ERACISM
MINUTE
11.17.19
Lauralee
Carbone
BUF
Black Lives Matter Ministry Action Team
Paul’s
message today is about baggage, so I decided to list some of our
American baggage:
-
250 years of slavery: Four million humans bought, sold and traded as commodities, families torn apart, rape, brutality, torture and murder, an economy built on the labor of enslaved people.
-
90 years of Jim Crow: segregation, beatings, lynchings, churches burned, Sundown laws, poll taxes, due process denied.
-
60 years of separate but equal: legalized discrimination, inferior schools and medical care, Black Codes and white supremacy.
-
35 years of racist housing policy; cut out of the mortgage market, commercial loans unavailable, farms stolen, predatory lending, redlining and block busting, overcrowded ghettos.
Because
of this history, the effects are still being felt and still ongoing
to this day. Economically, black people have been locked out of the
greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in US
history. White households are worth 20 times as much as black
households. Black people have been deprived of their rights under the
13th
and 14th
amendments. There is mass incarceration, as well as police brutality
and killings. In recent years there has been a rollback of
progressive legislation of the 1960s.
Like
Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “It is as though we have run up a credit
card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled
that the balance does not disappear. The effect of that balance,
interest accruing daily, are all around us.”
“Until
we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be
whole.”
