Michigan Votes Today

I had hoped to finish out my life without writing words like: "It is not enough to stop killing black kids and throwing them in jail."  But the economic and social repression of black Americans, the intentional destruction of black America that began in earnest with Ronald Reagan, continues to this day, in spite of the eight-year presidency of a bi-racial American who identifies himself as black.  If it is true that on every important economic measure black Americans are worse off now than when Barack Obama took office in 2008, are we to believe that it's because he doesn't care about black people?  Or is the simpler, more compelling truth that the forces of repression are so entrenched in the political establishment at every level that only a political revolution can improve the lives of all working Americans, including black Americans?

We have free public elementary schools and high schools that have been theoretically and legally desegregated since 1954.  Segregated housing is also against the law.  And yet, I sit on the white side of a river and directly across from me, on the black side of the river, there is a high school from which only a few graduates went on to college last year.  The lead in the water my family drinks is only 2 ppb, while the lead in the drinking water of the families on the black side of the river is 12 ppb. Unemployment on my side of the river is low, unemployment on the other side of the river is devastatingly high.  Is the quality of life on the other side of the river so low because the people there are black?  No.  It's because they are poor.

So far, support for Bernie Sanders in the black community has been very low. If that doesn't change, we will be looking at a continuation of the Obama presidency. While that may be consoling to some, it will alter nothing in the real world.