I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long. They have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long. The effect in their personalities, their lives, their very grasp of reality, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history, a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.”
— James Baldwin
DETROIT — A gaggle of politicians, journalists and staffers huddled at Detroit City Hall as the polls closed on Election Day 1992, anxiously awaiting the results. The conventional wisdom was that the incumbent President George Herbert Walker Bush could not survive the deep economic downturn that had hit the Motor City particularly hard, but Ross Perot had planted a seed of doubt in the electorate’s mind: Would the billionaire oilman play spoiler and steal critical votes from the Democrat, Bill Clinton?
It was early in the evening when it became abundantly clear to everyone that Clinton would indeed emerge victorious, and the African-American audience began to clap and cheer and even hug one another. The GOP’s 12-year occupancy in the White House represented a dark night of the soul for urban America, in general, and Blacks in particular, and we hoped that the saxophone-playing Democrat from Arkansas would usher in a new day.
As the crowd continued to celebrate, exchanging high-fives and knowing glances, the chairman of the Wayne County Commission, Arthur Blackwell, smiled broadly before turning suddenly somber. Then he turned to me and said:
It really don’t matter though. We can have a Democrat in the White House or a Republican, the Dow Jones can go up 500 points or down, and Black folks will still be poor.”
What change?
What Blackwell prophesied on a late autumn evening more than a quarter-century ago has certainly come to pass; and indeed history suggests that the descendants of African slaves will never be anything more than guest workers here in the country of our birth. In the 155 years since the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 50 years since the Kerner Commission Report on Civil Disorders identified racism as principally culpable for African-Americans’ abiding poverty and stark racial inequality: 33 states have adopted Stand Your Ground laws, effectively granting Whites a license to kill people of color; the water in Flint remains poisoned; black households in Boston have a median household wealth of $8; schools are as segregated as they were before the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; and the only person jailed for lynching an unarmed African-American on a Staten Island street corner is the young black man who filmed it.
For all intents and purposes, the descendants of African slaves continue to have no rights that Whites need respect. The United States of America is a racial kleptocracy and will remain forever so unless African-Americans adopt a dramatically different strategy for self-determination.
A modest proposal in recognition of a miserable reality
And so it has come to pass that to solve our country’s intransigent racial oppression, I propose a two-state solution.
Anyone who considers this far-fetched should consider the alternative for a moment. Since the abolition of the peculiar institution, the political economy of the U.S. has experienced recurrent generational cycles of catastrophe, racial rapprochement, democratization and prosperity; followed, inevitably, by the resurgence of white racism and a campaign of ethnic cleansing such as we are experiencing right now in this country.
The last cycle began at the nadir of the Great Depression when white workers put aside their resentments enough to work with Blacks to stitch together a functioning demand economy and turn bad jobs into good jobs. But no sooner had they stitched together the most dynamic middle-class in history, the political class — beginning in earnest with Richard Nixon’s southern strategy – re-cast its spell on white America, convincing it that African-Americans were to blame for everything that’s gone wrong.
American Way, 1939. Photo | Margaret Bourke-White
American white supremacy is akin to a religious cult: motivated by ignorance and fear, a critical mass of Whites regard non-Whites in much the same way that villagers in Salem regarded the witches they burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft.
The only magical thinking is in believing that will ever change. The two-state solution is a recognition that what vexes Black Americans is precisely what vexes Palestinians living in the occupied territories: the white settler.
The viability of the American Bantustan
How might a two-state solution work in the U.S.? Much would need to be decided by African-Americans in consultation with each other and negotiations with Whites of course, but in the main, the Black nation would be a constellation of African villages carved from the continental 48 — say, for the sake of argument, Chicago’s South Side, Brooklyn, Southeast D.C., North Philadelphia, the entirety of Detroit and Oakland — the objective of which would be a confederation of sovereign African villages.
Each black community would effectively represent a super-charged Bantustan or tribal reservation where all decision-making was in the hands of the people. An unwed mother would have as much opportunity to run for mayor as would a corporate lawyer, and the rotation of political elites would be constant.
All commercial activity would be informed by what development economists refer to as “import substitution,” meaning that everything we consumed — soap, automobiles, batteries, whiskey, furniture, aspirin, raisins — we would produce and protect by walling off our micro-economies from exported goods. Blacks would decide everything from the minimum wage to the curriculum taught in our schools. Banks would be publicly-owned. The police would be black and so would all jurors. Healthcare would be a right, and so would housing.
Imagine a scenario where professional sports teams were owned by the Black community, much as the Green Bay Packers are owned by Wisconsin residents. With windfall profits from the ownership of the Brooklyn Nets, for instance, New Yorkers could fund historically black colleges such as Florida A&M, Howard and Morehouse, subsidize child care centers, create summer apprenticeships for kids from disadvantaged neighborhoods and thousands of jobs through worker-owned cooperatives that roast, brew, bottle and knit the city’s own line of artisanal coffees, craft beer, organic toothpaste and sportswear — just for a few examples.
How would we finance such a venture, and how would we convince Whites that it is in their best interests? History suggests that the white working class will begin to search for allies when the next recession hits, and the bigger the downturn, the more they listen to non-Whites. This will be our opportunity to finally get reparations in the form of sovereignty. Blacks will agree to collaborate with Whites to reduce student loan payments, implement Medicare for All, and end military interventionism — but only if Whites agree to push for a sovereign Black state. It would, in effect be a reparations movement; but, rather than monthly cash payments, it would come in the form of a check to the entire community that could be funded by a small, one-time tax of a single penny on all Wall Street transactions. In conjunction, banks could agree to write down African-Americans’ student debts or subprime car and home loans.
Another funding model would be the tax-increment financing districts that remove local tax payments from the city or county tax rolls — creating, in essence, a slush fund. That money is then used to pay for pet development projects. But rather than paying for a new college basketball arena, the Black Bantustans would use the money to pave streets, train parolees, or clean up polluted properties and waterways.
Moreover, the idea capitalizes on white racism by willingly segregating ourselves. “You say you don’t like us? Fine by us.”
Of course, not all Whites are racist, and there would even be some who would prefer to live with Blacks. If the community accepted them, that would be fine, and if some African-Americans chose to live among Whites and were accepted, that would be fine as well.
But we need to understand that racism and racial violence are the white-settlers’ default position; generally speaking, they will always mean us harm.
Or, as Maya Angelou once said: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them.”
Top Photo | A photo showing the mostly-black neighborhood police set ablaze in Philadelphia on, May 14, 1985 in pursuit of the residents of a home. Peter Morgan | AP
Jon Jeter is a published book author and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist with more than 20 years of journalistic experience. He is a former Washington Post bureau chief and award-winning foreign correspondent on two continents, as well as a former radio and television producer for Chicago Public Media’s “This American Life.”
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