By Junious Ricardo Stanton | Today’s social inequalities, disenfranchisement, depravity and social oppression have their roots in Colonial America. The break from the British colonial rule and the establishment of a new government did nothing to alter the racial or socio-economic dynamics in America. All that really happened was control passed from British blue bloods to Americans based in total on a slave economy that the new elites controlled!
We have been brainwashed to believe the “founding fathers” were noble men of vision who aspired to create a land of opportunity and freedom for all. Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact the ninety-nine men who created the constitutional form of government did so in direct negation of the original reason they were sent to Philadelphia which was merely to revise and amend the Articles of Confederation. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin et al were in effect traitors who set out to hi-jack the process and make sure the rich controlled the country, setting themselves up as the new one per cent. “How can this be in a republic whose founding testament begins in part by saying the purpose of the federal government is to, ‘promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity?’ Language holds the key. Part of the answer to this question is to ask, when the Founders said, ‘We the People,’ who did they really mean? We know that they did not mean to include the human beings that even the authors of those great words held as possessions. Women were similarly excluded. In fact in the time of the founding of the American Republic, the franchise of citizenship was intimately tied to possessions; land, money and property. The reality is that the Founding Fathers were the One Percent of their day. This is proven in part after making some subjective judgments about the occupations up until 1787 of the members of the Constitutional Convention. As Brown writes the Founding Fathers were, ‘a group set apart.’ There was a degree of social distance between these men and the ordinary citizens of their day.” We The People vs The Original One Percent by Guy W Clinch https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/we-the-people-vs-the-original-one-percent/
US culture has always been fraught with bigotry, racism, economic cast, violence and social repression. When it comes to Africans in America no level or facet of society is exempt from racism, violence and inequity. We see blatant examples of this on a daily basis with the killings of unarmed males by police with seeming impunity. Our visionary and progressive leadership has always been under attack and subject to suppression in an attempt to keep us disorganized, impotent and ineffective. The ruling elites view us as their prime threat because of the horrific way they have treated us over the years. So it makes sense the education process we were allowed to participate in was designed to further the economic aims and social agenda of the ruling elites. “This unsound attitude of the ‘friends’ of the Negro is due to the persistence of the mediaeval idea of controlling underprivileged classes. Behind closed doors these ‘friends’ say you need to be careful in advancing Negroes to commanding positions unless it can be determined beforehand that they will do what they are told to do.” The Miseducation of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson page 30.
In reality the education we were given was not designed for our edification but to advance the wealth of the ruling classes and to create a stratum of docile, brainwashed servile Black folks working against their own best interests to maintain a system that oppressed us. “In the first half of the 20th century, the Rockefeller Foundation and Carnegie Corporation undertook joint projects aimed at constructing an education system for black Americans in the South as well as for black Africans in several British colonies. In 1911, the Phelps-Stokes Fund was chartered with the purpose of managing ‘the education of Negroes both in Africa and the United States.’ This restrictive educational system for black Americans had already been institutionalized, beginning with the 'philanthropic' endeavours of Wall Street bankers and northern industrialists and capitalists at several conferences in 1898. The education was constructed on the basis that, as one conference participant stated, ‘the white people are to be the leaders, to take the initiative, to have direct control in all matters pertaining to civilization and the highest interest of our beloved land. History demonstrates that the Caucasian will rule, and he ought to rule.’” An Empire of Poverty: Race, Punishment and Social Control By Andrew Gavin Marshall
Social repression was and is the main force used to keep Blacks “in their place”. The place we were originally consigned to was as a source of free or cheap labor. “Important to note has been the ways in which slaves were used as the main labour force, and thus blacks were identified and being sustained as a lower-class labour force. Following the Civil War, abolition of slavery and the Reconstruction Period, there were coordinated moves - a 'compact' - between the North and South in the United States, to devise a way of keeping blacks as a submissive labour force, and one which was confined to a new form of slavery: penal slavery. Thus, we see emerging in the 1870s and into the 20th century, a rapid expansion of prisons, and with that, of southern penal systems using prisoners as forced labour. This new legal system, which was ‘far less rigid than slavery,’ had been referred to as ‘involuntary servitude,’ and, wrote one scholar, ‘was a fluid, flexible affair which alternated between free and forced labor in time to the rhythm of the southern labor market.’…The legal system was used to essentially criminalize black life, without making specific references to race, laws that were passed specifically targeted blacks in attempting to limit their mobility, the price of their labour, and to make several aspects of typical black southern life to be deemed ‘criminal.’ This process was paralleled in South Africa in the construction of the apartheid system.” ibid
With advancement of machinery and automation the need for free labor decreased and the ruling elites schemed to replace cheap Black labor with cheaper immigrant labor. Their aim was to continue to criminalize Black life since deportation was no longer an option (See the history of the American Colonization Society) incarceration and the prison industrial system was reenergized and expanded.
Today people of color Africans in America, Hispanics/Latinos make up the bulk of the US prison population. The goal seems to be to incarcerate and or kill as many people of color as possible. Prisons are the new reservations (a disingenuous euphemism for concentration camp) for Blacks and Hispanics. In the United States more money is appropriated for prisons and “corrections” than for institutions of higher learning and education. This is by deliberate design! But they also had to constrict the desire for education and advancement by Blacks. To do so meant restricting the number of Blacks in higher education. The ruling elite agenda is to gut social programs including public education and to restrict access to higher education.
In a 2007 report the Association of Pennsylvania Collage and University Faculties revealed the Commonwealth appropriated between $32,000 and $33,000 dollars for each prisoner vs a measly $4,352 per year per college student in their system of higher education. This is why Cheyney University the oldest institution of higher learning for African Americans in this country is suffering, because of the lopsided policies and agenda of the state! This pattern is not just in Pennsylvania it is nation wide.
“The U.S. incarceration rate in 1980 was 220 for every 100,000 people, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Today, with more than 2 million people incarcerated, the rate has climbed to 743 per 100,000 people. Reason magazine's Veronique de Rugy points out nonviolent drug offenders account for ‘roughly one-fourth of all inmates in the United States, up from less than 10 percent in 1980.’ In roughly the same period, state governments scaled back their financial support for public colleges by more than a third nationwide, between 1991 and 2008. And as states have chopped away at appropriations for their universities and cut need-based grant aid for students, the Government Accountability Office found both public and private schools are becoming increasingly reliant on what students pay in tuition and fees for funding. Last year, some students saw tuition increases as high as 40 percent.” Prison Drug War Spending Rockets While Higher Education Funding Declines http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/28/spending-on-prisons-higher-ed_n_1835889.html
We are witnessing an escalation of policies that criminalize poverty and mass incarceration. These policies are promoted by Republicans and Democrats alike, it is a bipartisan effort! This is not new, the ruling elites in Britain did it to the Irish, Welsh and Scots in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This is how they got their fodder to work in the colonies, this is what they did to Africans in America following the War Between the States and this is what the bogus War on Drugs was all about.
The ruling class wants to return to the so called gilded age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of vast income disparity/inequality, rigid social caste and deplorable socio-economic conditions. We are in the midst of a class war in the US. This is why they shut down the Occupy Wall Street movement so the ninety-nine per cent would not wake up to what the one per cent is doing to us. The next phase will be the ramping up of the police state similar to what we saw in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina before General Russel L. Honore took command and changed the mission, and what we witnessed in Ferguson Missouri and other places in recent months. We need to wake up and take action before its too late.
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