Why American Black People Donât Trust the Government or Your âResearch Studiesâ
Imagine if the Antarticans invaded North Texas. They captured you, your wife, your kid, basically everyone you knew. And then they shipped you back down to Antarctica and you had to mine coal for them. In the meantime, they basically stripped you of your identity.
You were no longer John Doe, you were Krug Dizzle. They taught you the rudiments of their language, but you weren't allowed to learn to read and write it. At some point, your wife is raped by your new Antartican masters and then sold away from you. As is your child. In their society, you are considered subhuman.
Eventually, the Antarticans have some sort of civil war and the winning side abolishes slavery after a few centuries. Now you and everyone like you is set free, but the stigma of being enslaved remains. You have a few years of prosperity, but as things normalize, old prejudices remain.
Bit by bit, laws are passed that make it hard for you to exercise your technical legal 'equality.' You can't vote, you can't live where you want, you can't earn credit, roaming bands of Antarticans terrorize you with little threat of legal reprisal. In fact, many of these people hold places in local, state, and federal governments. They are entrenched in every area of society.
A doctrine then comes down that says that 'separate but equal' is the law of the land, but because of how the taxation system works, separate is inherently unequal. Your schools are underfunded, your property is undervalued precisely because you are on it, and taxes for schooling are determined by property tax. Meanwhile, certain experiments are carried out on those who are just like you (i.e. the Tuskegee Experiments).
Laws are designed specifically to criminalize largely harmless activities, but carry remarkably harsh penalties. These laws seem to be enforced principally in your communities, ensuring a significant portion have felonies or misdemeanors on their records.
Simultaneously laws and regulations are enacted that allow employers to check your criminal record to determine employment. Also, many areas of Antarctica have also put laws into effect that restrict rights, including the right to vote, based upon past criminal record.
Marriage in your community is effectively discouraged by the new welfare state that has cropped up. Women and children can get means-tested assistance, though usually the presence of a man in the home and his resultant income means that they are ineligible, thus many in your community never marry and 7/10 of your children born in the last 2 decades are done so out of wedlock.
Meanwhile, Antartican social commentators ask questions like âWhy is it so hard for these people to succeed?â Anytime your previous servitude is brought up, youâre playing the âslavery card.â Youâre told you just need to leave whatâs in the past, in the past and move forward. The fact that your people, as a collective, have less wealth, less education, less prospects in life, face discrimination, increased law enforcement scrutiny, and systemic bias in the judicial system has nothing to do with what was done to you before. It just happens to be where the chips fell.
Likewise, when you express anger and resentment towards the societyâs laws being targeted towards your communities, youâre characterized as unnecessarily bitter and for being full of excuses for bad behavior. If you would just comply, everything would be fine. Society has nothing against you. It loves you, even if that means tough love.
Periodically, when evidence of this establishmentâs transgressions against you comes up, various studies will come out and show that by some statistical analysis that youâre wrong. Nothing bad happens to you and your ilk more than anyone else. Even though that flies in the face of everything you and everyone like you has ever experienced, youâre supposed to accept this research study showing that the system isnât stacked against you, that youâre just imagining things.
Even though it comes from the same people who kidnapped you, raped your wife, sold your children away, stripped everything from your culture away from you, and transported you to a land that wasnât yours. Even after ending the forced servitude, these people still discriminated against you, allowed elements of its society to injure, humiliate, maim, and kill you with virtually zero consequences. You were promised equal rights under the rule of law, but never received those rights in the same way the others do.
But you are expected to believe the âfactsâ presented to you by the same people who did this to you. And they never once even apologized for all theyâve done to you. They begrudgingly admit that it happened, but downplay its significance and quickly move to say that itâs largely irrelevant for your current state of affairs. It couldnât be that these facts were manufactured to fit an established agenda.
Youâre just wrong and overreacting.
Iâm not saying that the research studies are wrong, just explaining why black people tend to not believe white people throwing numbers at them explaining why something that weâve experienced our whole lives âisnât an issue.â
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