Month: March 2020

I remember back in the late 1980s-early 1990s watching this show, “For The People”, which was created by Mr. Listervelt Middleton (1952-1996). He interviewed prominent black historians (Black/ African people whom the white historical establishment dismissed because their perspective was from an African continent historical point of view, and not European).  Mr. Listervelt was also the producer and host of this award winning program , that was broadcast originally on South Carolina Educational Television SCETV. On the program he interviewed leading Afrocentric scholars from Africa, as well as, North and South American scholars on a number of topics as they relate to Africa and African people at home in Africa and abroad in the diaspora. The program I am presenting is a lecture by Dr. Yosef ben-Johannan (1918-2015).

According to the New York Times 2015 obituary, “Dr. Yosef ben-Johannan was a sage, a self-taught scholar who dedicated his life to uncovering the suppressed history of a people, challenging narratives that had written Africa out of world history.

In the 1960s, Dr. Ben-Jochannan emerged as prominent figure in Harlem, pushing his anti-colonial message to its limit, claiming that the very foundations of Western civilization, including Greek philosophy, Judaism and Christianity, were African in origin. He regularly lectured to crowded auditoriums; he was a disciple of Marcus Garvey and a confidant of Malcolm X, and he appeared on stages with Amiri Baraka, Al Sharpton, James Brown and Louis Farrakhan.

This ‘For The People’ lecture with Dr. Yosef ben Jochannan was originally broadcast in 1983 on South Carolina’s public television channel, SCETV. Dr. ben-Jochannan was speaking on how Hinduism, Islam, Christianity and Judaism symbolism originated in Egypt, an AFRICAN NATION…not a nation in the Middle East.

SOURCES:

The Origins Of Things- A Poem by Listervelt Middleton

https://www.panafricanalliance.com/listervelt-middleton/

There is a dark underside of segregation in American history that is rarely addressed. We always talk about racism and segregation in America in the context of personal prejudice, and this personal prejudice is the basis of what’s called ‘de facto segregation’… de facto segregation being the separation of people that occurs by ‘fact’, or circumstances and/or customs, rather than by legally imposed requirements.  The belief is this: because racism is not an intentionally legislated effort to separate groups, de facto segregation is the result of personal choice (ex: white flight and gentrification; 2 modern examples), thus de facto segregation cannot be addressed on the federal level.  Because of this belief, the federal court system (The Supreme Court/ The Constitution) cannot remedy the long history of segregation via Federal laws because these laws would somehow penalize white people of today for the sins of white people in the past. Why? Because de facto segregation occurs by personal choices, such as: private home owners refusing to sell to blacks, rogue real estate agents steering black families to specific neighborhoods/ areas, loan officers/banks discriminating in the way they lend, etc….and not by legally imposed requirements (the claim being that the federal government had nothing to do with these ‘facts’).  The Supreme Court has said that there is nothing that they can do about it.

The truth behind de facto segregation is this: It is a MYTH. The racial segregation in every metropolitan area of this country was created by racially explicit government policy, designed to create racial boundaries, and designed to ensure that black Americans and whites could not live near one another. These racial policies are so embedded into our society that they still determine the racial landscape that we see in our cities and suburbs all over the country.

The book: THE COLOR OF LAW, A forgotten history of how the US government segregated America, by Richard Rothstein, documents how de jure segregation completely segregated all over the United States, and it began in ernest right after World War II.

Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and Black Americans should live. In other words, the United States government codified and made explicit policies based on race to separate Blacks and whites from living together.

Residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, East and West that we see today is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation, but of overt public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. This policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time.

Had it not been for the US government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the negative causes that is so pervasive today —private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation—still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression.

Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what the judicial system calls De jure Segregation: segregation (or separation of people…in this case, black and white Americans) by law and public policy.

Residential Racial Segregation is the very definition of De jure Segregation.

I HIGHLY recommend this book if you really want to understand the segregation policies in the US, especially after World War II.