Racism, Power and, Preserving Inequity

Berman James Watts, May 1998


How, in a nation where slavery is outlawed, might some yet remain enslaved? The neo-conservative Republican dogma that welfare recipient blacks support liberal candidates for handouts does not hold water. Welfare recipients are hardly the best represented among minority voters. Nor is the black population very well rewarded relative even to other minorities- let alone whites.

Consider that purchases by credit depends on contracts - not the value of the purchase. Indeed, so swiftly does such alleged asset depreciate that even where sold it but offsets a fraction of the involved debt. How can a thing be worth so much as to require years of repayment yet have no recoverable value after a fraction of such period? Sales of swiftly depreciating or worthless junk is but an excuse for a contract that thus enforces involuntary servitude.

Some might claim such servitude voluntary but then why such opposition to a living minimum wage? Why the toleration of strong Unions and high blue collar wages-before the civil rights laws- when the primary beneficiaries were white? Now labor willing to put up with more slavelike living conditions is vacuumed in from historically more economically suppressed populations even as wages meeting a minimal American living standard have been systematically reduced.

Furniture that does not even have "honest" veneer over it's pressboard but, wood grain printed on paper is thus sold.Care to guess what it could be sold for once you take ownership? Care to guess what the dealer will take for that car just driven out of the showroom that he charged you thousands more for? What is that 400 mhz Pentium Pro with a DVD CDROM and 20 gigabyte hdd going to be worth in six months?

Combined with escalating living expenses, taxes, health and medical expenses such combination make most effective chains and whips. But continuing discrimination and an anti-affirmative action movement assures that such effect falls primarily upon blacks. White average pay remains above Black at all educational levels.Black unemployment is a multiple of the white. Blacks are over represented in low paying areas. Just as a past era of black codes, vagrancy laws and convict lease system preserved race based slavery after the Civil War and absent the loss of it's legal basis - so does inequitable law enforcement, racial discrimination and the constant of white popular dissembly and deceit continue and even expand the modern slave era.