! The Great Black Hope! by Kevin Pennant! August 23, 2014!
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In a bit of schadenfreude some of us, black and white and everyone else in between, are haughtily debasing the commander-in-chief, chastising his ability to lead us out of the preexisting conditions and slave-era remnants of racial segregation. Already half-way through his second term the President should have also united Israel and Palestine, halted terrorism, and rid Iran of all of its uranium enriched plutonium. Iraq and Egypt should have become the model democratic nation for which all Arab states ascribe to, while the rising dragon in China surrender all its ambitions to usurp the US as the world's economic and military superpower. Such bold, lofty, and hypocritical goals would have made Russia second-guess annexing the Ukraine’s Crimea region, and military actions should have reigned in and disciplined Syria’s Bashar Al Assad from even considering chemical attacks against several opposition groups, of whom have now turned against each other.!
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This is what we hoped for in a black president. A return from the economic abyss of a financial crisis that was more devastating systemically overall and far more damaging to economic mobility than any other crisis, in any given lifetime. The president should have led a reconstructive recovery that would have been less partial towards the well-heeled and more equitable for the middle and the especially poorer classes. However, this has not happened as expected. Instead not only is Congress more divided than it has ever been, it is both more scornful and more frustrated with the President’s ability to be the most powerful person in the world. !
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With the kind of power that we bestowed through either promotion and or casting votes for the first and probably last black president of the United States, comes a weight that no pair of shoulders could possibly bear. It is the kind of weight that can’t be nudged much less lifted. To put it more bluntly it is wishful thinking of the kind that is usually thought of while high on
marijuana. To rectify institutionalized ills- that breed hopelessness, that miseducate, that redirect, that falsely justify, and that capitalize not only on the less fortunate, the unlucky, the disadvantaged, comprising of minorities (both economically and racially)-would be a mountainous task. And it all boils down to the audacity of our hope- that you can just leave it up to one individual to resolve while we sit back and watch, criticize, and lament. Okay Maureen Dowd. Okay, moving on.!
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Much like the ideology and drama behind the story and the seduction of the “Great White Hope”, the disaffection with the our Great Black Hope’s inability to use his position and status to atone for the disenfranchised has grown palpable. Michael Eric Dyson, the prominent author, esteemed professor, and PhD alumni of Princeton University denounced Obama’s response to the situation in Ferguson, Mo., as “tone deaf and disappointing”. I guess what really should have happened during the height of the protests and confrontation, with the militarized police force on one side, the disenfranchised residents on the other, and with just a few feet of narrow space between pure chaos, was for Obama to appear unannounced, walk through and part the them in Moses-like fashion quelling the anxieties of reactive violence bubbling between them. If this did happen they would converge upon one another eventually, like they did, right after he left.!
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Our journeys’ path has grown more riddled with blood, more sweat, and more tears. There was and there still remains much to overcome on this narrow treacherous road that we have to overcome towards our destiny of fulfillment. The notion that many of us has made it through and entered into a so-called post-racial society that Obama now presides over seems debatably untenable. Any positive trends over the decades of integration and participation within the socioeconomic structure of the US stems from forced entry by zealous blacks challenging status quo along the way and paving over a better surface for which other minorities can now more easily travel in their plight. But the strength of the institution to stall socioeconomic mobility with hazardous roadblocks is far greater than imagined for most of us.!
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There are many economic measures by which we can truly see how far we have come on this journey within the institution. Our path is marked with self-defeating policies of false assurances like a college education and trickle-down economics. You need more than a trickle to succeed here. Even though the median family income for both black and white families has increased over the last 30 years we appear too be no better off than our white counterparts even with all the acknowledgement and struggle in our marked history. If the next generation should be better off from the sacrifices made from the previous, then presumably the notion is that we are within on par socioeconomically with median white families, but this is far from the case. Based on the facts retrieved from the Brooking Institute…! There was no progress in reducing the gap in family income between blacks and whites. In 2004, median family income of blacks ages 30 to 39 was only 58 percent that of white families in the same age group ($35,000 for blacks compared to $60,000 for whites).! Black children grow up in families with much lower income than white children.!
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To add more insult to the already injured and handicapped…! White children are more likely to surpass parents' income than black children at a similar point in the income distribution.! Overall, approximately two out of three blacks (63 percent) exceed their parents' income after the data are adjusted for inflation, similar to the percentage for whites.! However, a majority of blacks born to middle-income parents grow up to have less income than their parents. Only 31 percent of black children born to parents in the
middle of the income distribution have family income greater than their parents, compared to 68 percent of white children from the same income bracket. Odds of exceeding parental incomes are better for black children from other income groups, but are still substantially lower than those of white children in the same circumstances.! ! In the land of opportunity where man should not be judged by the color of his skin but by the content of his character, it appears that we among the minorities and stereotypically resented, as black people continue to be marginally characterized. One’s character can easily be dislocated by the breaking his or her spirit through exclusion and resentment. Those statistics speak volumes of the self-reinforcing policies that the institutions of government influenced by corporation, healthcare and law enforcement project on society at large. It should come to no surprise that “Obamacare won’t heal all that anguish” as posited in the bars of Jay Electronica’s verse “We Made It”. With a lawsuit pending from members predominately from the republican party against the President for trying to incorporate the Affordable Care Act efficiently, the institutions continue to impose their will to withhold and redistribute away from the middle and poorer classes. Mr. Tom Edsall, another prominent author and professor at Columbia University, stated in his NYT editorial that the ongoing recovery has especially damaged the black community…! From 1965 to 2000, the poverty rate among blacks fell from 41.8 percent to 22.5 percent. Since then, it has risen to 27.2 percent. The white poverty rate also rose during this period, but by a more modest 3.2 points.!
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Blacks suffered more than whites as a result of the 2008-9 financial meltdown and its aftermath, but the negative trends for African-Americans began before then.!
After decades upon decades of countless black victims of torture, abuse and fatalities at the hands of the police, have we now come to a head with the tragic execution of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year old teenager who would have started college this fall?. It is quite odd that this tragic incidence in particular of over policing that has unfolded in Ferguson has reached an incessant nationwide level of discomfort that pivots both sides of the racial divide. It’s conscious pitch is more feverish and yet poignantly placed in our minds. But how could this systematically
cruel and unjust grievance out of so many be the best credible catalyst for change? There are way too many more recent social outcries of this sort of belligerence by law enforcement towards young black men that could have served as the reflection point, but the institutionalized and hypocritical media plays prominently in isolating and muting those occurrences. !
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What is not so surprising is the outpouring of support for Officer Wilson around the country. Fundraising campaigns through crowdfunding websites have reportedly raised over $300,000 in just a few days. I am going to briefly touch upon this socioeconomic dilemma here. It is important to recognize that law enforcement is a public good that is non-excludable, however when police form unions or subgroups or become selective about the way they carryout that public good then it can no longer be a public good it becomes privatized. Privatizing the police would be a detriment to the community just like privatizing the fire department would be asinine. The fire department can’t just go around saving houses that financially support their service, just like you can’t pay to have policing done in a way that favors some yet harms others in a community. Those efforts in raising funds in support for Officer Wilson is quite specious and should essentially be returned because it creates a slippery slope of continued bias. The proper way of investing in law enforcement is through the political system which apparently is inept due to the institutions in place and the lack thereof of representation which seemingly isolate and misrepresent the very people they serve. What we have here is a type of fairness dilemma whereby the public good is improperly and negatively targeting blacks in the community in terms of protecting and serving at the distorted perceptions of whites who benefit tremendously from this free rider problem. !
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These impolitic institutions are so egregious that the President who is alleged to be in charge of upholding them have seemingly refused its invitation to participate in perpetuating such countervailing policies with other politicians in charge of legislating. While Obama is seen as disengaged with party politics it should be quite apparent he is more involved with accountable leadership something that is foreign to American politicians. Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri said it best that … ! “The White House has something in common with the rest of America, and that is disdain for Congress,” Ms. McCaskill said. “It is hard to blame them.”!
By the way the Senator was both praiseworthy and critical of the advanced military equipment used by local police against peaceful protestors in Ferguson. A provocation that may have led to escalating confrontations in the community. This show of force sends a dehumanizing signal to the community and the unfortunate response to such a provocation results in defiance and the destruction of the economic institutions of the community they aim to protect. It is because the institution works so well for sustaining the influence and mobility of the majority at the expense of the minority that such crass investments of oppression have been made. !
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Attorney General Eric Holder is also grappling with an institution clearly favoring a select population in the the US while neglecting others. The top law man in the country is wrestling with a myriad ways the justice system has enforced laws designed very well to serve and protect the majoritative democracy and yet seem so countervailing to so many of its citizens. According to the NY Times, “Mr Holder has been tracking the events in Ferguson since he read the first reports a few hours after Mr. Brown’s shooting. He dashed off an email to aides asking to be briefed by morning and eventually grew angry that, over his objection, the local authorities released surveillance video showing an apparent robbery by Mr. Brown.�!
What leads people to act out in ways that are detrimental to others is at first glance deplorable but if you look deeper such actions derive from a dehumanizing source. The dehumanizing source is oppression. Oppressors distort self-realization in ways that can and will result in incivility not just for the oppressed but for the oppressors as well. Oppressors tend to exploit their role by virtue of power as a way to falsely express their own humanity, albeit paradoxically, they end up dehumanizing themselves in the process. This distortion becomes a vicious cycle between the oppressed and the oppressor at the local level while on the macro level the institution hardens and thrives.!
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In the next few weeks we will be presented with a set of facts that suggests complicit misconduct on behalf of the local police in Ferguson and whether Officer Wilson acted rogue and against lawful procedures. As I suspect this is the case for many cities across the US with conspicuously racial divisions and we will soon find out how this judicially plays out in the court and it will once again test our faith into a system with which we have vested and placed so much trust. The system that we continue to want to trust by casting our vote for just governance under the leadership of the Great Black Hope, and what I have gleaned so far from this notion of the Great Black Hope is that it is nothing more than just hope. Hope can only be found in fair and equitable change to a relentless institution of despair. !
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