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Beggars and billionaires: The perception of continued slavery

Chapter 29

 

 


Historical photo


Historical photo

  

Historical background information to this chapter for the heavy readers:

Even under the most hopeless oppression people have an unconquerable ability to survive and so the concept of the extended family as a survival unit has often become the black family's means of overcoming the impact of an oppressive society. But where the concept in Africa meant a closely connected family living together in the same compound, it has in America meant the brutal uprooting and forcible separation of family members over great physical distances.
When we whites excuse the destruction of the black family by sympathetically talking about its "inheritance from slavery"- as if the family alone, and for no reason, should have carried this inheritance on from generation to generation - it is in order to blame an evil system which existed 100 years ago so that we can feel themselves free of responsibility today. What I see again and again is not a black inheritance from slavery, but society's inheritance from slavery. When the whole system they live in today is hardly distinguishable from (and even perceived as) slavery, it is hardly surprising that the inheritance from slavery is also in fact being forced upon the black family.

  

  

Many of these children's missing fathers have over the years built the southern highways in chain gangs. Today there are no chains, as bloodhounds and sub-machineguns are far more effective.

  

  

By following one of the prison trucks I discovered that among other things the prison workers clean up around the mansions and on the private beaches of the richest people in the world in Palm Beach.

  

  

The work here under the guns of white overseers can hardly be perceived by the black consciousness as anything but a direct continuation of the slave work formerly carried out around the large white plantation homes. Back in those days the slaves found it justifiable to steal to survive the hardships that had been forced upon them.

  

  

Today I find them more likely to steal as a result of self-destructive anger caused by their growing sense of  the poverty and marginalization which these white millionaires directly are guilty of e.g. through large scale stealing from society in tax breaks for themselves - a privilege Republicans desperately try to hold on to by also stealing the right to vote from black ex-offenders..... in the same way as they did before blacks won the right to vote in the Civil Rights Struggle.

  

  

When in addition blacks everywhere in America get much harder and longer sentences than whites for similar offenses, the perception of slavery becomes a concrete reality. Many blacks have received a life sentence for criminal charges of which whites would have been acquitted.

  

  

Almost all of my friends in this presentation I find worse off today than when I first met them. But here on Palm Beach and Miami Beach are some of the wealthiest families in America whom the voters in the 80's, 90's and not least with the re-election of Bush in 2004 decided to make even richer.

  

  

Here the wealthiest families in America have their vacation homes - the Rockefellers, Duponts, Kennedys, and Fords.

  

  

It is also here that until a few years ago blacks apart from servants were not allowed to set foot - although in practice they are often still arrested, if they do.

  

  

Well, sometimes a beggar does get in to beg from the multi-millionaires.

  

  

It is also here some can afford to play on the finest golf courses in the world with black caddies paid just a few dollars an hour.

  

 

And it is here that these black slave workers can see white millionaires getting out of their Rolls Royces to read the latest quotations from Wall Street.

  

 

I even found a democratic millionaire (on the right) who let me borrow his Mercedes to follow the prison slaves in.

  

 

After all the hog maw, chitterlings, turnip greens, pigs' ears, feet, and tails I had eaten for months in black homes it was nice here to get lobster for a few days. 

  

 

But if prisoners work for you, you naturally also must have the police at your side. When you have killed love and trust in society, all the TV cameras and electronic surveillance equipment in the world are not enough.

  

 

 It would be very unfortunate to have your little children kidnapped!

 

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