The colour prejudice conundrum

By Gamal Nkrumah

Images of African americans from The Other America

Delegates at the NAACP convention blamed decades of discrimination by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) for the demise of the African American farmer. The loss of black-owned farmland is highly symbolic, and is a particularly emotive issue for African Americans. It represents the slow death of rural black culture in the Deep South, a deep-rooted culture of resistance against racial oppression.

Last year, black farmers filed a $2 billion lawsuit against the USDA in an attempt to force government to recognise their complaints. But in April, they received a setback when the US Justice Department ruled that black farmers were ineligible for cash settlements for past discrimination complaints because the cases were filed too late.

In response, angry demonstrators marched through Atlanta protesting what they said was systematic and institutionalised discrimination by the Justice Department and the USDA, which had resulted in the appropriation of black-owned land by white farmers.

Slaughter, the vice president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturists Association, told Al-Ahram Weekly, "Successive American governments have failed to take swift corrective measures to alleviate the suffering of black farmers, the loss of black farmland, economic opportunity and a rich and unique heritage. We are facing foreclosure." Slaughter explained that it was African slaves who first introduced traditional African farming techniques in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the American Deep South along with crops such as cotton, rice and sugar cane that eventually became export commodities and the backbone of the southern states' economies.

Statistics illustrate the point. According to the US Census Bureau, at the turn of the century, African Americans owned 14 per cent of the farmland in the US, mainly in the Deep South. Today, blacks own less than 1 per cent of farmland and the figure is dwindling fast. In fact, as NAACP Chairman Kweisi Mfume told delegates at the convention, black farmers are an "endangered species".

There were some at the NAACP convention in Atlanta who have voiced fears that the African American himself is an endangered species as he grapples with poverty, one of the world's highest crime rates, narcotics and the AIDS epidemic. Moreover, alarming new research studies show that, contrary to widespread notions in American society of the traditional hyper-fertility of African Americans, infertility has in fact become a major problem among black youth. Between 1988 and 1995, infertility rates in the 25-44 age group rose 65 per cent for undetermined reasons, and several conspiracy theories are in vogue.

Researchers at Yale University's assisted reproductive technologies programme say that 50 to 60 per cent of infertility among African Americans is a result of the male factor. Meanwhile, again contrary to popular misconceptions, African American teenage pregnancies are declining at a rate of 20 per cent. Fewer blacks than whites seek medical advice because they can ill afford it, and fewer blacks than whites have access to the wealth of new reproductive technologies.

Dr Vivian Lewis, director of the reproductive endocrinology unit at the University of Rochester Medical Centre, explained that since infertility treatment costs between $2,055 and $10,000, the financial barriers facing black couples are considerable. Lewis added that black couples are more likely than whites to be uninsured.

The US Supreme Court, too, came under fire from the NAACP leaders in Atlanta. "This Supreme Court ought to be ashamed of itself," raged President Kweisi Mfume. He said that the worst offender was Chief Justice William Rehnquist whose law-clerk hires in his 26 years on the court were 99 per cent white and 86 per cent male. A recent survey showed that of the 394 law clerks who have been hired by current justices, 68.4 per cent were white males, 24.3 per cent women, 4.5 per cent Asian American, 1.8 per cent African American and 1 per cent Hispanic American. Small wonder ethnic minorities in the US complain about injustice.

Meanwhile, in Nashville, Tennessee, at Fisk University's 32nd Race Relations Institute (RRI) which took place a week before Atlanta's NAACP convention, tempers flared when it became known that sculptor Jack Kershaw, a son of a southern plantation owner, was putting the finishing touches to his statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, slave trader, Confederate hero and founder of the notorious white supremacist Klu Klux Klan.

The Forrest statue was unveiled with great aplomb and fanfare in a private Confederate Flag Park in a southern suburb of Nashville. Black prisoners were forced to clear the land on which Forrest's statue was erected, a grim reminder of a bygone age when black slave labour was the order of the day.

There are other echoes of a grim past in recent headlines about black church burnings and, especially, the brutal murder of a mentally handicapped African American man called James Byrd by self-confessed white supremacists. Several similarly gory incidents occurred almost simultaneously throughout the country. Then there is also the proliferation of hate symbols such as the swastika about 130 yards in diameter which was recently cut in a field in the rural Washington Township in New Jersey, not far from the prestigious Princeton University.

Meanwhile, the social conditions of a large section of the black community in the US are deteriorating. "The number of African American babies who weigh too little at birth is more than double that of white babies in America. A baby born in Third World countries like Cuba, Jamaica and Trinidad has a far better chance of survival during the first year of his life than the average African American baby born in the US," said Dr Henry Foster, an obstetrician who teaches at Meharry Medical College in Nashville. Foster, who serves as US President Bill Clinton's advisor on teenage pregnancy and youth issues, was a panelist on "The Struggle for Equal Health" at the RRI. He told the Weekly that the number of blacks who live below the poverty line is on the rise, even though the African American economy has an estimated value of some $400 billion. He said that had African Americans constituted an independent nation, that nation's economy would be the world's tenth largest.

The radical chic liberals of New England and New York now make no bones about the difficulty of discovering "redeeming social value in the lyrics of rap music," as one New York columnist sarcastically put it. More seriously, they want to do away with affirmative action altogether. However, affirmative action and race issues have in the past few years returned to haunt America with ever greater force. In the words of the NAACP chairman, Julian Bond, "Affirmative action really isn't about preferential treatment for blacks, it is about removing the preferential treatment whites have received through history."