From Slavery to Subprime Loans

One of the headings I'm using in the introduction of my book Beyond Oppression: Colonization and the Language of Heroes is "From Slavery to Subprime Loans."  And there's an article out today at Truthout that talks about this in some detail.  The piece, by Jon Jeter, is entitled "Flat Broke, Black Voters Want More Than Just Another Black President," and here are some highlights:

What has befallen Black America is the heist of the century, a Ponzi scheme so cataclysmic that it has not only capsized the global economy, but it has also shone a light on slavery’s vibrant afterlife, in which the African-American proletariat has been assigned the role of a permanent debtor class.

And while President Obama held no one accountable for the 2007-08 financial [fraud] crash, Jeter points out that both President Reagan and President H. W. Bush got indictments and sent hundreds of bankers to jail

During the savings and loan crisis, for example, the Department of Justice, under the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, jailed hundreds of them, including Charles Keating, whose Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal cost taxpayers $3.4 billion.

The failure of Lehman Brothers in 2008 cost taxpayers nearly 10 times that amount, and yet the Obama administration did not prosecute a single Wall Street executive for malfeasance. Indeed, the nation’s first Black president bailed out everyone except the very people who were swindled out of their homes and life-savings

And really, in my view, the crux of the Black dilemma in America is that every aspect of the culture, including our education system, financial system, political system and system of justice, is a minefield designed to strip African-Americans of wealth and dignity at any and every opportunity, which Jeter speaks to here:

In a material sense, slavery has continued practically unabated. Consider that when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Black people owned one-half of 1 percent of all assets in the U.S. More than a century-and-a half later, according to The Color of Money, by Mehrsa Baradaran, the Black share of the nation’s total wealth has doubled to all of 1 percent. For all intents and purposes, Black Americans have no greater stake in the country of our birth than what we had when the first recorded African stepped foot in the “New World” in 1619.

Jeter's article is found here.