Critical Race Theory poses that every law and every facet of American culture is permeated with anti-black racism from the founding of the nation until now. The more I learn about history, the more I agree.
Critical Race Theory is currently a hot button issue that people are either violently for or against. I’m not really sure, but I am starting to understand what it means. It is very much….
I’ll give you so many examples:
1. The Black Panther Party had a 10-Point Program, all of which points were fundamentally essential for Justice. The Ten Point Program comprised two sections: "What We Want Now!" and "What We Believe."
a. 1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black and oppressed communities.
b. 2. We want full employment for our people.
c. 3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalist of our Black and oppressed communities and reparations for what has been robbed from us
d. 4. We want decent housing, fit for the shelter of human beings.
e. 5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.
f. 6. We want completely free health care for all Black and oppressed people.
g. 7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of Black people, other people of color, all oppressed people inside the United States.
h. 8. We want an immediate end to all wars of aggression.
i. 9. We want freedom for all Black and poor oppressed people now held in U.S. federal, state, county, city and military prisons and jails. We want trials by a jury of peers for all persons charged with so-called crimes under the laws of this country.
j. 10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.
I personally agree with every one of these points; totally positive, just and non-violent. They also believed in their 2nd Amendment Rights to bear arms in a well-regulated militia. At this time, 2nd Amendment armed militias are organizing and training all over the United States, yet our FBI doesn’t feel compelled to assassinate them as they did the leaders of the Black Panthers. Why did they arrest, imprison, or assassinate members of the Black Panther Party, who were defending their constitutional Rights? Because they were Black.
My Grandma Rose was a “Gray Panther.” She also worked very hard to advance social justice. She was one of the original authors of the Medicare bill. Yet, the FBI didn’t want to assassinate her even though she was a card carrying Socialist. Because she was White.
Critical Race Theory points out the historical discrepancies in which Whites and Blacks were treated for the same actions. It is about White Privilege and how Whites are driven to disempower Blacks any way they can.
2. During World War II, Whites and Blacks fought side by side. Yet, when they lined up to get their paychecks, the service always ran out of money when the Black servicemen came to get paid. I heard this time and again from WWII veterans when I lived in Vallejo.
3. I am a Registered Nurse having spent many years in the Mother/Baby Department. I noticed early on that White women got very different treatment than our Black patients. I saw an obstetrician literally tear open a cesarean section on a black patient, yanking it apart like it was an old rag. He said it heals faster when you tear it rather than cut it with a scalpel. I never saw him do that on any other patient. At change of shift, the derisive tones of some nurses when giving report on their patients of color. They seemed to lack empathy or respect for the women of color.
I saw White women get top notch healthcare and the Black women were abused. That’s what initially instigated me on this 3-decade journey of trying to resolve the inequities of our healthcare system with universal, single-payer healthcare in California and the USA. Now I realize that the reason we don’t have universal, single-payer healthcare in the USA, unlike nearly all industrialized economies, is because the Elites, presumably White, believe that they deserve better quality than the Poor and the Blacks, who deserve nothing. Such arrogant hubris. Pointing out the inequity is Critical Race Theory.
4. Redlining was a blatantly illegal banking policy that excluded Blacks from White neighborhoods and relegated them to ghettos. Black people were clearly unjustly excluded from buying homes in certain neighborhoods.
5. The sub-prime mortgage and foreclosure debacle of 2008 to 2012 is another example. Normally, banks offer higher interest loans to People of Color. Mortgage companies went wild in the years preceding 2008, selling high interest mortgages to mostly Blacks and Hispanics. Then the greedy investment bankers put together portfolios of mortgage notes and sold them on the securities exchange as ABD’s (asset backed derivatives). This caused the worldwide economic collapse in 2008, and the beginning of conveyor belt foreclosures, causing a massive shifting of assets away from People of Color upward to the Elites as family after Black family were evicted from their own homes. Critical Race Theory suggests that the bankers have been preying on the hopes of upward bound Black families, only to cut them down and take all they have earned, time and again. I believe, this is part of the banking industry business model.
6. Next example is discrimination against Blacks in voting.
a. Slaves could not vote, although they were counted by 2/3 in the census to determine the number of Representatives in the House.
b. Once slavery was outlawed, the elite Whites who controlled the voting booths came up with the system of Jim Crow to continue to disenfranchise American citizens of color from their Right to Vote.
c. Jim Crow ended with the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Which was followed by the War on Drugs.
d. The War on Drugs convicted People of Color far more often for the same crimes as Whites, who were either never charged with a crime, fined, or acquitted. In many States, felons can never regain their Right to Vote. Currently, about 2/3 of all Black men have served time in jail for one thing or another.
e. Look what happened in Florida. A citizen’s Initiative on the ballot passed by a landslide, and felons who had finished their parole could regain the Right to Vote. Since poll taxes were made illegal by the Voting Rights Act, the Florida Legislature immediately passed a law saying that they had to pay back all their financial obligations to the state first before they could apply to vote. That eliminated about half of the 1.5M new Florida citizens with the Right to Vote.
f. These are my thoughts about paying back what these former felons owe to the State. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery except as a punishment for crime. So the War on Drugs put Black People back into slavery in prison. While in prison, everyone has a job. The prisoners are paid pennies a day for their labor. Their virtual slave labor saves the prison in maintenance costs, and even earns for the prison in renting out their slave laborers to farms, factories, and customer service jobs. When they have completed serving their time, all their slave labor is valued at nothing, and instead, they are discharged from prison with debts to the Courts. Critical Race Theory points out that even today, we find ways to put Black People back into slavery aka prison.
g. The racial bias built into the culture that punishes Blacks for the same behavior condoned in Whites is endemic among police and the courts. There is no Justice in the Justice System, especially not for Blacks. These inequities are what Critical Race Theory points out. Why is it so important to disenfranchise People of Color from the vote?
h. Every 10 years, the Constitution requires a census in order to adjust voting districts to achieve even representation in the House and the Assembly. Time and again, the districts are gerrymandered to spread out communities of color into fringe minorities in peripheral districts thereby disempowering the Black vote and maintaining White control. This results in Rule by the Minority. White Capitalists want to make sure their Property Rights supersede all other Rights. Critical Race Theory teaches us that the need to overturn Democracy into Rule by the Minority is all about White Supremacy.
i. The Elite Capitalists talk about freedom and liberty. They mean the freedom to make as much money as possible no matter who they hurt or what law is broken. That leads to the issue of State’s Rights. State’s Rights is another way of saying the right to segregate and disenfranchise voters of color. Liberty and State’s Rights are words we often hear from White Supremacists. We know what you really mean.
7. Critical Race Theory states that racial bias has been interwoven in our entire US history, since the 2/3 Rule at the Constitutional Convention to the January 6th insurrection in DC.
8. The Declaration of Independence talks about unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. By the time they ratified the Constitution 11 years later, the unalienable rights had become Life, Liberty and Property. Property is another euphemism for slaves, and wives. Slaves gained their legal freedom before wives did. Black men got the Right to Vote before women.
9. The unbelievable cruelty of the police and White Supremacists who kill Black citizens provoked by nothing more than skin color and their own assumptions about Black People. Rate of police fatal shootings of Black People from 2015 – 2021 was 37 per million of the population. Add the Hispanics, and the total become 67 per million compared to 15 per million for Whites. The rate of police shootings for Blacks is more than double for Whites. And this doesn’t include killings by chokehold, tasering, beating, breaking their neck, or by suffocation. And also doesn’t include Blacks killed by hate crimes. 57.6% of Hate Crimes in 2019 were motivated by racial bias. The fact that most of these crimes are either covered up or the White perpetrators are acquitted is something that is illustrated by Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory says this is not unique but rather has been endemic since the beginning of the nation.
