Shortly after they stopped being ‘property’, folks adapted to having blacks as underpaid overworked employees, often still in the servant or farm-hand capacity. After all, they didn’t have an education. Most had no special skills.
White people had an economic interest in keeping black people un-educated, unable to vote, “keeping them down” so they would never transcend a job ‘Flipping the proverbial burger’ even back then.
And through the years, from generation to generation “Keeping Them Down” and hampering the “Uppity-Ones” was kind of a thing.
In politics, “The Black Vote” became important because this group was malleable. They were being kept poor and supplicant. Social programs kept them obeisant to the Democratic party. These hoary, elderly white heads never really let go of slavery. (Yeah, just a hundred years earlier, Slavery was practically ONLY endorsed by Democrat politicians.
The media has always fanned the flames. Newsworthy stories were those which inflamed; those stories which were sensational, or scandalous. A news story about a black man winning the Nobel Prize, or a close-knit black family graduating a Doctor from Harvard was NO WHERE NEAR the value of a story that showed a group of black men breaking windows or stealing. Without compunction, for at least a decade in the seventies, television sit-coms and entertainers perpetuated the image of black men as television-stealing thieves as openly as we now portray lawyers as lying scheisters.
[The primary difference is that lawyers actually ARE lying scheisters.]
I can speak from experience that I literally *never* saw black people portrayed as ANYTHING BUT THREATENING during my childhood.
A continuing lack of education and a ‘possibly-intentional’ socio-economic disadvantage has perpetuated low-income employment and the resultant desperation and last-resort behaviors. Social programs that incentivize and saddle black families with more children instead of less, and a neglect of education that would garner savvy money-handling skills, credit-wisdom, and “getting ahead” are conspicuously absent in prevalently black schools. Inner-city parents may also neglect these issues simply because even when one or both parents are present, they may still be absent working three menial jobs. They may not have had the luxury (and thus witnessed the value of) a good education and having been deprived the benefit, may not push it with their kids.
Focusing “the war on drugs” on the white geo-distributed population has also negatively impacted African American populations. In subsidized housing there is a benign-neglect of drug-related crime. You don’t see anything but arrests in Techwood Homes. There are minimal efforts to actually discover and expel the population dealing drugs. Just arresting the outliers in the parking lot who are stupid enough to get caught.
Black on black homicide seems to receive practically no attention.
The fact of the matter is that people-in-general including black people, are pretty much the same. Just trying to make it. Love their kids, fret about the usual food and shelter, bills, and their job. They’re not fundamentally lazy but there are lazy people all over the place of every flavor.
[image: DSCF0234.JPG] Still, *EXACTLY* like “Southern” people are portrayed as slack-jawed simple-minded Hillbillies, like the Dukes of Hazzard – so are black people depicted in their worst light in today’s media.
