Juneteenth: a tribute to Blacks’ unflinching will to be free

Photo: MGN. “Emancipation day celebration – later known as Juneteenth, Photo Date: 1/19/1900”

This article first published 6/23/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/06/23/critical-race-theory-backlash-would-keep-the-truth-hidden/

As the story is usually told, the secular holiday known as Juneteenth began two months after the end of a bloody, four-year Civil War, when General Gordon Granger and 2,000 Union soldiers disembarked at Galveston Island, Texas in mid-June of 1865 and made a horrific discovery:

Chattel slavery was still very much alive in Galveston.

Days later, Granger read five General Orders issued by the federal government, the third of which declared: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

The news of their liberation was akin to a thunderclap. The streets of Galveston exploded in spasms of cathartic joy; men hurled their hats into the air, women danced, the elderly wept.

This bacchanal on June 19th—the name inspired by merging the two words mimicking African Americans’ rapid-fire cadence—inspired the holiday that has been celebrated virtually every year since across the nation at backyard barbecues, block parties, town squares and city parks. In 1872 a group of African American ministers and businessmen purchased 10 acres of land in Houston and created Emancipation Park to host the annual Juneteenth celebration.

But the widely-publicized spate of killings of African Americans by White police and vigilantes—including Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and, here in Minnesota, Philando Castille, George Floyd and most recently Daunte Wright—has shone an even brighter spotlight on Juneteenth and sparked a reconsideration of the holiday as something more than just a cultural touchstone or street festival celebrating Black culture.

Related Story: A snapshot of Juneteenth events in the Twin Cities and beyond (updated)

What is often left unsaid in the retelling of Juneteenth’s origins is that it was not the product of liberal, White benevolence but Blacks’ political agency and unflinching will for self-determination. Among the Union troops who accompanied Granger to Texas were a contingent of colored troops from New York and Illinois who were livid when they discovered the continuing exploitation of slaves.

They approached Granger and told him in no uncertain terms that either he would do something about the situation or they would.

“One of the tropes about American life is that Black people didn’t fight for our freedom,” said Robert S. Smith, a history professor at Marquette University and the director of the Center for Urban Research, Teaching and Outreach. “The truth is that there is no union victory without very clear and robust engagement by Black people in the abolition of slavery.”

As noted by several historians—most notably W.E.B. DuBois—one of the factors that influenced Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation was that “slaves had started to act free anyway,” Smith said, by sabotaging the owners’ crops, organizing work slowdowns or sit-down strikes on the plantation, or simply walking off the job headed North.

In the year that followed Juneteenth, Blacks began to build Black institutions and communities and reassembled families that had been scattered to the winds by slavery. The system of White terror that began to emerge in 1877 after federal troops withdrew from the former Confederate states undermined Black progress that Whites saw as a threat, Smith said.

This foreshadowed the financial terrorism of the banks that pilfered the wealth of Black homeowners after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, which saddled African Americans with predatory loans. The result is that homeownership is at record lows; about 44 percent of African American households own their home compared to 77 percent of Whites.

The irony is that Blacks today own no larger stake in the U.S. than they did when General Grangers’ troops arrived in Galveston 166 years ago. The question increasingly confronting African Americans today is how to summon the same ferocity, resilience, courage, and improvisation of the colored Union troops who dared deliver their ultimatum to General Granger.

More municipalities, institutions, and workplaces than ever before are recognizing Juneteenth this year, and many are giving employees Friday, June 3 a day off. The Movement for Black Lives Matter has called for June 19th to be made a national holiday, which was finally realized with Congresss’ passage of the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act on Wednesday. President Biden’s signed it into law on Thursday.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont also called for it to become a national holiday in 2019 when he recognized Opal Lee, an activist in Fort Worth who campaigned for a Juneteenth holiday.  The work of Lee and the late Congressman Al Edwards, who also pushed for the holiday, was recognized when the bill was passed in the House on Wednesday evening. “This has been a long journey with the work of our fellow Texans, the late Representative Al Edwards, and Opal Lee,” Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee stated.

Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African American studies at Duke University, told the New York Times: “I think Juneteenth feels a little different now. It’s an opportunity for folks to kind of catch their breath about what has been this incredible pace of change and shifting that we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks.”

Ann Jeffreyes, a retiree and African American activist who attended Juneteenth celebrations when she lived in New York City and plans to attend events in the Bay area this year, said that Juneteenth is a vivid reminder that African Americans are far from the helpless victims they are often portrayed as in both the news and entertainment media.

“Through the most brutal form of slavery…our ancestors still celebrated life and plotted at the same time,” said Jeffreyes. “So yes, [Juneteenth] keeps us connected to our ancestors’ courage and persistence, resilience.”

George Floyd did—and—did not change the world

Photo: Chris Juhn/MSR News. “Thousands of protesters march down Hiawatha Avenue on their way to the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis. / Chris Juhn”

This article first published 5/24/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/05/24/how-george-floyd-changed-the-world/

Reflections of a veteran journalist

Wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and carrying a placard that read “Standing in
Solidarity,” protesters poured into the streets of Camden, New Jersey just days after a White
Minneapolis police officer cavalierly asphyxiated with his knee an unarmed Black man, George
Floyd.

In a country riven by race, it came as a surprise when a Camden police officer approached
one of the rally’s principal organizers, an African American mother of three named Yolanda
Deaver, to ask an impassioned question:
“Can I join you?”

“Absolutely” was Deaver’s response, and before long one Camden police officer was joined
by another and another until finally the police chief, Joseph D. Wysocki, asked to join. He
eventually posed for a photograph with Deaver and other protesters that went viral.

And so it came to pass that this impoverished city on the banks of the Delaware River
doubled down on an experiment in police reform. In the year since Floyd’s murder, violent crime
in Camden has declined at a time when violent crime rates nationwide are rising. Citizens’
complaints about excessive use of force have plummeted, and police officers regularly attend
barbecues, block parties, and recreation league basketball games.

Addressing budget concerns, City officials voted in 2012 to abolish Camden’s police force,
enabling it to be absorbed by the larger county agency. But this did little to defuse tensions in the
mostly Black city of 77,000. Only in the last year, since police joined hands with protesters, has
the City begun to really drill down on de-escalation techniques and improve relations with the
community.

The Camden County police remain a work-in-progress, but it has started a genuine dialogue
between the people and law enforcement. Kimberly Mutcherson, the co-dean of Rutgers-
Camden Law School pointed out, “one thing that’s interesting about Camden is that there was,
from the beginning, a police department and chief who recognized that the protesters, the people
out there, their cause is righteous.”

The murder of George Floyd on a street corner in South Minneapolis a year ago this week
has changed everything in America, and it has changed absolutely nothing.

There are encouraging signs that elected officials and policymakers are at least beginning to
listen to African American communities that have been under siege for the better part of the last
century. Yet there are at least as many signs of stasis and a State that has every intention of
continuing to terrorize Blacks.

Three hundred and twenty miles due south of Camden, protesters in Elizabeth City, North
Carolina entered a fourth week of demonstrations to demand that charges be filed against
Pasquotank County police officers who fatally shot an unarmed Black motorist, Andrew Brown
Jr., during a warrant search last month. The district attorney announced last week that the
shooting was justified, and that Brown’s attempts to escape represented an imminent threat to the
officers.

Lawyers for Brown’s family contend that Brown made every effort to elude the officers, not
attack them, and that firing into a moving vehicle violates the police department’s own
regulations.

Six days after Brown was fatally shot in the back of the head, an international panel of
experts and jurists from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America and Europe issued a report
concluding that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima
facie case of crimes against humanity. The 12 rapporteurs appealed to the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, or ICC, to investigate responsible police officials, yet neither the
White House nor the U.S. Congress has responded to the report.

The killing of George Floyd on a South Minneapolis street corner a year ago has changed
everything, and it has changed nothing.

‘School hesitancy’ slows classroom re-openings

Photo: Photo by Ralston Smith on Unsplash.

This article first published 5/21/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder  https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/05/21/school-hesitancy-slows-classroom-re-openings/

Many Black parents resist a return to education as usual

Melissa Elayne was a bit relieved when the pandemic’s first wave shut down her 13-year-old daughter’s suburban Philadelphia school. The environment there was not especially conducive to learning, especially for African American children.

There was the school police officer who once gave Elayne’s daughter detention for dancing with friends in the lunchroom. There were the students and teachers who touched her hair without permission. There was even one White classmate who had taken to using the “n” word, and with a hard “r” at that.

The virtual classroom was no better. Already battling a short attention span, Elayne’s daughter was bored to tears by the robotic online instruction provided by unimaginative teachers and an inflexible curriculum that failed to engage students by connecting lesson plans to nationwide protests against police brutality or a once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis. When her daughter didn’t respond in chat sessions or turn on her camera, a few teachers logged her out of the virtual classroom and even threatened to fine Elayne for her daughter’s attendance.

“We found the virtual school environment to be hostile,” Elayne said in an interview. “There was just a lot of antipathy… None of her friends were in any of her classes, so there were no opportunities for the camaraderie which often makes school tolerable. I feel like they did a terrible job of lessening the kids’ isolation, which I’m positive was much worse for Black children.”

As a result Elayne decided to homeschool her daughter this year, and while she wouldn’t describe the transition as seamless, her daughter is excited about learning and getting the kind of quality education that the ironically named Colonial School District has long denied her.

This Philadelphia household is one of millions of Black and Latino households that have chosen not to return their children to schools that have reopened following the COVID-19 pandemic. While a federal survey indicates that only one-in-10 elementary and middle schools remain closed nationwide—and a similar number of high schools—a majority of Black, Latino and Asian American students remain out of school.

There is no single reason for this. One is that many teenagers from low-income families have found jobs to help their parents who have lost jobs or had their hours drastically cut. “I wanted to take the stress off my mom,” 18-year-old Pauline Rojas told the New York Times. She is taking courses online but working a job in fast-food and has no plans to return to her San Antonio high school.

“I’m no longer a kid,” she said. “I’m capable of having a job, holding a job, and making my own money.”

Additionally, parents who made new child care arrangements to tide them through the worst of the pandemic are reluctant to disrupt new routines that have worked relatively well for them. There are even reports that the language barrier has left some Latino parents in the dark about school re-openings.

But at base, the pandemic has led many parents of color to reevaluate the mostly White school districts that seem far more interested in controlling their children than educating them. Scholars have taken to referring to urban schools as “sites of suffering” to describe the harassment, bullying, and even physical violence visited upon schoolchildren of color by police, teachers and administrators.

Beginning with the Clinton administration’s efforts to privatize schools, successive federal educational reforms have deepened the Black community’s reservoir of mistrust that dates back to the Reconstruction era and the doctrine of “separate but equal” public resources. Black students are suspended or expelled at three times the rate of their White classmates.

While African Americans account for nearly 13 percent of the U.S. population, they represent only 6.7 percent of all teachers, underscoring the view embraced by many Blacks that their children are being taught by their enemies. In his iconic autobiography, Malcolm X wrote of the White teacher at his all-White school in Mason, Michigan who scoffed at his ambition to one day be a lawyer, telling the president of his seventh-grade class to instead consider a career in carpentry.

Experts have coined the term “school hesitancy” to describe families rejecting traditional learning models. In Washington, D.C., families in the poorest ward turned down offers for a spot in their local elementary school at twice the rate of families in the wealthiest ward, according to city data. As a result, schools in wealthier wards are back to maximum capacity while seats remain empty in the poorest neighborhoods in the city’s southeast quadrant, sparking a debate over whether resources are best spent on in-person or online learning.

Some experts worry that Black students might fall farther behind—especially in mathematics—with students on average likely to lose five to nine months of learning by the end of this school year. Students of Color could fall six to 12 months behind, compared with four to eight months for White students.

But Elayne has seized on the opportunity to homeschool. The Colonial school district has a good reputation, but Elayne notes that neither her daughter nor her older son had a Black teacher. In consultation with her daughter, she has retooled her curriculum to include the illustrated version of Karl Marx’s famous tome “Capital.” The school district requires that homeschoolers’ curriculum include some Pennsylvania state history, and “so we’re studying the Indigenous people from this area,” Elayne said.

Math continues to be her daughter’s weakest subject, but overall the educational experience so far has been a positive one. Said Elayne: “It’s been fun.”

Homelessness grows as globalization boosts housing costs

Photo: Chris Jun.

This article first published 5/14/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/05/14/homelessness-grows-as-globalization-boosts-housing-costs/

Reflections of a veteran journalist

Wearing “Black Lives Matter” t-shirts and carrying a placard that read “Standing in
Solidarity,” protesters poured into the streets of Camden, New Jersey just days after a White
Minneapolis police officer cavalierly asphyxiated with his knee an unarmed Black man, George
Floyd.

In a country riven by race, it came as a surprise when a Camden police officer approached
one of the rally’s principal organizers, an African American mother of three named Yolanda
Deaver, to ask an impassioned question:
“Can I join you?”

“Absolutely” was Deaver’s response, and before long one Camden police officer was joined
by another and another until finally the police chief, Joseph D. Wysocki, asked to join. He
eventually posed for a photograph with Deaver and other protesters that went viral.

And so it came to pass that this impoverished city on the banks of the Delaware River
doubled down on an experiment in police reform. In the year since Floyd’s murder, violent crime
in Camden has declined at a time when violent crime rates nationwide are rising. Citizens’
complaints about excessive use of force have plummeted, and police officers regularly attend
barbecues, block parties, and recreation league basketball games.

Addressing budget concerns, City officials voted in 2012 to abolish Camden’s police force,
enabling it to be absorbed by the larger county agency. But this did little to defuse tensions in the
mostly Black city of 77,000. Only in the last year, since police joined hands with protesters, has
the City begun to really drill down on de-escalation techniques and improve relations with the
community.

The Camden County police remain a work-in-progress, but it has started a genuine dialogue
between the people and law enforcement. Kimberly Mutcherson, the co-dean of Rutgers-
Camden Law School pointed out, “one thing that’s interesting about Camden is that there was,
from the beginning, a police department and chief who recognized that the protesters, the people
out there, their cause is righteous.”

The murder of George Floyd on a street corner in South Minneapolis a year ago this week
has changed everything in America, and it has changed absolutely nothing.

There are encouraging signs that elected officials and policymakers are at least beginning to
listen to African American communities that have been under siege for the better part of the last
century. Yet there are at least as many signs of stasis and a State that has every intention of
continuing to terrorize Blacks.

Three hundred and twenty miles due south of Camden, protesters in Elizabeth City, North
Carolina entered a fourth week of demonstrations to demand that charges be filed against
Pasquotank County police officers who fatally shot an unarmed Black motorist, Andrew Brown
Jr., during a warrant search last month. The district attorney announced last week that the
shooting was justified, and that Brown’s attempts to escape represented an imminent threat to the
officers.

Lawyers for Brown’s family contend that Brown made every effort to elude the officers, not
attack them, and that firing into a moving vehicle violates the police department’s own
regulations.

Six days after Brown was fatally shot in the back of the head, an international panel of
experts and jurists from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America and Europe issued a report
concluding that the systematic police killings of Black people in the U.S. constitutes a prima
facie case of crimes against humanity. The 12 rapporteurs appealed to the prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court, or ICC, to investigate responsible police officials, yet neither the
White House nor the U.S. Congress has responded to the report.

The killing of George Floyd on a South Minneapolis street corner a year ago has changed
everything, and it has changed nothing.

Reparations: a philosophical exploration

Photo: MGN.

This article first published 2/3/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder.  https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/02/03/reparations-a-philosophical-exploration/

On a late spring evening in 1918, a 19-year-old Black sharecropper named Sydney Johnson fatally shot the White plantation owner who had beaten him and refused to pay him for a week’s work. The planter, Hampton Smith, was known in South Georgia for bailing African Americans out of jail and having them work off what they owed on his plantation, a system of debt peonage that was common at the time.

Upon discovering Smith’s murder, authorities in Brooks County organized a dragnet, rounded up several of Smith’s employees—and even a few African Americans who were incarcerated in the county jail at the time—and lynched them.

One of those killed was Hayes Turner, whose 33-year-old wife Mary was eight months pregnant at the time. She denied that her husband had anything to do with Smith’s murder and threatened to file criminal charges against the mob’s ringleaders. One local newspaper would later write that “the people in their indignant mood took exceptions to her remarks as well as her attitude.”

Turner fled after getting wind of rumors that she was in imminent danger, but the mob caught up with her, dragged her to the Folsom Bridge overlooking the Little River, tied her ankles together, strung her upside down, doused her clothes in gasoline, and set her on fire. While she was still alive, a man split open her stomach with a long knife used to butcher hogs, causing her fetus to plunge to the ground.

On impact, the infant cried out before the quick, forceful stomp of a man’s boot ended its cries and its life in one fell swoop. Mary Turner’s corpse was riddled with hundreds of bullets and later that night, her remains and that of her baby were buried a few feet away from where they were slain.

The coronavirus pandemic and shrinking economy widening longstanding racial disparities in wealth and health that provide further justification for financial recourse to be taken.

For all of its shock and awe, however, the horrific slaughter of a Black Madonna and child doesn’t help explain why the U.S. owes 42 million African Americans recompense or reparations.  However, this does: three days after Mary Hayes’ murder, Hampton Smith’s real killer, Sydney Johnson, was cornered and killed in a shootout with police, culminating a weeklong rampage that left at least 13 Blacks dead and compelled another 500 to flee from the area near the Florida border, abandoning scores of parcels of arable farmland that were quickly snatched up by Whites.

This land grab shines a light on a system that has come to be known as racial capitalism and is also enormously useful as a kind of feasibility study for reparations. Communications technology regularly provide ample evidence of White lust for Black blood—including last year’s fatal shooting of an unarmed Black jogger Ahmaud Arbery by White vigilantes just 120 miles east of where Mary Turner was hunted down like a wild boar 102 years earlier.

Add the coronavirus pandemic and shrinking economy widening longstanding racial disparities in wealth and health that provide further justification for financial recourse to be taken.

Recently, lawmakers in Minnesota and across the nation have begun to at least entertain the notion of redress to 42 million African Americans who have been viewed by Whites as a source of obscene profits for 400 years and counting.

Yet, of all the details that need to be addressed in devising a workable plan for reparations, perhaps none is as immediate as the question of reparations for what, exactly?

To answer that question, consider that African Americans—who represent 12% of the population—own 1% of all assets in the country, according to Mehrsa Baradaran, author of “The Color of Money; Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.” That figure is virtually unchanged from January 1, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Such a yawning wealth gap can only be contextualized as part of an American kleptocracy or pyramid scheme in which all institutions and businesses—banking, real estate, the criminal justice system, schools, organized labor and the news and entertainment media—have conspired to steal Black capital.

In that vein, reparations are not merely a moral cause but also sound economic policy: the concentration of property in White hands acts as a drag on the economy, reducing buying power and shrinking the consumer demand that the macro-economy relies on to grow.

 

Photo: Wikipedia. “Mary Turner Historical Marker, Lowndes County, Georgia.”

 

As one example, the 500 Blacks who fled their homesteads following the Turner lynchings in 1918, depleted the rural economy of customers who would have added to the coffers of commercial enterprises in the area by paying taxes, buying food, seed, cattle and livestock, and clothes.

Similarly, a study published last year by Citigroup found that racial discrimination against African Americans since 2000 has cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion in lost output, equivalent to nearly one year of Gross Domestic Product.

That figure includes $113 billion in lost wages for Black workers unable to obtain a college degree, $218 billion in losses accrued to the real estate market because Blacks were denied home loans, and $13 trillion less in commercial activity because African American entrepreneurs couldn’t access the credit markets.

If those gaps were closed today, Citigroup researchers concluded GDP would grow by $5 trillion, or roughly 25%, over a period of five years.

The most common understanding of reparations, expressed by movements like the American Descendants of Slaves, or ADOS, is of a reparations plan that is altruistic in nature, and limited to cutting native-born Blacks a check.

This misses the point entirely: without ownership of our community, and the means of production, Blacks would merely return their reparations check to Whites in the form of rents, college tuition, health insurance, groceries, utilities, car loans, and taxes, leaving us vulnerable, like the Turners and their neighbors, to predatory schemes such as debt peonage, land annexation, and subprime mortgages.

We need to reimagine reparations as a plan to expand GDP nationwide by sparking the economic development that has systematically been denied Black communities through a cycle of dishonor, death, and dispossession. Rinse and repeat.

This is part one of a series on reparations and what they may look like.

Part II: A Soldier’s Story: A father’s lessons about America’s class war

Photo:  Gladson Xavier on Pexels.com

This article first published 1/29/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/01/29/part-ii-a-soldiers-story-a-fathers-lessons-about-americas-class-war/  

It was only after my father’s death that I understood the broader political context of his struggle at Chrysler. While the celebrated head of the United Auto Workers Walter Reuther was the only nonblack speaker invited to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, it was later revealed that his union was at that time “negotiating discriminatory union contracts. These contracts locked Black workers in de facto segregated job classifications in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act,” according to the labor historian Philip Foner.

By 1960, according to data compiled by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Black workers accounted for seven-tenths of one percent of the skilled labor force in Detroit auto plants, yet 42.3% of the entire workforce. In the 1973 documentary, “Finally Got the News,” about the radical League of Revolutionary Black Workers, one White autoworker recalled:

“I took three tests, now one of the math tests I took I didn’t do too well on. The fella who was running the tests said ‘well I tell you what: you go home and study up on this a little bit and come back and see me in a week.’ I know G-d-n well he wasn’t going to tell that to any Colored boy.”

The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was a Marxist-influenced cell formed in the aftermath of Detroit’s 1967 riots. While it did not accept White members, it worked closely with White workers and encouraged them to organize their own so that the proletariat could fight together against the bosses and the Vichy labor leadership at the point of production that was the stronghold of the capitalist system.

[Related Story: Part I: A soldier’s story: A fathers lessons about America’s class war]

A chapter at Polaroid’s Boston headquarters initiated the international Boycott and Sanctions movement that led ultimately to Apartheid South Africa’s downfall. To the best of my knowledge, there was no League chapter in Indianapolis but my father certainly shared in the organization’s objectives, which was, primarily, the abolition of a political economy that exploited workers of all races.

The UAW and the Big Three automakers conspired to undermine the League as part of a broader effort to unspool the interracial coalitions that emerged in the New Deal and had, by the time of my father’s gas station confrontation, reduced poverty to historic lows, and the wealthiest 1 percent’s slice of the national pie to its smallest share ever.

In one revealing statement, Reuther boasted of the UAW: “We make collective bargaining agreements not revolutions.”

My fondest memory of my father was his laugh—loud and free like a runaway train—and few things amused him more than Earl Butz, the Ford administration’s Agriculture Secretary. When the singer Pat Boone asked Butz what the GOP could do to attract more Black voters, Butz, a corporatist who opposed food stamps and the school lunch program tried to discredit Black political leadership such as that exemplified by the League.

Parroting the White supremacists who invented a ring of Black rapists to turn public sentiment against a populist, bi-racial political movement that had lifted living standards for the bulk of North Carolina’s working class in 1898, Butz replied: “The only thing the Coloreds are looking for in life are tight —, loose shoes and a warm place to s.”

My father would howl with laughter at any mention of Butz’s name and as a child, I thought my old man was laughing at his caricature. He wasn’t. He was laughing at Butz’s pathetic and clumsy effort to implode the class consciousness at the heart of workers’ growing prosperity.

As the Black Panthers were known to say, my father did not hate White people, he hated the oppressor. He loathed class enemies such as Oprah and Clarence Thomas and Indianapolis’ neoliberal Black school superintendent got along with my Jewish pediatrician like a house afire, and when Ted Kennedy visited Indianapolis during the 1980 Democratic primaries, my father volunteered to pick him up from the airport.

At my dad’s repast, my brother’s White father-in-law Dave approached me in the parking lot, grabbed my hand with such force I thought he might crush it, peered me straight in my eye, and said: “Your dad was a great man, Jon.”

It occurred to me that while my father and Dave had not worked together, they were both blue-collar workers in a Rust-Belt city at roughly the same time, and as a result, they recognized in one another an ally in the fight against the bosses. I never saw a tense moment between the two at family gatherings and none of my siblings can recall my father ever uttering a negative word about Dave.

Since my father died nearly a decade ago, his birthday has triggered for me a month-long period of mourning that typically dissipates in the days after the anniversary of his death on January 15.

But his life is particularly salient today as pundits like Matt Taibi, Jacobin’s founder, Bhaskar Sunkara, the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann, the intellectual, Adolph Reed and others gaslight the role that White racism has played in America’s decline, and instead put the onus on African American aggrievement that they conflate, mistakenly, with identity politics, and describe, absurdly, as polarizing.

If we’re to move past this crisis of capitalism, the American Left needs to understand that it was White people, not Blacks who created identity politics to help put down a movement led by Black workers who overwhelmingly favored universal policies such as full employment, guaranteed national income, single-payer health care, progressive taxes, community schools, affordable college tuition, worker-owned cooperatives, environmental remediation, and workplace democracy.

The Johnson and Nixon administrations were the most forceful proponents of affirmative action and conservative Black Democrats like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are the product of Wall Street and Democratic Party apparatchiks, not the Black community writ large.

Hence, the African American working class is blameless for what has befallen the nation. Or, as the slain Black activist George Jackson once wrote: The major obstacle to a united left in this country is White racism.”

Jon Jeter is a professional journalist, commentary writer and social media commentator who has served stints at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Washington Post among others. This is part II of a two-part essay.

Part I: A soldier’s story: A fathers lessons about America’s class war

Photo: F. Muhammad from Pixabay

This article first published 1/4/21 by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. https://spokesman-recorder.com/2021/01/04/part-i-a-soldiers-story-a-fathers-lessons-about-americas-class-war/

What I remember is my father pumping gasoline at an Indianapolis gas station while I waited in the car with my mother and two brothers. It was, as I recall, a summer weekend in the bicentennial year, 1976, and from the car’s back seat, I watched as my father and the cashier, a White woman, began to argue.

He accused the woman of cheating him out of the change he was owed; the cashier insisted that he had given her a $10 bill rather than the $20 my father said he’d handed her. In my mind’s scrapbook, I can see plumes of smoke billowing from my dad’s blue-black forehead as he flew into a rage, swearing and pointing his finger at the attendant who was behind the glass booth.

“Sir, I am going to have to call the police,” I remember her saying over the loudspeaker. “ Go ‘head,” my father said defiantly. “I’ll be right he- ah.”

When the police officer arrived a few minutes later, the woman told her story, my father his. The officer, also White, unsurprisingly chose the cashier’s version of events. Towering over my father, the police officer extended his hand to return the change that the cashier said he was owed from the $10.

“**** your change, peckerwood,” my father said, simultaneously slapping the change from the officer’s hand. I remember the hollow sound of the coins pelting the concrete like tin rain, and watching the officer place his hand on the holster as though reaching for his gun.

From the car’s passenger seat, my mother intervened, convincing her husband that this was not a hill worth dying on. “Cecil,” she said, “C’mon. Let’s go. ”

Born 89 years ago today to the son of a slave, Cecil Nathaniel Jeter did not suffer fools gladly as the saying goes. Yet to fully grasp the dire circumstances facing a nation in post-industrial free fall, you’d do well to consider that what inspired my old man’s rage on an afternoon 45 years ago was not some blanket loathing of White people, but rather his profound understanding of class struggle and the role that racism plays in undermining proletarian solidarity.

My father was far from perfect: he let bitterness get the best of him at times, lost years to the bottle, and often unfairly blamed my mother for his own shortcomings. But despite only a high school education, he was a voracious reader and the first class warrior I ever knew. Even to this daynearly 10 years after his deathhis ferocity, brilliance, and humanity continue to shine on me, like the warmth from a thousand suns.

My dad undoubtedly viewed the White gas station attendant and the police officer as traitors to their class, no better than marionettes on a string, manipulated by the oligarchs to fight a proxy war against their coworkers rather than challenge their common enemy: the bosses.

“They do not want the White man and the Black man to get together,” he would often say to me, like a mantra, long before I could fathom the full weight of what he was saying.

“Daddy was my first lesson in the way the American system works,” said my sister, Karen, now  63. “He would always say that the White man and the Black man are like two rabbits chasing after a dollar bill and in the midst of chasing that dollar bill they start fighting each other. That’s why we never get anywhere.”

Roughly six months after the gas station incident, on February 8, 1977, a 44-year old man of Greek descent Anthony Kiritsis walked into the office of his Indianapolis mortgage broker, and wired the muzzle of a shotgun to the back of the lender’s head. Much of the hostage standoff was broadcast live on television and while I don’t recall my father exhorting Kiritsis to murder his hostage, his sympathies clearly were with the blue-collar borrower whose exploitation by the financier underscored America’s kleptocracy.

The old man always sided with the underdog. We were at that off-brand gas station in 1976 because my father refused to buy gasoline from Shell Oil which supported South Africa’s barbaric, apartheid government.

Writing to my mother in 1956 when he was a serviceman in the Korean War, he described his commanding officer disciplining him for asking why the U.S. was always picking fights with people who’d done nothing to us. “So today, I’m cleaning the latrines,” he wrote.

His father, James Jeter, was born in Union, South Carolina, in 1884, two years before state lawmakers prohibited Blacks from entering into collective bargaining agreements and created a militia solely to suppress labor organizing. Undoubtedly fleeing the racial terror that followed, my grandfather was part of the Great Migration’s first wave, arriving in Indianapolis sometime before World War I.

When I was an adolescent, my father would shuttle me to a prewar gymnasium to play pickup basketball, and if we made that trip two dozen times, I swear he told me the same story 24 times, each time apparently oblivious of the previous trip, as though he was in a trance.

When he was a child of maybe eleven or twelve, he had tried to play there, walking the nearly two miles from his family’s shotgun house to the gymnasium, only to be turned away by a White man not long after he had walked inside and began shooting baskets with the other boys, all of them White. As he trudged back home in the heat of a summer day, a few of the White boys who had seen him at the gym doused him in a bucket of piss as they whizzed by him in a pickup truck.

When my father returned home from the war, he bounced around from job to job before catching on in 1965 at Chrysler where he quickly decided that he wanted no part of the backbreaking assembly lines and the dangerous speed-ups. He enrolled in training courses that would enable him to eventually become the plant’s first African American skilled tradesman, after first being denied a promotion despite scoring the highest on a qualifying examination.

When he inquired about the promotion, my father recalled the White foreman’s response thusly: “Now Jeter, if I promote a nigger, we’ll both be fired.”

But he persisted, and I was never so proud to be my father’s son than at his wake on a snowy, January day in 2011 when several of his Black coworkers told me that he was always encouraging them to enroll in the training courses for promotion to the higher-paying, less strenuous and safer skilled-trade positions like the one he held.

Jon Jeter is a professional journalist, commentary writer and social media commentator who has served stints at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Washington Post among others. This is part I of a two-part essay.