...Yette said he was compelled to write his book after witnessing an absence of change over the decade of struggle in the 1960s. He said that he could have kept his nice job had, “I been a nigger instead of Black, a spy instead of a reporter, a tool instead of a man, I could have stayed at Newsweek indefinitely.” Instead Yette wrote in The Choice that at the dawn of the 1970s the United States was simultaneously at war with the “colonized colored people of Indochina” and “the colonized colored people of the United States.” He referenced the then exploding numbers of Black un- and under-employment and the statement made by the labor secretary that the nation was “piling up a human scrap heap” of surplus laborers. Yette concluded that “black Americans are obsolete people.” And since then these rates of un- and under-employment have risen while so many more of the Black surplus are siphoned off into the prison-industrial-complex, the post-1970s big boom business which scholar Lawrence Bobo also says is creating “Black internal colonies.” It is no wonder then that the Economic Policy Institute report from 2008 concluded then that Black America is in a “permanent recession.”
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 20:34:33 +0000
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