One must dig to find it, but the grim historical record of racial persecution and subjugation is readily available if you are interested. As I point out in Blue Bias, for more than a century after the Civil War, the treatment of Black Americans was so horrific that it is easy to understand why these atrocities were left out of school textbooks.[i] But atrocity is not a strong enough word to describe the thousands of documented examples of Black Americans having been lynched, shot, stabbed, beaten to death, burned alive, disemboweled, evicted, run out of town, or had their property stolen. In too many instances to list, for decades after 1865, hundreds of thousands of freed slaves were arrested on totally bogus charges for the express purpose of continuing to work as prisoners for whites without being paid, which is fully explained in Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas A. Blackmon. [ii]
Had these incidents happened all at once, they would echo the inhumanity and depravity of the Holocaust. Like the Holocaust, the incidents of harm to individuals would number in the millions. I grew up in Oklahoma and Texas, regions of the country in which a hard-right ideological culture assumed that white racial superiority was common sense. It took me years of intensive self-education to unravel my indoctrination.
In preparation for writing Blue Bias, I spent several years studying the treatment of minorities, especially African Americans in post-Civil War America. I can say without hesitation that as you delve into these documented historical events that have been exposed but largely ignored or omitted from conventional textbooks, that anyone with an ounce of empathy and a modicum of objectivity, will declare that reparations are owed Black Americans. Full stop.
After reading hundreds of accounts of unimaginable cruelty that are so emotionally taxing that one must take frequent breaks before plodding ahead, I can say without any reservation whatsoever that the moral legitimacy for reparations is a no-brainer. But having said this, as I mention in Evolving in a Dangerous World, I don’t know how such an effort could be implemented without incurring even more racial resentment than we are currently witnessing. [iii] The answer in my view, will require addressing the poverty of poor whites as well, while making the reasons for such redress for African Americans clear enough that these overlooked atrocities and calculated injustices are made prominent enough so that they cannot be denied or forgotten.
I don’t plan to write any more books on racial bias, but I haven’t stopped researching the topic. Once you have achieved a seasoned understanding of how the conventional history of this country has been so distorted as to hide a reality so disturbing that it flies in the face of moral civility, it is hard not to continue to try to find ways to help explain and right these universal wrongs. There are hundreds of books which have documented the depravities wrought on Blacks, Latinos, and Indigenous Americans, but these works are routinely excluded from the books selected for the classroom.
There is so much to uncover that has been purposely hidden, which I know from numerous occasions where I thought I had finally got a good handle on the subject, only to be blown away by new revelations. A prime example is my recent discovery of Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America, by Elliot G. Jaspin. Racial cleansing? [iv] Yes, indeed. Jaspin records the occurrence in many Southern states in post-Reconstruction America.
Jaspin documents examples of whites forcing Blacks to leave their homes and businesses in fear of their lives in Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Illinois. No doubt these types of crimes occurred simultaneously in many other states as well. Even though the Fourteenth Amendment gave African Americans their rights due as citizens, the decades stacked up like cordwood in which the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was only on paper. All over the South, the rights of black Americans were still effectively nonexistent. Killings took place, ranging from what Jaspin referred to as orgies of violence to the gamut of one’s imagination about homicides and ethnic cleansing.
Imagine the many generations of American citizens living under edicts of hatred, generations whose aspirations and dreams for a decent life were severely constrained by the fears of accidently crossing the mortal lines of how white bigots thought that Black citizens should behave, based on arbitrary and conceited demands for deference by egregiously ignorant people whose beliefs in their own natural superiority were morally groundless.
It is little wonder that people like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott don’t want this history readily available to their citizens. Their ideas about freedom don’t include voting rights, or reading books with disturbing content, or taking subjects in school that cause moral consternation and reflection, because this kind of knowledge makes students question the integrity and moral viability of the status quo. This kind of oppression is endemic to the closed society that Karl Popper warned us about. Governors who oppose freedom of thought are the designated enemies of an open society. [v]
The history of whitewashing and excluding racial atrocities from the public conscious is so ubiquitous that it’s almost like an automatic default position every time these subjects come up in print or conversation. Jaspin incurred the same strain of repressive cover-up as a reporter while working on a newspaper series about this subject. His employer didn’t want him to use the word “cleansing” in the title. [vi]
If every American were competent in fully understanding the actual history of this country, there would be no need for courses in Black history and there would be no need to convince a doubting public about the existence of systemic racism. Once you become well versed enough to maintain a mental big picture of the historical reality that has been purposely expunged from school texts, it is exceptionally hard not to be haunted by the incidents that were suffered by millions of Black men, women, and children of which nothing was written, and all the memories have been forever lost in the perpetuity in man’s inhumanity to mankind.
The future of this country, especially now that we have such extreme political polarization, requires a fully woke examination of the past to truly appreciate how understanding the discontent of the present can help us ensure that we have learned enough from the past to secure a future without tribalistic racism.
Notes
[i] Charles D. Hayes, Blue Bias: An-Ex-Cop Examines the Learning and Resolve Necessary to End Hidden Prejudice in Policing (Wasilla, Alaska: Autodidactic Press, 2020), 46-52.
[ii] Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans After the Civil War to World War Two (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
[iii] Charles D. Hayes, Evolving in a Dangerous World Made Racism Inevitable: Concerned Citizens, Police Officers, and Teacher Can Help Change This (Wasilla, Alaska: Autodidactic Press, 2022).
[iv] Elliot G. Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
[v] Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).
[vi] Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters, 234-239.
(Charles D. Hayes is a self-taught philosopher, author, and one of America’s strongest advocates for lifelong learning. He spent his youth in Texas and served as a U.S. Marine and as a police officer before embarking on a career in the oil industry. Courtesy: LA Progressive. LA Progressive was founded by Dick and Sharon whose mission is to provide a platform for progressive thought, opinion and perspectives on current events.)
