How We Were All Fooled: Black American Racism

By Victoria Reilly

This book covers many questions about how we as a country got to Black American racism. As I found more and more answers, I realized how many of them were totally new to me and how I felt that I had been so deceived about so much of our history. After talking to many people, Black and white, I knew that it wasn't just me who had been deceived. There is so much that has been done to Black Americans over the ages, not just slavery, that I felt everyone could understand better if various truths were revealed. One Black young man I discussed this with seemed to visibly feel better about himself just hearing some of these basic truths.

Eugenics, I believe, was worse than slavery. Eugenics founder, Galton, was a first cousin to Charles Darwin. This was all related to Malthus, who decided in 1795 that overpopulation was a dire emergency. Eugenics was the answer to who should be allowed to live or reproduce in order to keep the world population down. The geologic timetable, evolution, overpopulation, and eugenics all came about in the early 1800s before any carbon dating. Who is still pushing this, and how does it all relate to American racism?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 14, 2024
• ISBN: 9798887936949

Book preview

cover.jpg

How We Were All Fooled

Black American Racism

Victoria Reilly

Copyright © 2023 Victoria Reilly

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-687-1 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-694-9 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

About the Author

Introduction

Today

After researching and studying this issue from the start, I must conclude that it still continues. What proof do I have that racism is still existing? The definition of racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior, according to the English Oxford Dictionary. This is happening now, and anyone who looks around can see that it still exists, not nearly to the extent it used to exist. There are still programs in place that are based on an assumption that Black Americans are inferior. First, the affirmative action program is a clear message that this race needs more help than others. Second, why aren't historical Black Americans, with their great successes, included in our school textbooks, making it look like the only way to include them is to have a Black History Month? Third, why are only Black Americans denigrated by liberal Democrats if they want to change political parties? And lastly, why are these Americans still called Blacks instead of just Americans?

Although slavery is still going on in the world today, it is hard to come up with as much cruelty as this group has had to endure for hundreds of years.

Opening:

I had initial questions, and then as I progressed, I came up with many more.

How did a whole race of people, for the first time in the history of this earth, get called by a color in America?

How bad was slavery here, and was it just Africans?

How did political parties get tied up with slavery?

What was the Civil War all about?

What did politics have to do with the Civil War?

What is eugenics?

Who started it and pushed it?

Was there a connection between American eugenics and Nazi eugenics?

What was the big switch of political parties?

When did Black Americans start voting Democrat?

When did the South switch from Democrat to Republican?

Did political parties have anything to do with war? Which party had government control during our wars?

How did ghettos get started?

Why do Democrats only get mad at Blacks if they want to change parties?

Which political party started the KKK?

Which president started income tax?

Which president started social security?

What was the single-party primary system in the South, and for how long?

Why were so many churches segregated? And still seem to be?

Why did Planned Parenthood want clinics in Black schools and in Black neighborhoods?

Why do Democrats preside over the worst crime-riddled cities?

Who turned our banking system over to the Federal Reserve?

Where did ghettos come from?

Who legalized housing segregation in the FHA?

How did unions affect the Black Democrat vote?

When did the South turn Republican?

Do people still believe in eugenics?

Is there still racism today?

What is God's real plan for Black Americans?

Black Dehumanization in the United States

Over forty years ago, when I came to the South, or Florida, I was curious to find out what the whole race thing was all about. Growing up in North Dakota, I never even saw a Black person until high school, and that was just one visiting the local mall. So, what was the difference between Black and white people? I thought it could not have been skin color because that would be just stupid! Skin color is nothing; it has nothing to do with what matters in a person. I was anxious to get to know Southern Blacks.

So, since it could not have been the skin color, I had to get to know individuals. How much do greed and power have to do with racism? How bad was slavery? And then how bad was treatment to Black Americans after slavery? How bad was the KKK to Black Americans and those who helped them? How much truth are we getting now? Obviously, every person is different from others in basic personality, intelligence, emotions, looks, character etc., but that's what makes people interesting. So other than the normal differences, as I got to know more and more Blacks, I saw no differences. No differences! Never having found any real difference, this brings me to the present. After forty-plus years in the South, why are people still talking about skin color? How did this insignificant, physical-pigment color ever stick as a name for a whole group of Americans?

Now in 2022, never in my life has everything been so politically charged! Why are there still charges of racism? It has been over two hundred years since slavery was abolished with the end of the Civil War. When was a color name for a people invented? What other inhumanity had to go into making a whole race of Americans believe that skin color made a difference in one's humanity? How could it last so long? How much does politics have to do with this issue? How has Black American history been hidden or removed from our study?

After all this research, it seems that it is about time to do away with this demeaning of darker fellow Americans. They have been so denigrated throughout our history of this nation, finally, there needs to be a letting go and a fulfillment of the warnings and prophesies of the great Black American leaders. We need to become "one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."

The Color Line

Our policy should be to unite with the great mass of the American people in all their activities and resolve to fall or flourish with our common country. We cannot afford to draw the color line in politics, trade, education, manners, religion, fashion, or civilization. Especially, we cannot afford to draw the color-line in politics. No folly could be greater. A party acting on that basis would be not merely a misfortune, but a dire calamity to our people. (Frederick Douglass)

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question of how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of skin and the texture of the hair-will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization (1900a: 125). (Web DuBois)

Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him. (Booker T. Washington)

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (Martin Luther King Jr.)

We won't organize any Black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both have sold us out. Both have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party. (Malcolm X)

Read more: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/malcolm_x.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife. (Zora Neale Hurston)

The Black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state. (Thomas Sowell)

Read more: https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/thomas_

sowell.

Black is a noun, not an adjective, today. This book is about the color line. It is an attempt to tell how it happened. It is an attempt to go back to the start of it and see all the obfuscations that were told and are still being told. It is an attempt to help to put an end to it by understanding where, when, how, and why it happened.

In English literature, as a field of study, I had read hundreds of books, many about the South and racial relations before and after the Civil War. Other than those American period books, never in books prior to the 1700s, including the Bible, have I ever seen or read any group of people being called a color! Now in the Trump era, I realize that suddenly things have become more racially charged. Is it an economic difference, or is it politically charged? So I decided I needed to find out when this color as a noun for a people started.

Slavery

Slavery has been practiced throughout the world for thousands of years. It has happened with almost every culture on the earth. In the Bible the Israelites were slaves in Egypt for a thousand years. In other parts of the Bible, slaves are described more as indentured servants. The slavery that took place in Egypt was not like servants, and God did intervene. Color of a people is not mentioned in the Bible. Obviously, skin color had different hues even back then, but it wasn't worth mentioning. It wasn't worth mentioning in any of our written works over history in the world. Black wasn't invented until 1705 in America's South.

Southern Plantations

First, after America was discovered in 1492, as settlers came to America, some had servants. Great Britain, Spain, and France were all excited about gaining more lands and territories or colonizing an empire building. England had changed their religion from Catholicism, which had been the world's only Christian religion for over a thousand years. With the invention of the printing press, the reformation had begun. England's King Henry VIII got tired of killing his wives, who would not bear him a son, so to get a divorce, he needed a new religion; and along came the Church of England, or the Anglican religion. But Ireland did not want to give up their Catholic religion. This made England even more upset with Ireland. Trying different economic hardships on them didn't seem to work, so England started shipping them to the New World as servants and slaves. Half of Ireland was shipped off, and England made money on that. In A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift makes mention of the horrible treatment of the Irish by the English.

As time continues, the Spanish find out where they can purchase and make money on a whole new group of slaves in Africa. They don't even have to go and catch these slaves because warring tribes in Africa who have caught other tribe people are happy to sell them to these Spanish and English merchants. Once they are brought across the Atlantic, a horrendous trip, nothing is worth more than the money the merchants can make from their cargo. As time continues, the African slaves turn out to be a more valuable merchandise than the Irish slaves or any other slaves in America. In fact, the African slaves are worth ten times more than the Irish slaves. So when trying to keep order on the ships during the long voyage, the Irish would have their hands or feet burned as an example to the rest of the slaves. If throwing a slave overboard was deemed a good threat for keeping control, then it was the Irish slaves that would be thrown over. The less-valuable merchandise would first be sacrificed to keep the more valuable African slaves. (Don Jordon and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America. NYC: NYU Press. 2008)

For 150 years, settlers were coming to America to make a new life full of freedom to choose their own land, life, religion, and vocation. This was the world's most desirable land of promise. Of course, this new land would not be easy, and many died in their venture, but many found a way in which they could not only survive but they could prosper! Many found that just dealing with the slave trade could make them rich. Others found how to use the slaves to make themselves rich. Cane fields in the Indies to make sugar were enriching those who had the fields and bought the cheap labor of slaves. It was such hard work that their slave labor would not live long, so they had to keep buying more. Slave-trading companies grew in the Northeast of America, and many enriched themselves by buying and selling slaves as well as using their labor in the West Indies. In the South, landowners found that they could get rich by growing cotton for clothes, indigo, rice, and other food, and tobacco with slave labor.

Why is it so easy for people to let money and power take over their lives? Why are people then willing to do anything to keep this money and power? It appears that the only thing holding this in some check is religion and values. Understand that one of the biggest motivations for traveling to the New World was for freedom to worship. Religion and Christianity were a large part of the belief system in Europe and the American inhabitants from Europe.

European Christian Barbarism

Anyone traveling in Europe to see medieval buildings and castles can't help but see that there was a lot of what we would call superstition, or belief in the black arts. If someone became a heretic or fought against the Church, the Catholic Church, punishment could be quite severe. If they were accused of witchcraft, then they had to prove it by any means. The castles throughout Europe have dungeons with torture equipment to, in their belief, find the truth and drive out the black evil and devil. Or some were just plain sadistic.

The following pictures are in historical castles in Europe and depict how horrendous torture was used to punish witchcraft and the black arts, as well as black devils who opposed the church of Rome. Black magic, black hearts, and black arts were all associated with the devil. The term black, for the most part, meant evil.

A stretching device to pull one person apart—bones, muscles, and skin