Michelle Alexander states and summarizes in her excellent book The New Jim Crow that in America we never really end systems of oppression, though white Americans think we do and historians say we do; we really only redesign our efficient and deadly systems of oppression. We whites benefit from these systems of oppression; much of our enormous wealth is generated from the oppression of generations of Native Americans and black Americans.
The abolitionists thought they were leading a major revolution, but it turned out that abolished legal slavery was soon replaced by legal segregation, economic sharecropping oppression, prison gang slavery and lynching---not much of an improvement over slavery.
Why this failure? White Americans never fully repent, change, restitute, repair the damage oppression has done. Some reforms, but never revolutionary change.
The brilliant and passionate, Michelle Alexander, declares that nothing less than revolutionary change will end the unjust, racially based, mass incarceration of young, black and Latino males.
Over my 90 years I have not found many white Christians who have taken Jesus' call to repent seriously, deeply as the only way to enter the kingdom of God. Few are willing to renounce and reject white superiority and white economic privilege. So white generated systems of oppression continue on generation after generation---slavery, segregation, mass incarceration, massive economic inequality. I see few signs of revolutionary white repentance today; is a Babylonian exile just around the corner?
Here is some documentation from the pen of Michelle Alexander:
"Much of black progress is a myth."
"Although some African Americans are doing very well, . . . as a group, African Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King was assassinated [1968] . . . .Nearly one-fourth of African Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same as in 1968. The child poverty rate is actually higher today than it was then."
"When the incarcerated population is counted in unemployment and poverty rates, the best of times for the rest of America [the Clinton years] have been among the worst of times particularly for black men."
Without a complete shift in white morals, values, "the racial caste system will emerge in a new form" even if mass incarceration is ended. Martin Luther King's Dream never emerged; instead, it has been an 'ongoing racial nightmare.'
"The criminalization and demonization of black men is one habit white America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the racial dynamics that have given rise to successive caste systems."
Nothing less than the just biblical kingdom of God will suffice.
Black men are demonized by demonic white oppressors. White oppressors blame black inferiority, not white oppression. Generations of white oppression have caused enormous damage among blacks---poverty, illness, illiteracy, PTSD, rape, etc. Oppression damages every area of life. According to the OT, oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and kills persons created in the image of God. Oppression causes black dysfunction---individual, family, community and cultural dysfunction.
The white oppressor propaganda machine incessantly puts the blame on blacks. They have succeeded in convincing most whites and some blacks that blacks are inferior and dysfunctional.
Unless they repent and engage in massive restitution, white oppressors should be sent into Babylonian exile, put on a desert island, sent into Outer Mongolia or sent on a one way trip to Mars.
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