Plantation Politics and Fannie Lou Hamer The structural conditions [Jonathan] Chait outlines above can be summed up under the phrase white supremacy. I have spent the past two days searching for an era when black culture could be said to be independent of white supremacy. I have not found one. Certainly the antebellum period, when one third of all enslaved black people found themselves on the auction block, is not such an era. And surely we would not consider postbellum America, when freedpeople were regularly subjected to terrorism, to be such an era. We certainly do not find such a period during the Roosevelt-Truman era, when this country erected a racist social safety, leaving the NAACP to quip that the New Deal was like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through. Nor do we find it during the 1940s, 50s and 60s, when African-Americans—as a matter of federal policy—were largely excluded from the legitimate housing market. Nor during the 1980s when we began the erection of a prison-industrial complex so vast that black males now comprise 8 percent of the worlds entire incarcerated population. m.theatlantic/politics/archive/2014/03/black-pathology-and-the-closing-of-the-progressive-mind/284523/#disqus_thread One day in 1961 [Fannie Lou] Hamer entered the hospital to have a knot on my stomach --probably a benign uterine fibroid tumor --removed. She then returned to her familys shack on the plantation to recuperate. But in the big house, ominous tidings circulated. The owners wife, Vera Marlow, was a cousin of the surgeon that had treated Hamer. Marlow gossiped to the cook that Hamer had lost more than a tumor while unconscious--the surgeon had removed her uterus, rendering Ha...mer sterile. The cook repeated the news to others, including a woman who happened to be Hamers cousin, and thus Hamer was one of the last people on the plantation to learn that she would never have a family of her own. I went to the doctor who did that to me and and I asked him, Why? Why had he done that to me? He didnt have to say nothing--and he didnt. If he was going to give that sort of operation then he should have told me. I would have loved to have had children. But a lawsuit was out of the question, Hamer recalled. At that time? Me? Getting a white lawyer against a white doctor? I would have been taking my hands and screwing tacks in my casket.—Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid, pp. 189,190 While in intense labor giving birth to my last child over 26 years ago here in the south, an old white doctor badgered me to let him tie my tubes while he was in there. My son was being delivered by c-section... I refused many times in tears and he said you already have two and youre not married. As I weakly stated I may get married again, he ignored me and was relentless .. He sent in an elderly black female nurse who with her sweet persuasiveness was able to convince me to let him forcibly sterilize me.. Havent shared that testimony much, too painful, but reading your post made me angry and sad at the same time ... What an evil.— Lori Renee Boyd Lj Have we really forgotten that much? I am surprised that people are surprised. This happened all over the country all of the time. Am I that old? That is why some of us have never come to terms with this country. It is and will always be our enemy until it is fundamentally changed. I will never forget the crimes committed against our people and still being committed. As Reverend Wright said goddamn America.—Ajamu Baraka
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 09:03:54 +0000
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