REPARATIONS: FAIR, DESERVED AND OVERDUE - BUT AMERICA MUST FACE IT'S RACIST BASE AND HISTORY OF 'PASSING' TO CARRY IT OUT.

"PerchedEye" Blogspot is twelve years old this year, 2021, starting with the first term of President Obama. The focus has been the political-economic-cultural pillars that define America....and how those features have evolved in the days, months, and years since....and continue to evolve.  It's been an unusual if not overwhelming decade highlighted IMHO by a farcical election of a farcical, autocratic, fascist, grifting, fast-food addicted, deeply indebted occupier of the Oval Office who, through incompetence or deliberate opportunism ("it's a Democrat Hoax") sat passively and watched a once-in-a-century Plague (!, yes, a Plague like in 1345, 1660 and 1920 ad) infect 33 million Americans and kill 350,000 of us, so far in Aprical 2021.                                                                                                                             ---------------------------------------------

REPARATIONS. This archived draft responded to a web article,  On Reparations, the Question Isn’t If, but When and How (Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, executive editor at YES! June 23, 2019).] Based on the complexity of determining by color who is African-American, after 400 years of Black-White mixing, modern DNA testing seems the way to base reparations, but this method will uncover a new 'problem' - a sizeable portion of so-called 'White' America potentially can be termed 'African-American' resulting from 400 years of hidden and increasingly accepted racial mixing. (By the colonial 'One Drop Rule', approximately 1/32 African-American heritage could define a 'White' person as Black even though looking White.) 

In America, 'Reparations' has almost exclusively applied to redressing the historically preserved deprivations and barriers to first-class citizenship imposed on African Americans, and practiced almost wholly on the basis of color, 'The Color Line.'  No other American minority has received this kind of artificially-defined exclusion.  

The Color Line still exists in many unofficial forms - chiefly housing and schools segregation but especially as informal pressures and penalties against racial (African-American and White) interactions especially 'intermarriage'. The informal Color Line remains in many forms as still the unofficial 'American Way'.  However, because the Color Line was in practice centuries before modern DNA testing, it relied on visual appearance and thus was porous to racial mixing. The result is the African-American population is visually broad in color (and belonging is often a matter of  choice). As for the American "White' population, the African-American sociologist, E Franklin Frazier, among others, estimated that since 1800, an annual average of 10,000 African-Americans newly crossed the Color Line to live as White.  

Reparations to redress slavery has been with America since Emancipation - Union General Tecumseh Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865) contained the famous '40 Acres and A Mule' recommendation for freed slaves. But Sherman's proposal met political death so this question still lives but after more 150 years since Sherman of increasing racial mixiing, it has morphed into a very complex matter of 'who' is African-American, and what is enough African-American heritage to qualify for reparations, and for how much of a full reparations share.  Several researchers, thinkers, and writers have addressed this question in 20th and 21st century times - one of the most current and perhaps most popularly known is Harvard University's endowed Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr, host of "Finding Your Roots", a Public Broadcasting television Series (PBS) which entered its seventh season as of January 19, 2021. (Professor Gates nearly became a precursor to the murdered George Floyd when, in 2009, 'presumptive' police arrested him as he was entering his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Prior prominent researchers and scholars who have also contributed to this subject are sociologist Edward (E.) Franklin Frazier, the author James Baldwin, Langston Hughes (poet and author) ... and many others, poets, authors, scholars and 'doers'.

REGARDING REPARATIONS - this blogger's BIG QUESTION is: 

'AFTER 400 YEARS OF RACIAL MIXING, WE CAN'T SAY, IN TOTO, OR PRECISELY, OR BY WHAT MEASURES WHO IS OR ISN''T AFRICAN-AMERICAN ...  THIS QUESTION MUST BE ADDRESSED AS THE BASIS FOR A REPARATIONS PROGRAM.'

(DNA-test qualifying for reparations on a sliding scale would open the door for a surprisingly large portion of white America to step out of the racial closet in order to get their reparation share.)

One of the most challenging truths to answering this question is the impossiblity of drawing a sharp border between not only white from Black America, but even with the African-American community itelf there is a dynamic of color. Both of these considerations prevent a simple approach to identifying who is qualified to get reparations, or how much of a full share: 

AMONGST AMERICA'S AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY, THERE ARE LIKELY FAR FEWER 'FULL-BLOOD' AFRICAN-AMERICANS THAN POPULAR BELIEF (PREJUDICE?) EXPECTS! 

This logically suggests a reparation policy based on a scientific-rigorous 'scale'. A scale of color? Of DNA composition? Perhaps other scale variables we haven't thought of? 

The answers to these questions will not just affect America's African-American community - as identified as African-American but will also affect White Americans in ways not easily thought of. Why?  Because the determining scale variables used in America are based not on scientific criteria but on what is easily seen by the eye - color and easily distinguishable physical signs. And at some point on these scales, an African-American can easily 'pass' for any number of American sub-groups who are not currently discriminated against, including White, e.g., 'Mediterranean' is a common 'error' committed by mainstream 'white' America in misidentifying African-Americans. 

American mistreatment of its African-Americans as second-class human beings then as second-class citizens began with slavery in 1619 which evolved into thinking based on greed that slavers-as-property should be made into an inherited status, most profitably even inherited for generations, hence the 1662 'One Drop' rule (hypodescent). 

The one-drop rule existed in form even until 1985 when American hospitals stopped listing babies as Negro, Black, or White. 

No other American racial or nationality subgroup has been given such a permanent sub-status and scrutiny as America has imposed on African Americans by slavery, followed by de facto 'Jim Crow' laws and 'modern' systemic racism.

Being 'African-American' historically (hysterically, in hysterical American history) has almost exclusively been a matter of the eye ... combined with politics.

So what might be a formula, a means of determining, a qualifications scale for who gets reparations? 

And, as there are so few pure-blood African-Americans, yet who still retain enough characteristics to suffer visual discrimination, how much will a reparation be for less than 'pure blood'? 

DNA scale reparations? Uh, Oh! Now we've raised the ghost ... of deeds past and topics forbidden to be spoken of, namely:

THERE ARE MANY 'WHITE' PERSONS AND THEIR FAMILIES WHO HAVE ENJOYED THE FULL SET OF PRIVILEGES DENIED TO AFRICAN-AMERICANS ... YET, BASED ON DNA, ARE AFRICAN-AMERICAN. SHOULD THEY RECIEVE A REPARATIONS SHARE?

This is perhaps the most problematic aspect of reparations in the American context. Why? Because money will test and hopefully break American racism. (The good old American 'solution' to all what ails the body and soul.) The perceived (and real) risk for a 'white' person and family to 'racially reveal' their racial legacy will be a 'medicine-made-easier-to-swallow' by rationalizing away color-based racism in order to get money. 

DNA-test qualifying for reparations will likely open the door for a surprisingly large portion of white America to step out of the racial closet.

Public sentiment based on the desire to participate in reparations ... in order to get a money share, will likely result in rationalizing away the stigmatization of African America in order to 'free' color-defined, white Americans to join the reparations queue.

Also, open-door registration for reparations will finally bring America to more willingly face its slavery history and legacy - the rape of Black female slaves, racial hate, and stigmatization.

Will there be DNA testing combined with the old standard ‘Paper Bag’ test for filtering current skin color ( the real-life American-color-gate leading from lower caste to full acceptance...as in the former apartheid South Africa who actually borrowed from the example of America's slavery system to design their own modern era apartheid system)? 

As many have pointed out, there needs to be first a national self-analysis and open discussion of America’s slavery and its not so long ago evil practices. Practices such as making it a crime to teach a slave to read and write, and for a slave to possess these skills.....and the lingering disposition in many states, even outside the former slave territories to continue, even until the 1960s (!}, a century after emancipation, to prohibit African Americans from attending ‘white’ colleges and universities. 

Then America has to face the reality that our substantial, national lagging behind other developed nations in such markers of ‘civil-ized’ societies such as health care for all and a national college subsidy program (some form of free college for all who desire and strive for higher education) ...our American foot-dragging, are significantly shaped by a lingering, post Reconstruction era focus on denying the descendants of formers slaves full citizenship. 

(From observations and listening on personal international travels, America seems to other nations to prefer to punish even its white (but needy) citizens if America can hold onto racially punitive institutionalized restrictions that were set up during slavery and preserved thereafter by legal code (Jim Crow segregated public institutions) and more subtle mechanisms such as social and entertainment media that promote, hence preserving, negative imagery’ of African-Americans and of Americans of color, generally. 

America needs to move ahead from those ‘chains’ made from its slavery history. 

Speaking the language of economic practicality which should not be the only measurement of modernization, but every American social innovation seems to eventually result in, or designed for, future monetary benefits (rather than improving quality of life or gaining national pride),  America is overdue to have a truly 100% national health care program like every other top-tier nation. This would seem to be a building block, a self-investment for future social stability and economic health (by lowering labor downtime costs). 

An affordable, national health care system will create a healthy, robust citizenry who are globally competitive; and it will create an industrially innovative America that will feed future growth. 

Additionally, our national health care program (for all and free) must be accompanied by a national college program designed for debt-free, higher education for all who wish to strive for that goal. 

America's old rationalizing of under-educated America by how easy it is to fill America's technical gaps by 'brain-draining' the engineers and scientists from foreign nations has seen its day. The globe began to resent this policy some time ago ... plus America has had problems assimilating this influx of job takers who home-grown Americans resent either deservedly or by American's own preferences to avoid technical education. (!!)

These are some of the destructive, weakening side effects America has created for itself by diverting so much of its soul and creativity to preserving 'slavery' in the form of discrimination and prejudice. America must move away from this posture so it can begin to be a true ‘democracy’ free of its shameful, slavery-based origins.

2020 TRUMPISM: THE LEGACY OF THE 1964-68 NIXON-GOLDWATER SOUTHERN (RACIST) STRATEGY

Richard Nixon’s evil political trick, his Presidential campaign’s  1968 Southern Strategy, lives on even more destructively than ever!  The Southern Strategy was, and remains, the work of the ‘Rancid Old One’ dwelling in the brains of Nixon and his campaign managers that made race-mongering the focal point of the campaign. The ‘Southern Strategy’  was, and remains, a life-threatening piece of political poison - dangerous skullduggery that easily can, did and continues to hurt and kill both target and users. It let bad stuff out of the bottle.

America’s current political-social turmoil, especially its extremes of public destructiveness and ‘shoot-to-kill’ reality, can be arguably credited to the extremist, manipulative, opportunist, venal, power hungry ... yet fragile ego of our incumbent president, Donald Trump. Likewise, the accompanying, intense racial discordance seems strongly linked, again, to the coded and overt public exhortations of Donal Trump to his 35% ‘base’ supporters - the ‘Maga Hatters’, religious southern evangelicals, right-wing conspiracy theorists, race-war proponents, gun culture 2nd-amendment right-ists, and so on, including several other fringe groups sheltered under the Trump tent. 

This blogger proposes that the above, current civil distress, and especially its root racism, goes back to 1964, when the ‘libertarian’ presidential campaign of  Barry Goldwater  was devastatingly rejected by the voters,...and, from that political failure, left the Republican Party with neither message nor person of substance to carry its banner forward. (In  retrospect, the Goldwater ‘message’ was actually a subliminal brain-mirage left by clever-sounding ‘media bites’ that upon repeating and further contemplation evaporated into meaningless Sophomoric quips.) 

‘Goldwater’ shocked the 1964 Republicans to the reality that they were ‘running on empty’ as far as message ideas and far worse, they realized themselves their messaging lacked a basic meaning. But, they also saw they had fallen into a trap of their own making - the Republicans had rejected so much in competing with the Democrats, there was nothing of real substance left for them ... they had even rejected science and technology in favor of evangelicalism, creationism, international isolationism and more.  

But the political obverse was that aided by the willing assistance from the backwards looking-and-longing Republicans, the Democrats had cruised by default (and by their own predilections) to near-exclusive ownership of ‘messaging’ the new American reality - youth, education, urban needs, American diversity (race, gender, age, etc).

In brief, the 1964, Goldwater-costumed, Republican Party had ‘achieved’ a near-overall rejection of reason and was regressing to a feudal condition ... while the Democrats were equally going full-blast in the opposite direction - upwards and onwards on the reality path to the future.

(And though the Democrats were surfing high on the crest of ‘what’s happening now’, there was the classic human ‘glitch’ written about by the ancients such as Aeschylus - ‘no picture is so perfect that it paints itself.’  Thusly so, with the Dems, even in a world with so many riches and open doors, just how does one start, use them, program them, message about them, unify behind them, etc... too much of a plentitude of riches. In other words, the classic, seemingly omni-present, Democratic Party ‘angst’ was opening fissures that allowed Republican presidential wins - the two terms of Reagan followed by the three terms of Bushes.

While the  ‘Old Guard Republican conservatives, in their vow not to repeat the ‘Goldwater Error’, were guiding the Party to the center - with some success, they were not totally successful in that struggle. 

After Goldwater, the Old Guard, conservative Republican ‘tide’ was always fighting against an ‘ebb’ tide of reactionary sentiment from the Republican base whose center was in the old South - ruralist (at least in cultural leaning) and religiously evangelical Protestant.  They made a good struggle to keep the Party ‘aucurant’ with a changing America, but there weren’t enough remaining rationality-messaging hand-holds to save the Party from regressing the ‘rest of the way’. 

But meanwhile, since 1964 and Goldwater, the American voter had grown a bit and was not so easily impressed (tricked) by the ‘quick-slick-worded one-liner’, vapid, behind-the-curtain, dismalness that Republican messaging had become. This was a tough situation - how and where could Republicans find a new hand-hold on their worn-slick, skeletal bones to message something to appeal to the newer voters, or even to hoodwink them.

These post-Goldwater challenges ideally required breadth and subtlety of thinking and problem-solving talents and skills, not ideological ‘magic and believing’ - tricks of self-deception that quickly evaporated under ‘second order’ examination into ... nothingness. Republican ideology, though, excelled in ‘faux-argumentation’ which was (is still) based largely on the rejections of classical rationality and Reason mixed with a strong measure of authoritarianism, and was thus automatically incapable of adapting and addressing these challenges.  (Once more, as exampled by Goldwater in 1964, Republican ideology had that tendency to ‘crash and burn’ before takeoff.)  

 

But the Republican messaging gap had to be overcome. A ‘fix’ had to be found.

Then, in 1968, there appeared from the dark imaginings of Kevin Phillips,  a young political consultant to Richard Nixon’s campaign, a new plate of Republican messaging magic - the race-baiting slogans, trigger phrases and graphic race-hate images now known as ‘The Nixon Southern Strategy’, which has become the core of all subsequent Republican Party messaging. (Mr Phillips has since, after maturation, left the Republican Party.) The Republican’s race-baiting often enough hit a mark - it did offer simple-concept reality-substitutes, i.e., hate and authoritarianism which easily satisfied the southern White majority and eventually a major segment of the working class (arguably aided by Democratic defocusing from the exceptionally strong relationship that had existed between the Democratic Party and labor unions.)

The current race-baiting, white nationalist messaging from Trump’s Republican Party is then the direct descendent of the 1968 Nixon “Southern Strategy” which was dreamed up to save that near defunct Party by stealing from the Democrat Party the southern White, conservatives (Dixie-crats) ... and Donald Trump is the current legacee of that terrible 1968, Republican wrong-turn-at-the-crossroads.

At the core of what Pericles21 suggests was the ‘Republican Problem’ in 1964, and that remains now, is that in 1964, they realized that largely through their own fault they had guided themselves, or allowed themselves to be guided, into irrelevance to American issues. And they hadn't found a way out.  And althoughhemselves be g they saw from the 1964 ‘Goldwater Affair’, that their conservative ideology, even when embellished with ear-catchy phrases, invariably if not too quickly,  collapsed on itself and thus offered nothing useful to resolving the real American problems that were evolving on several challenging fronts - social, international, technological and more, there was not much Republicans could do to mask that inadequacy except to “double down” on a losing bet’

The Democrats, by their natural alliance (it seems) with scientific rationalism, have been near-perfectly aligned with modern problem analytical methods and thinking and thusly have been comfortable with America’s new technology base and are especially coherent with AMERICA’S ‘NEW DIVERSITY’ (a historically preexistent racial diversity that in 1964, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was taken out from behind the ‘Jim Crow’ curtain and became a legitimate, ‘full-rights’ picture of America... and was subsequently complemented by gender-rights laws and social acknowledgments.)

In comparison to the above evolving America, and to the Democrats’ easy adaptation to those mentioned changes, the Republicans, largely through Nixon’s 1968 Southern Strategy which relied on race hatred at its core, had self-isolated from America’s reality, and also from the international world. 

By 1968,The Republican campaign messaging had become an almost-empty bag of emptier-sounding  clever quips that actually scared voters when read or heard spoken a second time (Goldwater, 1964 campaign). 

(COMMENT: it is worth noting that, imho, there is in 2020 a Goldwater heir of sorts the clever-phrase wonder, Rand Paul (Republican Senator, Kentucky)

So, even after a debatably illegal 2016 ‘Trumpism’ electoral college ‘win’ (although Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 million), America and the Republican Party, were faced with the problematic ‘realty’ of Donald Trump as President because the Trump ‘success’ ‘came with’ (not ‘because of’) an all-embracing alliance with the empty leftovers from the 1964 Goldwater debacle. But it was all about the Goldwater ‘leftovers’, anyway.

Predictably, within weeks after the 2017 inauguration, Trump turned full-on rogue, and aided by an increasingly complicit Old Guard, rapidly began regressing America to a feudal, autocratic, oligarchic-fascist status ...complete with walled borders, hunched shoulders rejecting centuries-old allies and treaties - all of the inappropriate formats for 20th century world leadership.

So now, in 2020, with Trump, the Republican Party finds itself again regressed to a 1964 Goldwater ‘poseur’ status with nothing to offer except empty words and phrases drooling from the mouth of an authoritarian, con-artist (who is also alleged to a paper-marche puppet of an foreign state enemy -a true nightmare for that super-patriotic party.