On the 96th Birthday of Malcolm X guest Dr William Darity economist and clearly one of our country’s leading authorities on black studies and systemic racism returns to Bringing Light Into Darkness to discuss Malcolm X and Nat Turner.
Today the average black family has $840k less wealth than the average white family. Systemic racism is a form of oppression within a system that Malcolm X was increasingly beginning to understand is a system not capable of resolving the race nor the gross wealth disparity in the US and throughout the world. Dr Darity shares important similarities and differences between Malcolm and Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion that led to 50+ deaths. Dr Darity suggests they both were willing to embrace violence “for the purposes of challenging a violent social system’. However, Malcolm’s image of him being violent is not supported by the facts, which include that he never took a life of another, and spoke of violence as an option only as self-defense against the greater violence victimizing blacks. Meanwhile ‘Nat Turner built an uprising that was “aimed at a forceful taking of racial justice” that Dr Darity describes can be seen as ‘engaging in an act of resistance’ against a brutal slave system. We pivot for most of the show about the impact transatlantic slave trade and how the wealth of the colonizing nations of the world are inextricably connected. Featuring St Dominique/Haiti, we document how, since 1492 Columbus discovering Hispaniola, which marked the beginning of enslaving indigenous peoples in the New World, the continued wealth of “advanced” nations was supplemented (from the Spanish and Portuguese to the UK, France & Dutch and ultimately the US domination of the western hemisphere).
Our discussion with Dr Darity explains how inequality has been crafted occurring within nations such as the US but also how it has disproportionately harmed predominantly black nations. All these wealth inequalities find their origin in and through the transatlantic slave trade and its ramifications. Dr Darity shares how the economic wealth and disparity in the US from 1776 through and into its industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century was generated largely on the labor of slaves that came to America against their will. The broken promises of land guarantees to blacks following the Civil War and the WWII GI benefits that went almost exclusively to whites with the almost total exclusion of blacks who served our country. All of this on top of slavery that began before the founding of our country have contributed to their wealth inequality today.
We appropriate and explain the revolutionary terms that Malcolm (‘international powerstructure’) and Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (‘neocolonialism”) provided those who are interesting in understanding and deconstructing ‘oppression’.
Siempre fieles, Pgatos pgatos00@gmail.com 5/24/2021
If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing. Malcolm X