Out of the Woods

    Presenting and Misrepresenting 

African-American History

 

 
    I spent the week in Washington DC being a tourist. One of the main goals of the expedition was to visit the National Museum of African Americans History and Culture. Admission is free but it is best to apply for a ticket ahead of time because the demand to visit is so great. The day I was there, there were a people of all ages and all colors, Americans and foreigners, but the preponderance were larger and smaller school groups with the majority being white students.

    The museum is quite wonderful. Instead of the many diorama's of old there was music, there were short and longer videos everywhere, there were some interactive displays. The history seemed fairly reliable. There was little attempt to whitewash the brutality of slavery. The presentation was quite explicit in attributing to white landowners the responsibility for embodying the difference between whites and Blacks in legislation at the end of the 17th century. Before then, white and black servants worked side-by-side, socialized and intermarried without any difficulty. By 1700, intermarriage was prohibited, Blacks were no longer allowed to vote, Blacks were not allowed to defend themselves against physical attacks by whites.

    The same can be said about 19th century history, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the long hundred years of Jim Crow where racial divisions were enforced by lynchings. Few whites protested.  There seemed to be few attempts to moderate the horror of that history.

    In the 20th century there is elaborate coverage of the civil rights movement. But now the account begins to leave out important facts. For instance: when veterans came home from World War II a grateful nation passed the G.I. Bill which provided free higher education to all veterans and low-cost mortgages for veterans to buy bungalows in the new suburbs being built in large numbers. Black veterans, however, were excluded. The best universities and colleges refused to accept black students. Real estate agents refused to sell houses in the suburbs to black buyers. Only very small percentages of black veterans were able to take advantage of the benefits all veterans were in principle entitled to.

    Here was surely one of the sources of current inequalities. But this source was not mentioned because the museum is pretty silent about current inequalities. The killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer are there. But any extensive description of the disabilities under which black citizens suffer is missing.

    Here are some of the facts the museum does not mention:

    • In absolute terms, the median white household has, in recent years, $111,000  in wealth holdings compared to $7000 for the median black household. That includes homes, cars and savings.
    • 73% of white households owned their home as compared to 43% of black families
    • Unemployment among Blacks is twice the rate of unemployment among Whites
    • The poverty rate among Whites is less than 10% versus 27% among Blacks
    • Cancer is the second leading cause of death for both non-Hispanic Blacks and non-Hispanic Whites. In 2001 the incidence for 100,000 persons was substantially higher for poor Black females than for White females for certain cancers. All in all health for Blacks is significantly worse than for Whites.
    • Infant mortality rates in the US in 2013 was five per thousand births for white women and more than 11 per thousand for black women.
    • Five times as many black people are incarcerated as whites.

    The list of inequalities between Black and White is much longer. In the vast majority of comparisons Blacks are at a disadvantage.

    These omissions are not surprising once we look at the lists of large donors of the Museum. General Motors gave more than $1 million as did Goldman Sachs. The pillars of the current power structure will not want ordinary citizens to know the extent of the racial crisis. They don't want American schoolchildren to leave the museum wondering why the government and the very rich are content to allow these major injustices to continue.

    The relative honesty with which the early history of race relations in this country are treated makes the public trust all of the presentations and thus citizens go home thinking that police brutality towards young black men and women is the last remaining problem that Black people face.

    Downtown Washington DC is one tremendous propaganda effort. The National Museum of African-American History and Culture makes a significant contribution to that propaganda effort.

Surprise, surprise.