Savant on Life.

The cage was CREATED by racists, by segregation, institutional racism and capitalist superexploitaton. In the REAL WORLD, ghettoes were directly and intentionally created by segregation, both northern and southern. That's historical reality, not a matter of opinion. But at least at one time the super-exploited, colonized Black community had a relative stable place in the economic as exploited laborers---albeit at the BOTTOM of the economic system,. That is what my parents endured. Degrading, but largely STABLE. And so my mom worked in the same miserable factory in Bmore for about thirty or forty years. My dad had a poor paying gig most of his life as a mechanic. And there was Bethlehem Steel in Bmore. In other cities you may have had GM or Chrystler. When Blacks were not excluded they were relegated to the BOTTOM. But at one time that bottom tended to hold steady. But then came the ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION within domestic and global capitalism. Then the whole picture changed. Industrial capital gave way to electronic and piratical finance capitalism. Capitalism has long been known as a system giving rise to technological revolutions. These revolutions mainly created labor saving devices which allowed the creation of more and more wealth (mainly for the capitalist) with less and less labor. But the new electronic revolution tends to created not labor saving but LABOR REPLACING devices. This new electronic revolution first obliterated that section of the economy with jobs that Blacks---thanks to centuries of racial caste--were disproportionately confined. Hence the current crisis in the Black community and the Black family. The fathers often CANNOT provide. I won't go now into a critique of the patriarchal family, which was no paradise. But now even that kind of family is increasingly impossible to sustain. Moreover, it is not just a coincidence that broken families are more common EVERYWHERE, not just in the Black community. Singlehood, not marriage, is now the statistical American NORM. Since capitalism can increasingly create wealth, profit without labor, the old New Deal social contract is now torn to shreds. Capitalism destroys families, jobs, communities, culture and civilization itself. The plight of the Black community is only a more severe example of the plight of America. Similarly, the fascistic police terror against Blacks is a foreshadowing of the fascistic future of America if this militarized police abuse isn't ended. Let's be clear. If the Black struggle is lost it will mean the end of democracy and freedom in America--what little democracy and freedom we still have left. And all you white people who demonize Black people rather than fighting the 1% are putting a noose around your own necks. An elder (who was a university student in the 1960s) tells me that when Dr. King visited Baltimore in 1967 he said at a meeting in our community "The REAL difference between us and our bemused white brethren is not what they think, and maybe no what we think. It's not that they're free and we're not. It's that we KNOW we're not free, and they think they are." Wake up, white America! It's later than you think.

-Savant