After only a few decades on the books, numerous Affirmative Action laws are being repealed across the U.S. "Why should minorities get favored treatment?" ask many white Americans today, with stories of whites being passed up for promotions or entry-level jobs in favor of less qualified minorities often related.

And over one hundred and thirty years after their emancipation, African Americans remain substantially impoverished and ghettoized. The United States, whites assert, is a free country, with free elections, a capitalist market system open to all on an even basis, and equal education and employment opportunities. Many argue that if minorities still lag behind in such areas as education, wealth and political representation today, they have only themselves to blame.

Why do so many African Americans find themselves so desperately impoverished in a society as ostensibly affluent as ours? To understand the answer to this question requires a broader understanding than most people today have regarding the history of African American impoverishment. It also requires that we acknowledge facts which put to rest a number of inaccuracies and myths concerning poverty in general.

"When my ancestors immigrated here, they had nothing," notes my father. "They were as poor as can be, but they worked hard, saved their money, learned the language, and prospered just like all the other European immigrants." He derides the failure of African Americans to assimilate and prosper, noting, "If my ancestors could do it, so can they."

What he and so many other Americans fail to recognize is that the situation of blacks in this country is not analogous to that of European immigrants, and that this fact is strongly relevant to understanding their plight today. Europeans may have arrived without money, but they arrived with something equally as valuable: their language and their culture.

More importantly, there were two essential opportunities available to Europeans when they arrived here: cultural societies to help them settle in, and an abundance of low-skilled industrial jobs. While some groups (notably the Irish and Italians) experienced racism directed against them, there were no laws which curtailed their legal rights. And poor as they were, Europeans immigrated to the U.S. of their own free will.

The vast majority of first-generation African Americans were dragged here in chains against their will. Once here, they were forbidden to speak their native tongue or to practice their religion. Families and communities were split up, causing much of their culture (and the positive social values that went with it) to disintegrate. Blacks were stripped of those time-worn cultural values (such as the importance of education) which helped Europeans prosper. Would a slave be likely to cherish those values held by his/her master? Yet these were the only cultural values to which they were exposed.

In 1861 slavery was abolished. Did African Americans become free citizens at that point? Hardly. Laws remained on the books which prohibited blacks from participating as full-fledged members of society (recall that the Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination at the polls, was not passed until 1965), and segregation remained unchallenged for the next hundred years.

During this period, blacks were excluded from almost all aspects of the American life which European Americans were free to enjoy, such as the right to live where one chose, the right to eat where one wished, and the right to participate in the decision-making bodies that ruled over school boards, governments, etc.

The majority of black immigration northward occurred in the early- to mid-twentieth century, by which time the late nineteenth/turn-of-the century boom in industrial jobs was over. Without jobs, without a distinct cultural ethic to guide them, and without the support of existing cultural societies to assist in their assimilation, blacks were forced into the ghettos of the cities. Legal segregation and widespread racism assured that blacks would remain marginalized and isolated for decades to come.

It was not until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's that African Americans attained equal legal footing with whites. By this time the disparities between whites and blacks were intense, and the struggle was profound. That segregation was so fully institutionalized and accepted in our society was perhaps best dramatized on June 10, 1963, when Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to physically prevent black students from entering.

It was only at this late date (a little more than thirty years ago) that the U.S. government began seriously to dismantle our segregated society. Urban riots half a decade later demonstrated that an institution many hundreds of years old was not going to disappear overnight.

The government's Kerner Commission (set up to investigate the causes of the riots) concluded that "We live in a nation divided, one white, the other black," and predicted grave consequences if this situation went unremedied. Yet the FBI's "Cointelpro" (Counter Intelligence Project) program continued to be directed against groups and individuals who spoke out or acted to espouse minority rights (as documented by the government's Walker Commission in the mid-1970's).

After over four hundred years of marginalizing African Americans, the U.S. government finally decided to begin restitution by instituting laws to help blacks (and other marginalized groups, such as women and minorities) to regain the opportunities from which they were denied so long.

Legislation was enacted in the 1970's which mandated that, all things being equal, women and minorities were to be given preference in hiring situations. Affirmative Action laws never encouraged that race or gender be given preference over experience and stories to the contrary are almost always apocryphal urban legends. The intention was to give minorities an extra edge in order to render the playing field more even.

With Civil Rights and Affirmative Action came welfare programs. A common view today of welfare recipients is that the majority are lazy minorities who would prefer to collect welfare for years rather than to work. Many perceive that welfare recipients are draining the public coffers, and in so doing are contributing to the national debt and our precarious economic situation.

These views are highly inaccurate and quite insidious. Although minorities are disproportionately represented (because of the historical conditions outlined above), whites still make up the majority of welfare recipients. The average welfare recipient is a woman with two children, who collects food stamps for an average period of one and one half years.

Of course there are people who abuse welfare benefits, but they are estimated to be relatively few in number. And welfare has nothing to do with the bankruptcy of our economic system; all welfare programs combined (excluding Social Security) account for 2-3% of the national budget, and states generally spend 3-5% of their budgets on state welfare programs. In one week the U.S. military outspends an entire year's budget for federal welfare programs. Welfare recipients are clearly being scapegoated for economic woes which have nothing whatsoever to do with the level of entitlement programs in this country.

Such myths and scapegoating, together with racism, are what perpetuates a system whereby minorities remain marginalized to this day. Welfare alone cannot rectify this situation completely, but as one piece of a comprehensive program it certainly can contribute. Neither welfare nor Affirmative Action has yet been given much of a chance. Is it reasonable to presume that programs initiated in the past two or three decades and only begrudgingly funded can undo centuries of deprivation? Yet this is what many Americans today expect.

The impoverishment and ghettoization of African Americans can only end when their historical conditions are understood, when myths concerning welfare and the supposed antiquity of black rights in this country and the state are shattered, and when social programs and public education are funded amply and given sufficient time to achieve their goals.

Those who claim that all Americans have equal opportunities fail to recognize the importance of history. Claiming that the playing field is now level for all is the equivalent of allowing someone to belatedly join a game of Monopoly after most of the properties have already been purchased; without an intentional redistribution of resources, fairness cannot be expected to advance of its own accord, and this is what Affirmative Action and welfare are all about.

Source from: http://www.lutins.org/afr-amer.html