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Example research essay topic: Capitalism And African American History - 2,548 words

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... was no longer a valued commodity to an owner and as such could be dispensed of in accordance to the will of any individual in the American society. Perceiving African American labor as a threat, assisted by the white state capitalist motivated apparatus, white proletarians instituted a reign of terror that has progressively through the ages taken less obtrusive forms. With the shift of African Americans moving up north, there also occurred a tremendous shift in the terrorist tactics of the white American society to keep blacks subjected to a characterized sub-proletarian stratum. Marable points out that, the informal, vigilante-inspired techniques to suppress Blacks were no longer practical.

Therefore, beginning with the Great Depression, and especially after 1945, white racists began to rely almost exclusively on the state apparatus to carry out the battle for white supremacy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1932, his presidency is known for the institution of the first comprehensive American social welfare program. However his programs did not provide advancement opportunities for the African American population. Rather it served as a medium through which racialize d capitalist ideals could further take root into the credence of American societal, political, and economic ideology. Jill Quadagno has argued that, "as Roosevelt sought to stabilize his unwieldy coalition of northern workers and white southerners by refusing to back legislation abolishing lynching or poll taxes and by weaving racial inequality into his new welfare state, " the advancement of African Americans were undermined. The most poignant area in which racial cleavages are apparent in Roosevelt's New Deal is in his Housing legislation.

The New Deal reinforced the entrenchment of the separation of white and black America through housing. The first government intervention in the Housing market was in 1934 with the National Housing Act. This act made available low down payments, extended loan maturities, and regulated interest rates in order to make the purchase of homes more affordable for working class families. Subsequently, the National Housing act established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) whose purpose was to ensure defaults on loans. However the regulations of the FHA would quickly turn into what would come be termed redlining. Quadagno writes: In practice, economic soundness was translated into "redlining": a red line was literally drawn around areas of cities considered risky for economic or racial reasons.

Redlining meant that most black families were ineligible for federally insured loans. Until 1949 the FHA also encouraged the use of restrictive covenants banning African Americans from given neighborhoods and refused to insure mortgage in integrated neighborhoods. Thanks to FHA, no bank would insure loans in the ghetto, and few African Americans could live outside it. Real estate brokers, realtors, lenders and private builders constantly manipulated legislation in search of profit. Capitalizing on the situation of the Negro and race politics those involved in the housing market eventually created a situation of segregation in housing that facilitated additional hindrances to African American advancement. It developed so that whites and blacks no longer lived in the same neighborhoods.

During the Post World War II as blacks migrated in greater numbers to the cities local officials and builders cooperated in making certain that blacks were kept separate from whites. "zoning ordinances specifying where people could live and restrictive covenants - private agreements to exclude designated minority groups - created separate black and white neighborhoods. Any attempt by African Americans to cross the color line triggered sustained and often violent resistance from whites. In Detroit alone between 1945 and 1965 more than 200 violent incidents occurred in racially transitional. Franklin describes a situation where real-estate agents: used it [the act] to demolish black neighborhoods that threatened white business districts or other valuable property, and then, to satisfy the federal mandate, they offered living quarters to displaced black families in new high-density housing projects. In the end, urban "redevelopment" was used to carry out widespread slum clearance and destroyed more housing than it replaced. After 1968, after the passing of the Fair (Opening) Housing Act the blatant discrimination in housing would change and become more subtle and underground.

Instead of blatant refusals, black buyers might be quoted a higher price, or told that the apartment of house is not available. This process gradually lead up to the ghettoization of black America. For a short amount of time the ghettos of black America were cites of progressive black economic activity. "The rise of a large, segregated black community in the north seemed to offer the fulfillment of Washington's dreams. The ghetto constituted a city within a city that supported a parallel economy of black-owned banks, real-estate companies, newspapers, shops, stores, theaters, nightclubs, and factories. " However the Great depression would see the destruction of this black progressive time period.

With blacks being the last hired and the first fired, consumerism decreased, and the black ghetto communities entered a recession from which they never recovered. The black ghetto progressively became a place of festering crime, violence, and drugs. The phenomenon of the bequeathal of poverty particularly endemic to the urban African American population is initiated through the gradual process of ghettoization. Marable writes, at the highest level of underdevelopment, the daily life of the Black poor becomes a continuous problematic, an unresolved set of dilemmas which confront each person at the most elementary core of their existence. The patterns of degradation are almost unrelenting, and thrust upon every individual and family a series of unavoidable choices which tend to dehumanize and destroy many of their efforts to create social stability or collective political integrity. As a result of the impact of the depression, family ties began to weaken as mothers worked long hours, fathers deserted families, and under less supervision, delinquency rates among youth began to rise.

Comparable to this as well was an increase of welfare dependency. In the economic infrastructure evolved a ghetto economy. Marable explains that: The pimp is one typical representative of inner-city underdevelopment within the sub-proletariat, the personification of the individualistic hustler. He accumulates petty capital by brutalizing young women, who sell their sexuality on the open market to (usually white middle class male) "consumers." Methods of "labor discipline" invariably include naked force - rape, threats, physical and psychological assaults. Women who are coerced or who accept these crude terms of "employment" are expected to deliver a certain number of tricks with "John's" per hours, day and week. Police in the ghettos are usually an integral part of the trade, and expect a regular cut from the women's profits for tolerating the traffic in their precincts.

Local black and white entrepreneurs in the inner city motel and hotel business find room to expand and even survive by orienting services to accommodate prostitution. The profits are also used to underwrite other illicit activities, from the ghetto's omnipresent drug traffic in elementary and secondary schools to small-time fencing operations. Lynching serves as evidence of by the American capitalist system. Primarily motivated and performed by the proletariat, but often directed and motivated by capitalists, race supremacy groups, such as the infamous Ku Klux Klan actively molested and harassed African Americans.

Lynching, along with government sanction abuses of black labor, replaces the institution of slavery for the capitalist as a mechanism to check and control black labor and movement. Marable explains lynching in this manner, from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the modern auto-da-fe parallels the development and maturation of capitalism in an oppressive, biracial society. Technically, the term is often used to describe the hanging of a person outside the legal sanction of the police and criminal justice system. Historically, and in actual practice, it is the ultimate use of coercion against blacks to insure white supremacy.

The forms it assumes - hanging by neck, shooting, castration, burning at the stake, or other spontaneous and random forms of violence - is secondary to the actual terror it evokes among the black masses, and the perverse satisfaction it derives for white racists. Lynching in a racists society becomes a legitimate means to check the activities of the entire Black population in economics, culture and politics. Experiencing economic amnesia in the South, as a result of the centuries of uncompensated labor, and after years of selling labor power to agricultural capitalists and subjected to white acts of terrorism, towards the end of the 19 th century, blacks started migrating north. Prior to the twentieth century 90 % of the African American population lived in the South, by 1940 that percentage had decreased to 77 % and would continue to decrease until a majority of African Americans would live in the north. As a result of high labor demands of wartime factories in the North, the failure of the cotton market in the south, the boll weevil, the failure of black banks, and oppressive politics of white lynch mobs, African Americans started migrating towards the cities en mass. Likewise, from 1890 until the early twentieth century, a majority of African Americans worked in agriculture; this would change in the twentieth century as well.

Though black migration to the cities began in the late nineteenth century, the black industrial class was not created until the massive migrations of 1915 and 1940. The black migration served the needs of industrial capitalists. African American willingness to take low-level positions characterized by subhuman wages and exorbitant working hours greatly provided for the capitalists' objective in procuring maximum profit. Here race politics vis -- vis capitalism becomes even more complex than that of slavery or reconstruction. In addition, similar to their nascent involvement in the capitalist Reconstruction economy African American labor, resulting from racially particularized societal sanctions, drove down wages. Manning Marable accounts that, when blacks performed identical tasks that whites carried out, they were paid less than 'white wages. ' Even when blacks acquired technical skills and advanced education, they were still paid much less than whites who possessed inferior abilities.

At every level of employment, white capitalists accumulated higher profits from blacks' labor than they gained from the labor of whites. Thus with black proletarian labor being more cheap than white proletarian labor and more accessible, this greatly challenged the position of white laborers. Hence, the black worker becomes placed in between a rock and a hard place, at one end their exists the white capitalist exploiter, on the other end there exists the white proletariat who desires to keep blacks from entering industry. Dubois records, for a hundred years, beginning in the Thirties and Forties of the nineteenth century, the white laborers of Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York beat, murdered, and drove a way fellow-workers because they were black and had to work for what they could get. Seventy years ago in New York, the centre of the new American labor movement, white laborers hanged black ones to lamp posts instead of helping to free them from the worst of modern slavery. In Chicago and St.

Louis, New Orleans and San Francisco, black men still carry the scares of the bitter hatred of white laborers for them. Here again is evident the effects of the race psychology. What again is ironic about this process is that the race ideology had become so deeply rooted that it was more important that blacks remain in their caste status rather than a cohesive labor movement be formed. Instead of uniting, the white worker preferred to maintain as status quo the psychological cushioning that he received from black subjugated proletarian labor. In the early twentieth century going into the years of the great depression, many scholars argue that it was the white laborer that kept blacks out of the most powerful unions as well as limiting blacks in such areas as low cost housing. "No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man has a Job" and "Niggers, back to the cotton fields - city jobs are for white folks, " were slogans often espoused by white industrial laborers.

Such circumstances lead Du Bois to conclude that the Negro's fight to enter organized industry has made little headway. No Negro, no matter what his ability, can be a member of any [of] the railway unions. He cannot be an engineer, fireman, conductor, switchman, brakeman, or yardman. If he organizes separately, he may, as in the case of the Negro Firemen's Union, be assaulted and even killed by white firemen. As in the case of the Pullman Porter's Union, he may receive empty recognition without any voice or collective help.

What greatly reveals the illogical rift created by the process of the reconciliation of the American ideology of capitalism and the myth of American liberty is the refusal of white proletarians to combine their efforts with blacks against a common enemy, the American capitalist. This phenomenon will be to a greater and more prominent degree demonstrated during the years of industrialization, however this rift between the black sub-proletariat and the white proletariat is evident even at the start of Reconstruction. The white proletariat faced similar oppressive economic circumstances that black proletarians of the time faced. An example of the shared oppression of white proletarians and black proletarians is in the crop lien system of the South. This system is characterized by a lien mortgage being issued to poor white and black farmers for crops that are or will be planted. Randolph describes this system in this manner: The poor farmer being in need of provision for his family until harvest time, borrows money on his planted, and sometimes unplanted crop, from a big merchant or bank.

The rate of interest is so high, sometimes as high as 1000 per cent on the dollar. According to the comptroller of Currency John Skelton Williams, the farmer is unable to pay the interest to say nothing about the principal. The farmers inability to meet his note results in the loss of his farm. He then becomes a farm tenant and works upon the mtier system This crop-lien system is profitable to the bankers of the South.

Both white and black farmers are fleeced by this financial system. But blacks and white farmers wont combine against a common foe on account of race prejudice. Race antagonism, then is profitable to those who own the farms, mills, the railroads, and the banks. Randolph goes on to comment that "the capitalist want profits, they don't care who makes them for them. " The hand of the capitalist is seen throughout these developments. Yet again, In an article entitled Lynching: Capitalism Its Cause; Socialism its Cure, Phillip A.

Randolph assesses the role of the capitalist in this manner: Capitalism is upheld by the Republican and Democratic parties of the North, South, East and West. Neither Republican nor the Democratic Party has ever condemned peonage or lynching. They cannot. They are owned by capitalists The white church is paid to reach the Christianity of lynch law profits. The press is owned and controlled by the employing class and it is used to influence the minds of the races; to foment race hatred, it gives wide circulation to that insidious doctrine of the Negroes being the hewers of wood and drawers of water for white men. It features in bold headlines such titles as "lynch the black brute, "young white girl raped by black burly fiend, " etc.

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Research essay sample on Capitalism And African American History

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