A Lifetime of Propaganda

There is a story about an eagle that grows up among chickens. With nothing but chickens as role models the eagle goes throughout his life living as a chicken. One day the eagle looks up and sees birds flying through the air and wishes he could do the same. The eagle sighs and returns to scratching at the dirt. Without an eagle role model as an example to help him develop an opinion of himself, the young eagle was resigned to live his life according to what he sees around himself.

There is a parallel to this story and young people in the black community. According to the constant messages being generated to the public not much positive energy comes out of the black community. Propaganda says it’s an environment that promotes under achievement, laziness, unethical behavior, and downright criminality. This description has been used to describe the black community when it was just an obscure corner on the white plantation.

From the moment black and white people met each other the message has always been that black people are morally, intellectually, and ethically less than white people. It used to be nothing more than a belief pulled out of racist white people’s ass. Black people were legally described as only three fifths human, worth only sixty percent the value of a white man. This is probably the foundation for the compensation ratio of black pay to white pay is based on.

The Christian bible has been used to justify the racism against black people. There was a theory that black people were the children of Cain and white people were the descendants of Able and this explained why black people were black and therefore satanic while white people were white and supposed the reflection of god’s light.

Science has been used to justify racism. According to Wikipedia, back in 1851, a physician by the name of Samuel Cartwright identified a condition called drapetomania to explain why some enslaved blacks would attempt to run away from the plantation. Mr. Cartwright also identified the condition of dysaethesia aethiopica to explain the idleness and improper food and drink of black people. It was a white man’s duty to beat their slaves in order to help the enslaved African submit to his or her position in life. Beatings will actually keep black people from running away.

Now, in the age of television and radio, where racist perspectives can benefit from the latest in political and social sciences, the propaganda that was once haphazardly distributed through the social system can now be carefully guided and reinforced with news stories, advertisements, weekly serials, movies, and comedies that constantly describe or portray black people as less than while at the same time showing white people to be the standard for normal, ethical behavior.

In the relationship between black people and white people, white people have always dominated wealth and everything that is controlled by wealth, essentially everything that’s worth anything. White people are the ones that control the airwaves, the government, the judicial system, the legal system, the newspapers, the television studios, the film studios, the banks, the corporations, the jobs, the wealth, and just about anything else considered to be a social system. So it should be little wonder that the propaganda that white people have always made against the black community continue to be made against the black community through all of these social systems.

Laws are passed to keep racism from being used as a tool for subjugation. But you cannot outlaw racism. If someone doesn’t want to hire a black person all they have to say is that the person wasn’t a fit or that he or she isn’t exactly what they are looking for. Racism has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law in front of people who have been programmed to view black people as inferior and unimportant. Like the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird” all the lawyer (played by William Windom) had to ask the defendant (played by Brock Peters) was “Are you black? No further questions your honor.”

Like the child who constantly hears from the parent, you are no good, you won’t amount to nothing, you are good for nothing, you are stupid, you’re not worth the time of day, and other derogatory rhetoric the child eventually learns to become his or her programming. Well, based on all the rhetoric and messages to the black community that it isn’t any good, it’s not amounting to anything, black people are thugs, black people aren’t important, and the black community would be destined to conform to the rhetoric.

In the past the black community always operated as a unit. It didn’t matter what was said about us because we were all together and we moved together. Today, the well to do would do well to leave. Only the lowest of the lower class would be caught dead in the black community. Propaganda says if black people want a better life they have to integrate into mainstream. And then we wonder why black children become the very caricatures and lowlifes that are constantly being pushed into our psyche. To all of this compound it with the denial of education, employment, and everything else of value and status and what do you have left but the sorry condition the black community is in now.

But hey, this is just a theory. There’s a mountain of propaganda that says it’s wrong. For centuries people have said that nothing good ever comes out of the black community. After all these centuries the propaganda that has always been promoted as the black community is finally coming true.