery (Probe Ministries, 1999), Probe. Accessed April 10, 2005, http://www.probe.org/docs/Apol-Slavery.html.

⁶⁰. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975). Accessed June 23, 2012, http://www.personal.tcu.eduswoodworth/Morgan.

⁶¹. Derrick Bell, Forward: The Civil Rights Chronicle (99 Harvard Law Review 4 1985–1986). Accessed June 23, 2012, http://www.heinonline.org.

⁶². Ibid.

⁶³. Jeff Wells, Review, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, Edmund S. Morgan (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975). Accessed June 23, 2012, http://www.personal.tcu.eduswoodworth/Morgan.

⁶⁴. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975). Accessed June 23, 2012, http://www.personal.tcu.eduswoodworth/Morgan.

⁶⁵. Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), volume I, Introduction xcix.

⁶⁶. Ibid.

⁶⁷. Ibid.

⁶⁸. Ibid.

⁶⁹. Boyer, Paul S. Democracy in America, The Oxford Companion to United States History (2001), Encyclopedia.com. Accessed June 25, 2012, http://www.encyclopedia.com.

⁷⁰. Ibid., 307.

Chapter 2

Early Exploitation to Modern Disadvantage—Timeline

The early exploitation of blacks in American began around 1619 with the introduction of African slaves in Virginia and later in 1787 the US Constitution counted slaves as three fifths of all other Persons tacitly conceding the existence of slavery. What followed: in 1857, the Dred Scott case held that Congress cannot ban slavery in the states and also that slaves are not citizens; in 1896, the United States Supreme Court held that segregation is constitutional in Plessy v. Fergusion . ⁷¹ Although in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution said, Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall exist within the United States ⁷² the perversion of the law continued by way of segregation, Jim Crow laws and sanctioned societal discrimination, which permeated throughout the country from politics to sports.

In 1913, the income tax became a permanent part of the United States tax system under the Sixteenth Amendment to the US Constitution; however, concerning black Americans the government and the courts continued to treat the equal protection requirements of the Fourteenth Amendment as virtually nonexistent. It wasn’t until 1964 that the Civil Rights Act began the dismantling of government sanctioned discrimination against black Americans perverted through the various state legislative processes like Jim Crow Laws. However, it wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down one of the final vestiges of Jim Crow miscegenation laws designed to continue government sanctioned societal discrimination against black Americans.⁷³

Modern disadvantages for black Americans as a group are now more a result of the lingering effects of discrimination and the legal plunder of politicians rather than a system of intentional racial discrimination since the official sanction of discrimination using the law has been all but eliminated. The law has always been used as a tool to install and cement the paths to privilege. New claimants of victimization all seek the sanction and benefits of laws even civil rights laws initiated in the past to cure discrimination against long standing identifiable minorities. Somewhere along the road some progeny of past exploiters now masquerades as exploited in order to add more advantages to their bag of capital assets. While the exploitation of blacks peaked in the periods of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, it was black people themselves as the targets of exploitation while now it is also the black experience itself that is exploited. Now days, it is more difficult to openly exploit black people. So now activists seek to exploit the black experience as the quintessential emblem of discrimination to promote the latest clan of quasi-victims destined on the surface to receive the temporary fruits of false compassion.

Societal Exploitation and Amoral Secular Socialists (Activists)

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager once described an activist as a person who believes his own beliefs are more important than the truth.⁷⁴ He also expressed the view that truth is not one of the activists’ values and is simply not their thing. Secularism is the view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education, that religion and religious considerations should be ignored or excluded from social and political matters, and a doctrine that rejects religion especially in ethics.⁷⁵

Amoral may be defined as not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral; lacking moral sensibility; not caring about right and wrong.⁷⁶ An attribute of amorality is the willingness to substitute falsehoods for truth because in the eyes of amoral secularists there are no real truths. Amoral secular socialist activists frequently illustrate a commonly held truism about the left that says the left destroys more than it creates.⁷⁷

Times have changed but human exploitation continues to plague humanity to this day. Noted French economist and writer Frederic Bastiat described what he saw as exploitation arising from what he termed A Fatal Tendency of Mankind saying people When they can, they wish to live and prosper at the expense of others.⁷⁸ Bastiat felt it was in man’s nature to satisfy his desires with the least possible pain.⁷⁹ This Frenchman pointed to history as witness to the truth of his observations. He noted that history was replete with incessant wars, mass migrations, religious persecutions, universal slavery, dishonesty in commerce, and monopolies.⁸⁰

When speaking of legal plunder Frederic Bastiat said you can identify legal plunder when you see if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong.⁸¹ Bastiat made dire warnings that when legal plunder exists then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder.⁸² Bastiat felt socialism was legal plunder and that Socialists want to practice legal plunder and like all other monopolists, desire to make the law their own weapon.⁸³ Frenchman Frederic Bastiat’s forecast in the year 1850 of calamitous results where socialism and legal plunder prevail can be seen in the economic failures and frailty of numerous twentieth-century European societies like France that lean heavily on socialism. Democratic socialism: purports to be committed to the principles of: equality and social justice, parliamentary government, redistribution of wealth (through progressive taxation) and social protection; Democratic socialist parties have held power in most Western European countries, as well as Australasia, Canada and some Latin American countries; after the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s, many communist parties reconstituted themselves as ‘democratic socialist’ parties.⁸⁴ The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’ collapse began in August 1991⁸⁵ and this was the demise of the largest group of socialist countries and territories in history that exposed the deceptions and the inherent flaws of the system of socialism.

The Destruction of Truth

Assertion of Falsehoods

From the start, it is an absurd and outrageous falsehood for a group composed predominantly of white Americans to claim that they have been discriminated against like, the same as or analogous to black Americans collectively as a group. Any movement based on such an outright falsehood and intentional distortion of American history is disgraceful and evokes images of other amoral secular socialist’s societies where to some the ends justify the means. Any society that gives sanctuary to an ideology that justifies any means to achieve some ends is a society that does not value truth. Frequently over the recent years this demeaning comparison has been made by gay activists and their liberal comrades like the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) in the halls of legislatures and in the courts, especially in cases regarding the issue of gay marriage. Those in the