We've
all heard of Russian Roulette, but none of us has played it, I hope. But,
unfortunately, whether we like it or not, all of U.S. have been playing this
other kind of roulette.
It is a game that has big winners and big losers. It is a
game of economics or asset building. American white males started the game and
eventually American blacks and even the Native Americans got to play. And
later, almost as an afterthought, women got to play too.
It is a game not unlike the one played in casinos across
the country.
You know the one, where a wheel is spun, a ball is
released that bounces around and lands in one slot of the wheel. If the bettor
is lucky enough to have his chips in the right slot, he wins big and if he is
unlucky enough to have his chips in the wrong slot he loses. Of course, in the
casino game, the odds of winning are much higher, 2.63% if you bet the right
number and lots of people just bet Red or Black where there is a 47.37% chance
of winning.
But in American Roulette, that's not really an
option.
So, here’s how American Roulette has been played
throughout history. Land owners owned the casinos. Slave owners had some of the
most profitable ones around. Their wealth increased exponentially with slave
labor. Others land owners, who had no slaves themselves, came to play. They
traded with slave owners, bought their crops and made business deals with them.
They may or may not have disapproved of slavery in principle, but they liked
how the system worked to create wealth, so for the most part they played along.
And, of course, everyone refused to let slaves play, so
slaves never won, and slave owners almost always won BIG.
You know the saying, “The house always wins.” If the
house didn’t always win, then the house would go out of business. So, it just
makes economic sense. Slavery continued because slavery was profitable. Slavery
made slave owners wealthy.
In fact, with American Roulette, many Americans believed
that slave owners had an unfair advantage over non-slave owners. So, as our
forefathers were figuring out representation and taxation in the federal
government, the politicians came up with a compromise. A slave would be legally
counted as 3/5 of a person. Politically, it wasn’t a perfect compromise, but at
least the slave owners had to pay a little more taxes even if it meant they had
a little more pull in the government.
Morally, that’s a whole different story. This country
decided (now remember blacks and women were excluded from this decision making
process, so we should say, white men decided…) that slaves were not people in
the sense that other people were people. They were less human than other people
… white men, to be exact. Remember slave owners agreed to this but so did
non-slave owners.
Then one day, the powers that be, led by the President of
the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, decided that we shouldn’t be
allowed to use people as tokens to play American Roulette any more. Through the
Declaration of Independence and the civil war, we were able to finally declare
legally that slaves were human beings and must be treated as such.
Great! But now what… The white males in charge didn’t
know what to do with the millions of freed slaves. Fortunately, they also had
confiscated hundreds of thousands of acres of land from the Confederate states.
So, Lincoln sent his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton,
to Savannah to meet up with the very successful Major-General, William T.
Sherman, to figure it out. “Stanton and Sherman met with 20 men
on the evening of Jan. 12. All were ministers or lay leaders from the city’s
black churches, and 15 were former slaves. Stanton posed a dozen questions to
the group. Asked to draw a distinction between slavery and freedom, 67-year-old
Garrison Frazier, a former slave who had been selected to act as spokesman,
responded
What they desired sounds eerily similar to the desire of Martin Luther King Jr. and even the desires of many impoverished African-Americans today: the desire to earn a living wage from their labor, to provide for their own needs and have adequate representation in the government and military to protect their interests for the long term success of African-Americans and the country as a whole.
With great discernment, when asked whether they would prefer to live interspersed amongst whites or to live segregated into all-black communities, Frazier spoke for 19 of the 20 men when he responded:
“I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.” (from the University of Maryland) Little did he know that the prejudice he feared existed throughout the North as well. Sherman himself showed severe prejudice against the freed slaves and refused to have blacks join his army.
But, seeing an opportunity to resolve Lincoln’s concerns and find a way to get rid of the flocks of freed slaves that were following his army, he issued Special Field Order No. 15 four days after the meeting. This order gave up to 40 acres of confiscated Confederate land per freed slave for them to work until such time as the national government gave them the opportunity to purchase the land.
New communities sprung up quickly and as per the Special Order were completely segregated and self-governed. 40,000 ex-slaves were transplanted on 400,000 acres of redistributed land within six months of the meeting.
“And what happened to this astonishingly visionary
program, which would have fundamentally altered the course of American race
relations? Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor and a sympathizer with the
South, overturned the Order in the fall of 1865, and, as Barton Myers sadly
concludes, ‘returned the land along the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida
coasts to the planters who had originally owned it’ — to the very people who
had declared war on the United States of America. (from
PBS.org)
“Even staunch Confederate sympathizers bridled at such
injustice. When a federal soldier told Mrs. George J. Kolluck that ex-slaves
would be forced to return to work for wages for their former owners, she
reported to her son that she answered, ‘very quietly, “this is what your
Government calls ‘Freedom’? The injustice to us in robbing us of our property
does not begin to compare to the cruelty to the negro himself.” (from
the NY Times)
“Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of
race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been
implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the
ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient
economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After
all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average
people being able to own land, and all that such
ownership entailed. As we know all too well, this promise was not to be
realized for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s former slaves, who
numbered about 3.9 million. (from
PBS.org)
And, so American Roulette was opened briefly to the freed
slaves. The house was forced to give each freed slave some of its own stash of
chips and welcome them into the game. They had a dream and a promise.
But, within months, during the fall of 1865, the land was
returned to its former owners.
Many of the ex-slaves were so limited in their options,
that they continued to work the land for former slave owners. Many became
sharecroppers limiting their ability to gain wealth and to add insult to
injury, their hard work continued to enrich former slave owners. Infuriating.
In the century ahead, laws were written, later called Jim
Crow laws, that were designed to provide “separate but equal” resources for
blacks and whites, but actually only worked to keep blacks and whites separate.
These were a constant reminder to former slaves and their descendants that
legally they were second-hand citizens.
In effect, the ex-slaves were given a seat at the
Roulette table, but only allowed to place one bet and hope for the best. Maybe
one in a 1,000 or one in a 100,000 made the transition from slave to property
owner with the ability to achieve the goals that were set out in that ground-breaking
meeting with Stanton and Sherman.
One hundred years later, after the civil rights movement
of the 1960’s, the laws changed. The descendants of slaves were given
protection under the law. Many hurdles still existed though.
And, now American Roulette was opened to all … with one
caveat. You could only play with the chips you had. Some descendants of slaves
had begun to amass wealth and reach their economic goals despite the huge
obstacles they had faced. But, the large majority lived and worked in inner
cities and were plagued by poverty.
The other reality is that white males still owned 99.9%
of the casinos. And the house always wins.
With only a limited capacity for making money, amassing
true wealth was about as likely for the descendant of a slave as the ball
landing in the 00 of the Roulette wheel. Some African Americans have hit it
big, been successful in business, achieved academic degrees, and amassed wealth
for themselves and their descendants.
But, for most, the American Dream remains a fairy tale.
Before
you judge the rest of African-Americans, those trapped in poverty, think
about the odds. Think about this game that we play, American Roulette. Think
about the history that has created a culture and a mindset among impoverished
African-Americans that cannot easily be untangled. At every turn, the house has
had the advantage. And, at every turn, whites have owned the house.
So, don’t
judge African-Americans by the success of whites and ask, “Why can’t they
just be like me? I worked hard and found a way to make the system work for me?”
Don’t
judge African-Americans by the success of other African-Americans and
declare, “We have a black president, black Supreme Court Justice, black leaders
in every field. There is no discrimination anymore! They need to quit
complaining and get to work!”
In fact, don’t
judge African-Americans at all. The Bible is clear, “Do not
judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way
you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be
measured to you. (Mathew 7:1-2)
So, “If we can’t judge them, what should
we do?” Glad you asked.
First, stop referring to them as Them. They
are Us. And, so some of Us are in this predicament.
Then, We need to walk together through this. We need to
begin where it all began and have White leaders and Black leaders, probably
from the church or at least those who are community minded and not
politically-minded sit down together and make a plan.
Many African-Americans (as well as many whites from all
ancestries) have systematically and intentionally been hindered from acquiring
wealth. Together there must be a systematic and intentional plan made to undo
what can be undone and move forward with what cannot.
It doesn’t help to fight amongst ourselves about it. It’s
time to make changes and transform the culture and mindset of our country. It’s
time to stop playing American Roulette with its few Big Winners and multitude
of Poverty-stricken Losers.
The odds are always in the favor of the house. Who owns
the house today?
As, the saying goes, “Follow the money.”
It’s time for all of US to stop playing into the system and
start building real wealth. We can’t get side-tracked by racial differences and
we need to start to address the injustices of wealth distribution. We need to
dream a way for the American Dream to be accessible for all. We need to talk.
