Why Whites Should Care
Both black and white Americans are still paying a huge cost in terms of the lack of equality between the two groups. It's easier to understand the ways blacks are suffering economically and politically. But there is a way in which whites perpetually pay for our country's failure to confront white supremacy and poverty. Working class and even lower middle class whites, as well as blacks fortunate enough to be earning a living wage, bear the brunt for paying the enormous costs of perpetual poverty for both blacks and whites. This is in the form of paying for three million prisioners in jail, their guards, armies of police, district attorneys, prosecutors, judges, the facilities which house them, and the revenues paid for public assistance. Together they add up to more than what is spent on education and about equal to what is spent on the military each year. And every politican in both parties is well aware of the direct connection between joblessness, poverty and street crime.

Failure to confront our country's history of white supremacy and the scapegoating of blacks and poor whites for the many problems in their communities has had numerous deadly and destructive consequences. The Klan and the Nazis are only two of the more obvious manifestations. Dig a little deeper and we see white supremacist tendencies in every institution of government, in the prison and court system, and throughout the corporate world and financial centers. Both top and bottom. From the president of the United States to the corner grocer who follows every black customer around his store.

Even the use of the terms, black and white race, help reinforce this division in society. There is really only one "pure" race, the human race. There are no longer different species of homo sapiens on the planet. There are only humans who have differing external appearances. We do have different nationalities, religions and origins. But we are all human beings. Color at one time in our history became a simple way to divide those of us who had to perform physical labor for a living from those of us that did not have to do manual labor. Those who owned the land from those who worked the land. It has evolved into the system of slavery based on color, capitalism and white supremacy we have today.

So why should whites care since they are better off than blacks on average and seem to benefit from white supremacy? Just take a look at events like that which occurred in Charlotteville. Continued support or indifference towards white supremacist groups and politicians will lead to pitched battles on a much larger scale. It also makes the fate of poor blacks a permanent fixture in America, leaving no hope of escape for those who grow up in our ghettos. It should be of little comfort if you are a poor unemployed white in a depressed area if the most neglected and destabilized areas are reserved for blacks.

The Cruel Lessons from Elaine, Arkansas: Can it Happen Again?
One cannot talk about Charlottesville without mentioning what happened across the country and in Elaine, Arkansas, (click here or on the photo to watch the video) in 1919, and event like many similar ones during this period that has been scrubbed from our school's history books. By way of background, after slaves were "freed" after the Civil War, they were free with only the clothes on their backs. They owned no land or property, and if they were still someplace in the middle of the South, most were eventually forced to work for their former owners as "sharecroppers" on the old masters land. Whatever they produced was then sold by their former owners or some other white middleman, and the sharecropper was barely paid enough to survive on. Blacks were typically completely improverished from the process. This was still the case in 1919 in Elaine, AR., when a dispute broke out between some black sharecroppers who tried to organize a union to negotiate fair compensation for their labor with the white middlemen traders who controlled how much they would be paid for their yearly efforts. During a union meeting at a church, the church was attacked and fired upon. In the struggle that followed, one attacking white was killed. It was soon falsely spread throughout the country side that blacks had been planning to stage an insurrection and murder whites in their beds. Whites and white police mobilized armed groups and began arbitrarily murdering any black they found on sight. Casualty accounts vary, but it is widely believed that hundreds of blacks were killed. Similar episodes happened after World War 1 in over 350 cities in America.

Our president has lit the match after Charlottesville that could lead to more and more severe nationwide racial conflict. Blacks are still largely confined to ghetto like areas in most American cities. And are still the poorest and most neglected of American citizens. Trump lit another match when he singled out black football players for kneeling, rather than standing, for the National Anthem, claiming they were disrespecting our men in the military. Ignoring the simple fact that blacks also make up a disproportionally larger part of our military, and have so since the Vietnam War. And ignoring the simple explanation that players such as Collin Kaepernick offered as to why he took a knee silently during the National Anthem, which was to protest the historically poor treatment of black Americans and the recent spat of police shootings of young black men. It reminds me of what the government claimed about those that opposed the Vietnam War. That they were disrespecting our soldiers. They said this even as they drafted working class and poor young men to the tune of millions and sent them to fight and die in an immoral war.