criminalblackman or oppressorwhiteman

The new "N" word is criminalblackman; crime and blackness are intertwined in the minds of many white people.  Even sociologists spend more time studying black dysfunctions than systems of white oppression.  On the surface, the high incarceration rate for black males seems to confirm this impression of a criminalblackman.

Crime is bad, evil, but the evil connected to white oppression is ten times worse.  So I am coining a new word criminallyoppressivewhiteman.

Last night I watched a Fox News pundit wax eloquent about black violence/crime in our inner cities.  But he seemed to be afflicted with historical amnesia.  There was no mention of the long history of white oppression with few white criminal indictments for evils such as Indian genocide, African enslavement and the theft of half of Mexico's land.

The more an American white talks about the criminalblackman, the more he covers up the fact that he is an oppressivewhiteman.  Almost every discussion whites have about race quickly turns into a discussion of black inferiority, flaws or dysfunction; blacks are THE problem.  White responsibility is largely ignored.


Ta-Nehisi Coates ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration") documents the long history of supposed black criminality; the following are some quotations from Coates.

"After decades of mass incarceration that have left the United States with the largest incarcerated population in the world, politicians of all stripes are suddenly declaring the policy a mistake.  But their pronouncements have failed to reckon with the phenomenon's deep historical roots, or with the damage it has done to black families."    Vanishing jobs and persistent racism a part of the story.

"black people are the preeminent outlaws of the American imagination."

"a portrait emerged of blacks as highly prone to criminality. . . . black villainy justified white oppression---which was seen not as oppression but as "the cornerstone of our republican edifice."

"Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for [black] slaves---and only one for whites."

"Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by manufacturing criminals.  Blacks [freed slaves] who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them."

"From the 1890s through the first four decades of the twentieth century, black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world."

"If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions" in Ferguson "it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder."

"The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about social control."

"To return to its 1972 incarceration rate, America would have to cut its prison and jail population by some 80 percent."

Criminalblackman is a classic case of 'blaming the victim' in order to retain white superiority and white privilege, and in order to avoid a focus on the evil of white oppression.

For the rest of the tragic story, read The New Jim Crow.

Republicans, Democrats, Americans in general, and far too much of the white American church have served the American trinity of individualism, materialism and ethnocentrism/racism so that even in 2015 a deep belief and practice of black inferiority and black criminality continues to damage the black community.

What can/should the church do?

1.  Stop rationalizing white oppression, instead repent.
2.  Stop redesigning systems of oppression; instead release the oppressed.
3.  Engage in economic restitution and then repair oppression damaged communities.
4.  Following the Sabbath/Jubilee Year principles of justice, design new systems of societal fairness.