Challenge: come up with a slogan for a modern civil rights movement that is even less plausibly controversial than #BlackLivesMatter.
Imagine if health and mortality outcomes for Black Americans were identical to White Americans. How many Black Americans’s lives would have been saved? According to a new study, it’s at least 2.7 million from just 1970 to 2004:
Overall, in the US, the mortality rate for blacks, across age and gender, is almost 18 per cent higher than the rate for whites.
But while Gray’s and other high-profile killings make the headlines, the far greater cause of premature death in African Americans is stress-related disease, says Arline Geronimus of the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California. For example, the diabetes rate for black people is almost twice as high as for whites, and blacks have higher rates of cancer and heart disease.
Using cause of death data from the US Centers for Disease Control, Geronimus and colleagues calculated that if blacks died at the same rate as whites, 5.8 million African Americans would have died between 1970 and 2004. The actual number of black deaths over that timespan was 8.5 million, meaning that African Americans had 2.7 million “excess deaths”, compared with whites.
Geronimus says she and her colleagues likely underestimated the number of excess African American deaths. For one, they accounted for only 35 years, which means they missed all excess deaths prior to 1970, the year in which good-quality comparable data first became available.
Journal reference: Social Science and Medicine, DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.04.014
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement lost a lot of momentum after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Many of the younger leaders who tried to pick up the pieces in the 1970s and 1980s sort of gave up and decided to accept the partial gains of the 1960s and leave things at that for the indefinite future. White American society then mythologized Dr. King — who had been hated pretty roundly when he was alive — and put his non-violence doctrines on a pedestal as the only right, true, and acceptable path to progress.
He believed that violent uprisings, while understandable, were not acceptable under his religious faith and wouldn’t “solve” anything. However, his movement also benefited from the more violent riots and “scarier” rival groups whose visible discontent with the status quo shocked many White Americans (or at least their policymakers) into action because they realized that the Black population wasn’t actually happy with their lot in life.
But the study discussed above also reveals another truth about the realities of strict adherence to non-violence. Yes, violent revolution results in needless deaths, but so does no revolution at all. Those who die needlessly in the latter case just die quietly and poor, instead of on the scaffold or in front of a firing squad.
In other words, as demonstrated in this study, people do die as a result of non-violent gradualist/incrementalist strategies. It’s just a different set of people. When you demand all resistance to fatal oppression be non-violent, you tell the oppressed to accept the interim cost instead of returning it. Hardline pacifism essentially externalizes the human costs that would be experienced in a violent social revolution or uprising back onto the oppressed people, all in the hope of a peaceful rectification of the situation. Which I bring up not necessarily to suggest that the other way is better than non-violence but rather to force acknowledgment of what strict non-violence really means.
Put yet another way: Since 1970, at least 2.7 million additional Black people have literally died quietly from poor health and mortality outcomes, relative to White people, just so we didn’t have to experience a violent social revolution to give everyone justice. And talk about “justice too long delayed is justice denied”…
To make my point yet starker, let’s do some actual comparisons to some famous, semi-politically-motivated major revolutionary purges, genocides, and mass killings:
– French Reign of Terror: Less than 42,000 executed
– Russian Red Terror and Civil War purges: 50,000-2 million killed
– Rwandan Genocide: 500,000-1 million murdered
– Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge: 1-3 million executed, starved, or worked to death
– Armenian Genocide: 1.5 million death-marched or executed
– Soviet Ukrainian Holodomor: 2.4-7.5 million intentionally starved
So, perhaps it still pales in comparison with events on the level of the Holocaust (11 million murdered), but this point remains: Poor health outcomes have resulted in genocide-level “excess” death figures for Black America since 1970. Actual revolutionary terror waves intentionally ordered by radical governments have killed fewer people than the number of Black Americans that racist neglect and traumatic poverty have killed.
But yes, please, let’s discuss broken business windows and smashed police cars some more…
Previously from AFD:
“After Baltimore: In defense of riots” by De Ana
“After Ferguson: In defense of non-peaceful resistance” by Bill
An excerpt from President Obama’s remarks in Selma, AL on the 50th Anniversary of the 1965 march:
Their faith was questioned. Their lives were threatened. Their patriotism was challenged. And yet, what could be more American than what happened in this place?
What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people – the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many – coming together to shape their country’s course?
What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?
That’s why Selma is not some outlier in the American experience. That’s why it’s not a museum or static monument to behold from a distance. It is instead the manifestation of a creed written into our founding documents:
“We the People…in order to form a more perfect union.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
These are not just words. They are a living thing, a call to action, a roadmap for citizenship and an insistence in the capacity of free men and women to shape our own destiny.
The full speech has other excellent passages as well, but that one spoke most strongly to me right now in the current debates on the meaning of U.S. patriotism, American exceptionalism, and criticism of American policy at home or abroad.
The narrative around the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s is very narrow. We’re taught in school that — because of racial inequality — Black people in the South staged peaceful protests to change the world for the better. The specific leaders of the civil rights movement are also treated with the same sterility. This is especially true of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday has just been honored again.
Because everything concerning civil rights is taught in terms of History, we are given the impression that the struggle for racial equality is over. By extension, those fighting today must therefore be merely causing a disturbance and not fighting for their personhood to be recognized, like the noble civil rights organizers of the past. Many using Dr. King’s legacy to shame those protesting today are doing so because of that narrow education around the civil rights movement. They do not understand that protests then — as now — were disruptive, and they do not understand that the protest leaders then — as now — were not automatically well-received, even by “moderates.”
Demonstrations are not effective if they happen at the corner of one’s eye. But in order for people to understand exactly how disruptive the Civil Rights movement was, they have to look beyond the few classroom quotes of MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech they learned in elementary school. They also need to understand that the non-violent protests of the past were deliberate acts of disruption.
From late 2014 to present, people have been taking to the streets protesting police brutality and the otherwise unjust murders of Black people across the country. Protesters have shut down freeways and train stations, disrupted brunches, and even managed to close down malls. It’s hard not to look at pictures and videos of these protests and see the similarity between them and the old black and white videos of protests in the past.
If you look specifically at the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for example, that was a deliberate attempt to disrupt the status quo fundamentally. It was about far more than just seeking justice for the initial arrests that led up to the boycott, much in the way that today’s protests have become about more than any one victim. The privately-operated transit system lost money from of the refusal of Black people to use the buses for over a year, over its mandated segregation requirements, because Black people made up 75% of the transit system’s business.
Although the act didn’t involve violence, they also weren’t passive. They were purposefully breaking a law by organizing a boycott of a business, which at the time was illegal under state law. Dr. King was actually brought to court for the boycott and was eventually made to pay $1000 in fines and court fees as well as spend 2 weeks in jail.
Similarly, in 2014 during the Ferguson demonstrations we saw an attempt by law enforcement to silence protests. Protesters were told they weren’t allowed to stay in place and would have to continue marching or leave the protest area. This was an obvious attempt to dispel the protests by tiring out the people involved. The protesters chose to march daily for more than three months. It was later ruled by a District Court Judge that forcing the protesters to continue moving was a rights violation and could not be enforced.
On Monday, January 19th, 2015 in honor of the MLK holiday, protesters decided to #ReclaimMLK. They held marches in several cities, including Ferguson, urging people to continue to speak out. On their website, they made clear demands for what they wanted to accomplish in their protest — and encouraged people to connect and take action in their own cities. Most important of all they were declaring that their demonstrations are just as valid as Civil Rights demonstrations of the past.
The Civil Right movement is far from over. As King himself suggested in his own lifetime, it’s a continual process, and despite the progress that has been made, we still have a long way to go.
“Now you will notice that the extreme optimist and the extreme pessimist have at least one thing in common: they both agree that we must sit down and do nothing in the area of race relations. The extreme optimist says do nothing because integration is inevitable. The extreme pessimist says do nothing because integration is impossible. But there is a third position, there is another attitude that can be taken, and it is what I would like to call the realistic position. The realist in the area of race relations seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites while avoiding the extremes of both. So the realist would agree with the optimist that we have come a long, long way. But, he would go on to balance that by agreeing with the pessimist that we have a long, long way to go. And it is this basic theme that I would like to set forth this evening. We have come a long, long way but we have a long, long way to go.” — Martin Luther King Jr.