Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Time for reflection on d ire state of African-Americans
EACH year, on January 17, Martin Luther King jr (MLK) Day is celebrated as a national holiday in the US to commemorate the great civil rights leader who was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
This year, the commemoration came at a time when congress was passing the filibuster bill. For months the MLK III junior and activist organisations have engaged in an intensive campaign for voter reform. But the real story was on the streets of Washington DC where hundreds of activists marched to protect the voting rights of black and brown Americans for the Deliver for Voting Rights Campaign.
“We’re working to restore the very voting rights protections my father and countless other civil rights leaders bled to secure,” said King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, who marched with his wife Arndrea Waters King and 13-year-old daughter Yolanda Renée King.
“We will not accept empty promises in pursuit of my father’s dream for a more equal and just America.”
The campaign calls on US President Joe Biden and Congress to end the filibuster (a delaying tactic rooted in the Jim Crow era); as well as pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Sadly on January 19, Senate Republicans, plus two democrats, effectively blocked Congress from moving forward on voting rights legislation, and Democrats failed to get 50 votes to change the Senate rules to move forward with the legislation with a simple majority.
The dramatic night started with the Senate first voting on whether to end debate on the voting rights legislation, a move that failed to get the 60 votes needed to move the bill forward, thus ensuring an era of stifling filibustering for years to come. Sixty years of civil rights has seen the democratic rights of African-Americans and other marginal groups eroded in the rigged political system in the US today. As civil rights stagnates, structural socio-economic conditions worsen.
Compare this with the reality that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the top 10 US billionaires – Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk have doubled their wealth.
To give credence to the view that the Democrat and Republican parties are two sides of the same coin, the Obama foundation graciously received $100 million (about R1.5 billion) from Bezos of Amazon.
Barack Obama did not mind that the vast wealth accumulated by Bezos and Amazon is on the backs of cheap labour in Amazon warehouses, with union busting, as well as its famed tax evasion model that has rigged the Washington political system for years,
ensuring that Amazon pays the lowest taxes in DC.
The killings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, and the sustained campaigns of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, has occupied the daily activism of ordinary African American communities for years, with very little change in policing methods and the “shoot to kill” attitude of many white police officers.
The conviction and sentencing of their killers is a step in the right direction and gives some hope, but as always too little, too late.
The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified these inequities. Writing in the Health and Human Rights Journal, Maritza Vasquez Reyes said: “Approximately 97.9 out of every 100 000 African-Americans have died from Covid-19, a mortality rate that is a third higher than that for Latinos (64.7 per 100 000), and more than double that for whites (46.6 per 100 000) and Asians (40.4 per 100 000).
“The over representation of AfricanAmericans among confirmed Covid-19 cases, and the number of deaths underscores the fact that the pandemic, far from being an equaliser, is amplifying existing social inequalities tied to race, class, and access to the health-care system.”
In terms of Infrastructure development, Biden’s trillion dollar signature infrastructure bill was welcomed as crucial for regional development. But a recent study by D Romas and JM Perry of the Brookings Institution raises some pertinent questions on “built-in inequities” of the Biden infrastructure bill.
On his first day in office, Biden signed an executive order on racial equity and under-served communities, followed by the “Justice 40” executive order, which seeks to deliver 40% of overall benefits from relevant investments to disadvantaged communities. They argue that the nature and financing of the Biden infrastructure plan, however, has inherent racial inequalities built into it.
In the domain of small business finance, the case is even more dire. A study by the Brookings institution shows that the median US white household has $188 200 in wealth, nearly eight times more than the median black household’s $24 100.
While 54% of “healthy or stable” white-owned small businesses had borrowed from a bank in the past five years, only 33% of similar black-owned businesses had done so, the Federal Reserve found in its last small business survey before the pandemic. Meanwhile, nearly 14% of black households had no bank accounts at all, compared with 2.5% of white households, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
After dozen of years since the global financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movements, there is little financial reform, and black communities are still red lined in terms of social housing and investment and small business opportunities.
The reality for the majority of African-Americans is that they not living the American dream, but languishing, as Malcolm X described, in the American nightmare.