"Less Revenge, More Revival"

Making Black Americans better makes all Americans better, because we are all Americans.
Our current Reparations conversation is built around the idea of the perpetual oppressor (White people) and the perpetually oppressed (Black people) and lives under the assumption that everything wrong in the Black community is somehow some racist some White person’s fault. That because a select group of rich White people owned slaves over 150 years ago that somehow every White American afterward benefitted from that — even White Americans unrelated to our nation’s founding fathers, like Irish and Italian Americans whose poor ancestors arrived from Europe via Ellis Island, decades after the end of slavery. And for White people to be able to atone for their original sin of “whiteness,” White people will have to now willingly participate in inverted racism by allowing themselves to be subjugated by Black people.

Everyday working-class and poor White people, who tend to be moderate or conservative-leaning, scoff at the idea of subjugating themselves to anyone in a supposedly free nation such as ours and often invoke Ellis Island and the many of their ancestors who fought with the Union soldiers of the Civil War to end slavery — even at times against some small numbers of Black people who fought for the Confederacy. Not to mention Black people who also owned Black slaves in the US, but also the Africans who sold other Africans into slavery that ultimately ended up as slaves in the US. White Americans who assert this historical logic in our current socio-political climate are relegated to being smeared as Hitler-lite, and/or a members of the KKK (an organization started by Democrats, by the way).

Conversely, Rich White liberals in the farthest left reaches of the Democrat party tend to fetishize this reverse subjugation in the form of outwardly self-deprecating, yet meaningless displays — like Nancy Pelosi’s cringy kneeling while draped in Kente cloth to protest of the country she was third in line of succession to lead — all in the name of George Floyd or Robin DeAngelo’s bestselling book “White Fragility,” (which even Black commentators in liberal rags like The Atlantic have said is a bit much) — all in an effort to pander to Black people in the most condescending and dehumanizing ways and to virtue signal to other liberal White people for their own political and financial gain.

So where does this leave Reparations? If Reparations means: ‘Because I’m White, I oppress Black people with my every waking breath and am thus intrinsically evil, flog me now, Mistress Shaniqua!’ then Reparations goes nowhere. And we know that’s by design, but let’s redesign it into something that could actually work. As I stated; an honest path to Reparations would be built out from the idea that Black America is America and that making Black America better makes America better.

Liberals thrive on the separation of Black people from the idea of loving America, or feeling like a true partaker of America, it’s how they win elections. White Democrats need us to think that they are the only White people who are good, who can save us. So in turn they can use our Black support of them as the strongest weapon they have to lob at their mortal enemies — White Republicans, calling them “racist.” It’s why Donald Trump, a media-perceived Republican racist lost the 2020 Presidential Election to an actual, on-paper, on-legislation, Democrat racist, Joe Biden. No one in the media cared about Donald Trump’s and his supporters valid questions about the vote count in 2020, a count even some Democrats have said seemed a bit shady:

How could Joe Biden win the popular vote and the presidency and his party simultaneously lose seats in the House of Representatives? That’s a mathematical impossibility…

“Shut up racist!” [in Tucker Carlson mocking-Liberal-rant-voice]
You see how that works.

Democrats tell us that even with all the numerous strides this country has made since the end of slavery, and even with all the contributions Black people have made to America, and even after two terms of our “first Black president” Barack Obama — who conveniently hides behind the boogeyman of “white supremacy” himself to avoid taking responsibility for his failure to keep his promises to Black voters whose hopes for change he rode to the Oval office — that no matter what any Black person does, America is “systemically racist,” and that we will never be equal to our fellow White Americans. Keeping us in a never-ending spiral of doom, despair and electoral redundancy in the ghetto.

Seeing things with this backdrop, it’s really no wonder Black people resent America, could you really blame us? If you are reading this and aren’t Black just walk with me for a minute. For many of us, it’s been drilled into our heads our entire lives to resent America because of a slavery and its after effects. Inculcating hatred in us for America more so because of what we’ve been told, what’s been shared with us and stories from the past that have been passed down to us than what we’ve ever actually personally experienced.

The George Floyd killing is a great example of that. What happened to George Floyd was wrong — bad, all that, all the things — no one doubts that. But what made a horrible thing that happened to one individual Black man literally explode into a summer of hundreds of violent riots across the country is the connection that was made between him and the rest of us.

If it could happen to George Floyd, it could happen to me. Because he’s Black and I’m Black. Derek Chauvin was a White cop, which means all White cops wake up every morning with intent to kill Black people! “They’re hunting us!”

Have you heard that refrain before? The “they’re hunting us” narrative was everywhere during the Summer of 2020. Turning what was a situation between two men, who reportedly knew each other and had previous bad blood between them. One being a cop; Chauvin who obviously had a higher responsibility than that of a civilian to act in accordance to law and did not. The other; Floyd, a civilian arrested for breaking the law. A civilian who obviously didn’t deserve to die at the hands of said cop — a criminal act which Chauvin was put in jail for.

So why wouldn’t the fact that Chauvin was sentenced to prison for his crime be the resolution to the situation? You do a crime, you do the time, right? It’s because according to mainstream media and the Democrat Black folks in charge; Chauvin didn’t kill Floyd, but because Chauvin was a cop; America killed Floyd, the system killed Floyd, white supremacy killed Floyd. Mind you, the part of America where Floyd was killed — Minneapolis, Minnesota, was totally run by Democrats, from the dog catcher to the governor — those details conveniently left out of Democrat demagoguery on the incident. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the police-involved shootings of unarmed or presumably unarmed Black people that made nationwide headlines over the past few years happened in cities where the mayor and the police commissioner — who is customarily chosen by the mayor — were Democrats.

So, because America killed George Floyd because he’s Black, America wants to kill you too, because you are Black. America has been killing Black people since slavery and ain’t a damn thing changed!

Black people can’t build nothin’, because if we do the White folks just gon’ come and tear it down, just like they did Black Wall Street. Ain’t a damn thing changed!

Now I’m neither George Floyd nor a slave, but America wants to kill me now? If that’s the case, then how have I made it this long? And I as a Black person can’t open a business in Brooklyn, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle in 2023 because of a racial incident that happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma over 100 years ago? Who is connecting these dots!?! The better question to ask is who benefits from the connection of those dots? Well, who was “elected” in 2020?

Democrats and other Black people in charge exploit the memory of our ancestors by reanimating the pain they experienced during the Middle Passage and beyond and nefariously connect these painful memories to current events for their own financial and electoral gain. As emotional Black people are a lot easier to lead and manipulate than rational, thinking, logical Black people. Instead of the Black American journey from slavery, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement to the advent of Obama, the “first Black president” and beyond, being retold and passed down as an inspirational story to our children, to illustrate to them the power of the triumph of the human spirit and the good that happens when good Americans of all races come together to do what’s right — even as we yet press forward with all of us working to fulfill the Constitutional promise of a America as a “more perfect union.”

We instead pass racial trauma down to our kids from generation to generation. Keeping today’s and tomorrow’s Black people in the same mindset and emotional frame as our four and five-times great grandparents of 150+ years ago. Many of us Black people actually believing — even though on paper and in our everyday lives as the fortunate citizens of the preeminent first-world country, people who like every other ethnicity citizen of this country are enjoying the perks of living in an industrialized democratic republic such as ours like of freedom of speech and cell phone service — that there has been no cataclysmic change for Black people in America over the past 150 years. That because of an individual Black person’s perceived or actual racial incident with a cop — even as more unarmed White people get killed by cops — that nothing has changed since the plantation, the plantation we were only merely told about. That even with all the Black so-called activists and so-called leaders we’ve elected to government office to represent us, including Obama, that there is just no other resolve but to believe that America is just a “systemically racist” country.

It’s from this central grievance of systemic racism that this fraudulent, ridiculous, cruel joke the Democrats are playing on us about this pipe dream of the US Government giving us all $5M for slavery comes from. It’s why many Black people actually believe this foolishness is possible. A true Reparations program would fix the Black malaise in America for once and for all, ending this grievance culture the Democrats have indoctrinated into us for generations, finally giving Black Americans true buy-in to the idea of America. Seeing America as more than just the daily tragedies that happen in the hood.

Every major city in America has a “hood.” A “hood,” is the main or one of the main Black neighborhoods in every city, what many would call the ghetto. If you want to find it, find MLK Blvd. on the the map, it will likely lead you there. Many Americans of all colors drive through the hood, drive by the hood on the highway or avoid it altogether. It’s place often full of crime, gangs, outdoor drug use, liquor stores, check cashing places, abandoned buildings, unemployed, shady-looking characters hanging out on street corners all day and even street prostitution. Not every Black person in the city lives in the hood but we all know people who do. Many of us grew up there and got out. Many of us still live there and are actively trying to get out. The other residents of the city, outside of the hood, even those who aren’t Black would love for the hood to be better, look better, do better. Because the dilapidation of the hood is a blight on the entire city. A city is only as strong as it’s weakest link. Nowadays when we talk about Chicago or Detroit or Philadelphia; our first thought is no longer The Willis Tower, The Renaissance Center or the Liberty Bell. It’s the hood. It’s crime, it’s shootings, it’s poverty. The whole city wants that narrative to change. The whole country does. In the spirit of ‘fixing the hood, fixes America,’ Reparations policy should be geared toward revival in three sub-areas: jobs, policing/crime and education.

2a. Jobs:
Gainful employment would solve the majority of problems in the hood. The part our Black Democrat leaders tend to obfuscate — by shoving the presumption of racism down our throats every five seconds — is that there has been a systemic off-shoring of US manufacturing jobs namely to China and Mexico over the past 30-40 years. This off-shoring has been overseen by Democrats and Republicans in Congress who got paid off by multi-national corporations and their lobbyists to sign legislation (much of which is also authored by said lobbyists) that makes it easier for US companies to fire Americans and set up shop overseas. This saves companies billions in personnel costs (as the standard of living overseas is much less than ours), which often go toward bonuses and multi-million dollar yearly salaries for CEOs and other high office holders — and if that weren’t cruel enough, they then ship their products back to the US to be sold to the same people they fired.

President Donald Trump as a part of his “Make America Great Again” initiatives talked a lot about bringing our jobs back from overseas and during his tenure he did just that — albeit not a cataclysmic shift in the return of US industry, much due to the COVID-19 Pandemic — but for the first time in a long time we were actually seeing some industry return.

Many of the industrial jobs that had been going overseas in Rust Belt cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, etc were once the main catalysts for The Great Migration; the movement of Black Americans from the agrarian economies of the post-slavery South to the new industrial economies of the North, between the 1910s-1970s. These are the jobs our grandparents and great-grandparents had that created the American Black middle class. These jobs provided enough pay to have to sustain father-led, single-income homes with stay-at-home wives and nuclear families, the marriage rates of Black Americans being higher than that of White Americans at a time during this era. The downside to this time obviously being the racism and discrimination of the period.

But what if we were to recreate this period today, a period where a Black man (or woman) could graduate high school and find fulfilling, higher wage work, without having to go to college and become a life-long debt slave to the US Government and without the constraints of the racism and discrimination of 100 years ago? Would this not Make America Great Again? A perfect example of this is my own father, born in 1943 in rural South Carolina. He has an 11th grade education due to the fact that he had to drop out of high school to work when my grandfather died in 1959. A few years later he emigrated to New York, got a job as a plumber in a New York State mental hospital via an apprenticeship and worked this way up to management positions there. He met and married my mother in 1977, supported her as a stay-at-home mom along with me and my three siblings off of one paycheck. After almost forty years with New York State he was able to retire at 63, with he and my mother living off his pension. The life my father lives is totally impossible today. That America doesn’t exist anymore. We need that America back, that’s making America great again.

This was my pitch in my Trump Tower meetings with high-ranking officials in the Trump orbit, namely his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and his former campaign manager Brad Parscale in 2019 & 2020. I told them that a lot of the issues they were having in attracting Black support comes from the fact that the mainstream news media does a really good job at painting the MAGA Movement as a White only, or even a White Nationalist Movement, even as the Democrats ran ‘my home state, Delaware was a slave state’ Joe Biden as their nominee. Democrats created a dramatic narrative that perverted MAGA to somehow mean hearkening back to a time in which Black people were enslaved, even as our enslavers were Democrats — facts be damned! I relayed to them that most lay Black people didn’t see how we fit into MAGA or understood how Trump’s tough-on-China policies were supposed to do anything for us as Black people.

This was to be the MAGA movement’s opening to the Black community. Make America Great Again is about bringing America back to a time where we manufactured our own goods and there when were plenty of jobs in tangible industries making tangible things that would provide the financial basis for family building and the achievement of dreams. Unfortunately for them and all of us, they didn’t take my advice and we all woke up November 4th, 2020 to President-Elect Joe Biden.

An effective Reparations plan would take it’s cues from here. Our nation bringing jobs back from overseas and our Black Democrat Representatives making the deals that would put those jobs directly into the Black communities they represent. Similar to the pledge Swedish furniture behemoth IKEA made to only hire people from the area when it initially opened it’s largest US store in Red Hook, Brooklyn, NY (my home town). Red Hook a majority Black neighborhood, dominated by the Red Hook Housing Projects, which before the arrival of the store was not a place you wanted to be after dark if you didn’t have anyone from the area to vouch for you.

And before you take the old Obama stance of ‘we can’t bring those jobs back!’ On the precipice of World War 3 — a possible two-front war against the newly allied Russia and increasingly defiant China — we have no choice but to bring our industry back, as not to depend on our enemy for the needs of our citizens daily survival. These jobs absolutely have to come back as a part of our decoupling from China, the foreign nation our politicians greed and betrayal of American blue-collar workers made wealthy. Never forget that.

Good jobs for Black people would even have a positive effect on the oft-exploited, hot-button issues of racial and social justice used by politicians to further divide the American populace. Let’s look at the George Floyd killing — which again, was wrong on every level. How he died aside, the reason why he was arrested is because he attempted to pass off a fake twenty-dollar bill at a Minneapolis grocery store. He wasn’t an international counterfeiting ring or a money-laundering syndicate, he was a 46 year-old, able-bodied man who was down on his luck. He obviously didn’t have gainful employment. Had he been in a better financial situation he would have most likely never tried to pass that bill as he wouldn’t have a reason to and the woeful events of May 25th, 2020, and the subsequent riots that ensued, would likely have never happened. So much of the underlying reason for crime and drug use is poverty. Welfare programs that give those who aren’t enterprising enough to scam them, just enough to survive until the next deposit won’t fix poverty or crime. The dignity of gainful employment will.

2b. Policing/crime:
Racial disparities in policing, real or perceived are a major concern among Black Americans. Anti-police rhetoric pushed by leftist groups such as the fraudulent Black Lives Matter and the equally fraudulent spoiled rich White kids of Antifa — both led by people whose affluence keeps them far removed from the harsh realities of actually living in the un-policed Black neighborhoods they advocate for (the former whose unofficial headquarters is a $6M mansion paid for by the small-dollar contributions of every day Black people as well as big bucks from shaken-down corporate interests) were repeated ad nauseam and amplified by mainstream and social media post-George Floyd — deepening the historical distrust of police amongst Black people.

This distrust, based on a the oft-repeated leftist narrative that police are targeting Black people and killing them in inordinate numbers as opposed to other races of people — though statistically incorrect — feels true to most liberals and Black people in general as we saw the faces of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Eric Garner and others amplified in the media and not the higher numbers of nameless White people also killed by the police. Polling has indicated that the greater pluralities of people who consider themselves “liberal” and “very liberal” when asked “If you had to guess, how many unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019?” said “about 100” and “about 1000” respectively, when in reality only 27 unarmed Black men were killed by police in 2019. This is according to the Washington Post Police Shootings Database, a decidedly non-conservative publication. The perception of this polling unfortunately has become reality.

In an effort to capitalize on the wave of anti-police sentiment and extend their chokehold on the Black vote, far-left Democrats like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush and others foolishly peddled “defund the police” as the cure for racism in policing and thus their rallying cry for the 2020 & 2022 elections. Much of that defunding coming from police training — in part the racial sensitivity training meant to foster better relationships between police and Black communities — the apex of which being the attacks on the new Atlanta area police training center, dubbed “Cop City” by the aforementioned Antifa radicals. Darkly funded by Democrat megadonors — namely George Soros, the Hungarian billionaire clearly intent upon destroying the United States from within — the “defund the police” political wave also ushered in a new class of soft-on-crime District Attorneys to reign over America’s urban cores, many of which — outside of the recall ouster of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, largely spurred by fed up Asian-American voters — still remain.

New laws specifically targeting police such as the ending of qualified immunity —the laws which shield individual police officers from civil lawsuits in the case of accusations of alleged impropriety — have prompted many officers to quit, retire early or move on to greener, more police-friendly pastures, like Florida. With virtually zero new recruits waiting to replace them, urban police forces are overextended and dangerously understaffed, to the point where the New Orleans Police Department is ”being forced to spin off some of its work to civilians.” This juxtaposed with disgraceful Soros-funded DA’s like New York’s Alvin Bragg — who wantonly dismiss and downgrade violent crimes, while hawkishly pursuing made-up process, non-crimes by the Democrat’s number one political enemy, President Donald Trump — have turned our inner cities into lawless hellscapes. Hellscapes where the very same poorer Black people the far-left Democrats purport themselves to be so dedicated to helping now live in fear of their lives from criminals and the police, while the Democrat politicians they vote for sleep comfortably in their beds at night in the nice part of town and under the watch of armed guards paid for by our tax dollars. Needless to say, “defund the police” is an absolute failure. An effective Reparations plan would address this.

It’s obviously time to re-fund the police. This rebuilding of police forces in urban areas under a Reparations program must be done in a way that fosters buy-in from Black American residents of these areas. We can no longer have it where citizens of the hood are policed by officers who live in distant suburbs and have no true vested interest in the improvement of the areas they patrol. The same way the US armed forces have historically targeted Black high schoolers and young people — disproportionately, some would say — with ROTC recruiting tables and stations at various places, touting financial benefits such as free or reduced college and other vocational training for joining to fight foreign wars — is the same way we must recruit young Black people to join the police forces to fight the war against crime at home.

Making a career in law enforcement more attractive by increasing police pay and benefits, targeting young people even before they leave high school by offering a viable life path for urban youth who may not necessarily want to attend college and want to make real money right away. Every young Black person on the police force making real legal money by helping their community is one less young person vulnerable to be lured into a life of crime by fast money via illegal means. That’s one more young person with the financial means to marry, create a family and build the community, creating new generations of Black people with pride in their community and thus pride in our country.

2c. Education:
It’s been recently reported that there are urban school districts, namely Baltimore — a majority-Black school district — that has several schools in which virtually no student is able to read and perform math at grade level. Obviously these urban government-run schools are in crisis. A true Reparations plan would absolutely have to include school choice — the ability for parents to take the up to $30k/per student/per year that the government spends, or rather wastes on its own schools and be able to use those funds towards a private, religious, or charter school of the parent’s choice. The great news about this is that Republicans are already largely on board with school choice, it’s the Democrats that insist upon trying to keep the bloated bureaucratic carcass that is the US Department of Education on life support — with our tax dollars, of course. Bucking the Democrats we tend to vote for — the overwhelming majority of Black Americans agree with Republicans in supporting school choice. It’s already the law of the land in Iowa and Arizona and is coming to more states as we speak. This would be the easiest part of Reparations to pass — and arguably the most impactful — as this infusion of funding would create opportunities for Black educators to start new private schools and expand existing private Black-owned schools such as the Brooklyn, NY based Xyayx Institute.

The race hustling has to stop.
Looking at and speaking of everything in terms of race has become such second nature to Americans, especially Black folks, that most of the time we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. I’ve made a conscious effort not to do it and even still I catch myself doing it sometimes. The longer Black and White Americans have inhabited this prime real estate we call America, the more we’ve become culturally alike, especially the young people. I’m pushing forty, my generation is the last of people who grew up, totally pre-internet. We are the youngest children of the generation of Americans before us who lived with real systemic racism, pre-Civil Rights Era, not the hyperbolic stuff people make up today, stringing isolated incidents into a nationalized narrative for their own gain, or hash-tagging #OscarsSoWhite because their favorite Black actor didn’t win an award. I mean the real stuff. Growing up my mother was denied eating at an ice cream parlor because she was Black and that was totally normal, stuff like that, actual racism. We’ve come a long way from then in a relatively short time, if only we’d act like it.

Music and entertainment has always been quite the uniting force between Black and White Americans, the influence and star power of Black entertainers breaking down many of the past barriers of racism. Back in the day Billboard used to put music made by Black people on a whole different chart, the “Race Records Chart” which evolved into the “Hot Black Singles Chart,” which today is the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs Chart — eschewing the racial label for one that more accurately brings the genre of music to the forefront rather than the race of the people creating it — as many White artists have since appeared on this chart over the years. Conversely, more Black artists are foraying into Country Music — a traditionally more White genre of music — and are even topping the Country charts. In fact, there was a week in 2003 where the entire Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Chart was all Black performers. Beyoncé and Rihanna, like Janet Jackson before them were considered the absolute it-girls of music, with a string of number-one albums and singles at their prospective peaks and Michael Jackson, the forever reigning “King of Pop” is the highest-selling solo artist of all time, a record that will never be broken. It wasn’t just Black people buying those records. It’s the same with movies and TV, with Black actors like Will Smith, Denzel Washington, and Eddie Murphy having starred in blockbuster films that reached #1 at the box office, grossing billions of dollars, their race not a factor in the movie’s success. In the 90’s, the golden age of the TV sitcom, Bill Cosby’s “The Cosby Show” and the Jaleel White helmed “Family Matters,” both with all-Black main casts easily pulled in 20 million viewers a week, of all races at their peaks.

Fast food, a decidedly American invention and symbol of Americanism across the world, doesn’t belong to one race or another. McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dunkin Donuts, Chick-Fil-A, and Taco Bell have fans and frequent eaters from all corners of America, from your friends and family, to celebrities, to President Donald Trump, who famously threw catered fast food banquets at the White House. Everybody eats hot dogs and cooks out on the 4th of July, we all watch sports, we all binge watch our favorite Netflix and Hulu series on the weekends and pontificate on them at the water cooler Monday morning, because we are all Americans.

So why is it when it comes election time or when it’s time to talk politics we have pretend as though it’s 1823 instead of 2023? Why are Black people spoken to by our Black Democrat leadership as though we just stepped off the plantation yesterday? A plantation that we would literally know nothing about if we weren’t told about it. I liken it to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and the question God asked them after they’d sinned and he returned to the Garden of Eden. “Who told you that you were naked?” Who told Black people that we were oppressed? Our Democrat overlords, for their own political gain, of course.

Larry Elder often cites a 1997 poll conducted of Black teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 where they were asked whether racism is a problem for them, 89% of them said that racism was “a small problem” or “not a problem at all.” As a person who was a Black teenager in 1997, I can concur. Even as a son of two parents who grew up with no electricity in racist, rural South Carolina in the 40’s & 50’s, I never felt as though I was oppressed in my own country by White people, because I wasn’t. I remember being 6 years-old at Ronald McNair Elementary School, PS 147 in Queens, NY, standing with my hand over my heart, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with my fellow classmates, feeling like I was just as much a part of America as everybody else, because I was.

In a 2021 hit piece on Larry Elder in the LA Times, written by columnist Robin Abcarian, a White liberal Democrat (of course), she tried to dump all over the lived experience of the aforementioned polled Black teens of my era by White-splaining that we were too young to have experienced true racism and that we would find out how truly oppressed we were when we got older, as though we didn’t have parents we saw every day. Of course this piece was written when Elder was gaining steam as the Republican Gubernatorial challenger to incumbent California Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, so it was politically motivated, of course. This is the same rag that called Larry Elder “the Black face of White supremacy,” that propaganda this time being peddled by another LA Times columnist, Erica D. Smith, a Black liberal Democrat with she/her pronouns, of course [eye-roll-emoji, eye-roll-emoji, eye-roll-emoji].

In reality, the 90’s and early 2000’s, the Bill Clinton/Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush years were a good time for America. Sure, there were racial incidents with police; Rodney King, Amadou Diallou, even the response to Hurricane Katrina was spun as a racial narrative, but in spite of these things there was still a hopefulness amongst Americans that things were getting progressively better racially, because they were and still are. This was a time before the words “white supremacy” was every other word out of Black people’s mouths, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton were our nation’s only race hustlers. Now every liberal (former) blue check on Twitter is joining in on the grift, even White people! How insulting!?! Black folks can’t even have our own outrage!

This was a time when the entire nation made fun of blatant racists like the KKK, as they were a ridiculous sideshow act, in ill-fitting costumes to be laughed at on trashy tabloid talk shows like Phil Donohue and Jerry Springer. Not as people to be taken seriously and elevated by our formerly serious mainstream news media as more than the dwindling few thousand weirdos they actually are. This is all for political means, of course — primarily to smear Republicans and scare Black people into remaining Democrat voters, post-Obama. I’m so glad I was a kid then and not now. My heart and head hurt for the young people of today.

These days you have so-called “woke” Black people in the 21st century walking around talking about being victims of “white supremacy,” using terms like “dominant society” to address White people in this country and using terms like “marginalized people” to refer to themselves. This is madness! There is no White person born to a woman that is “supreme” over me. Period. What’s funny is that I’ve uttered that exact statement in front of the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York, a room full of right-wing, mostly-White folks and everyone clapped and cheered. But when I say the same thing to Black folks I’m a “coon,” a race traitor, for believing in myself and knowing that I’m equal to White people. So you mean after a Civil War, a Civil Rights Movement and a two-term Black president, we still ain’t equal to White folks? Well damn! What the eff is it gonna take?

An honest Reparations program would not only solve the tangible issues of Black Americans, but it would put also put an end to the intangible sense of insecurity and victimhood that inculcated into Black Americans. It is learned behavior. No baby is born feeling less than. This is an inherited insecurity that is designed to make us feel as though we are second-class citizens or less American than White Americans. Even as Black Americans, those of us who are direct descendants of slaves have been here way longer than most White Americans. Black Americans, slave and free, fought in the Revolutionary War that created America as well as every war since. So for Black people to ever feel less than any other American is nothing but a cruel psyop perpetrated by people who have a vested interest in exerting homogenous, political and emotional control over Black people — also known as Democrats. So for Reparations to ever be a real thing, the race hustle has to end.

A reparated Black American isn’t a race-hustled Black American. These two things can’t coexist. True Reparations would mean the end of all Black-specific aid programs and groups. No more NAACP, BLM, affirmative action, race quotas and diversity equity inclusion programs, there would be no need for them. The breach between Black Americans and the US Government would finally be repaired, never to be spoken of or exploited again, right? These programs and initiatives don’t just run off the goodness of their hearts, there’s a lot of money and political power pulling their strings. Are the powers that be ready to give all that up so that the collective of Black people can finally feel free (because in reality we are already free) in our own country we’ve been in since it’s inception? Are the Democrats, whose bread and butter is the exploitation of race prepared to deal with that new electoral reality, one in which they’d have to actually work for the Black vote? A reality where “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t Black!” is no longer viable Black political outreach. Sure they’d still have feminist women and the LGBTQ+ crowd to still serve as their forever victims, but the ownership and exploitation of the Black narrative brings a certain gravitas to their White savior complex that the blue-haired feminists and alternative lifestyle crowd just can’t match.

This is why the “fight for Reparations” is way more politically valuable than the actual passage of Reparations. If your campaign, conferences, rallies, speaking fees, Patreons, Cashapps and social media followings are all based on the “fight for Reparations” what the hell are you gonna do when you actually get it? Then the money stops. So instead of being pragmatic and figuring out how to pass something that works, you go the hyperbolic route and come up with the most extreme thing you can think of, that will obviously go nowhere to keep the money cycle flowing. A true Reparations program would be an ultimate solution but unfortunately there’s just way more elections to be won and money to be made off the problem.