There is a RAGING debate starting on YouTube about who should and shouldn't be allowed to consider himself or herself a 'American descendant of slaves' or #ADOS.
Because of the traditionally-unsavoury history of being identified as "black" in the United States, there are many who share the appearance of what are now called "African-Americans", but, are normally reluctant to accept the title.
That seems to have suddenly changed in some circles, ever since four events which were, in order:
(1) The appearance of 2020 Democratic Primary candidate Corey Booker on a syndicated radio program out of New York City called 'The Breakfast Club'
(2) The later appearance of 2020 Democratic Primary candidate Kamala Harris on that same radio program. [Kamala is pronounced like "Pamela" but with a 'K' rather than a 'P.']
(3) The announcement of Marianne Williamson's 2020 Democratic Primary candidacy that includes a long-debated, long-awaited (link to YouTube!)policy about payment of reparations to black American descendants of American slavery; and ;
(4) The allegation by various mainstream media (heretofore: "MSM")outlets that any time users of social media sites like Twitter saw the hashtag #ADOS (American descendants of slaves) that there wasn't a real person behind the post but, instead, a Russian 'bot' or algorithm, rather than a real person.
Subsequent to these events, the real persons behind the #ADOS hashtag took to YouTube and revealed themselves and began to explain why they created the hashtag. Those persons were Antonio Moore and Yvette Carnell, who undoubtedly embarrassed and discredited the MSM by simply announcing their presence, the well-documented use of that hashtag, and, the fact that they were living, breathing African-American's, denying any affiliation with Russia and confirming that they were not 'bots.'
The response among the black community to the performances of Corey Booker and Kamala Harris on 'The Breakfast Club' was mixed.
Mainstream media is immensely popular, and a lot of people prefer the chicken nuggets of outlets like Fox, CNN and MSNBC to the 'coq au vin' of independent news outlets like Kyle Kulinski, Kim Iversen, Jimmy Dore, David Pakman and the like.
The jury is still out on the performance of Marianne Richardson, and the show has not, and may not, interview other Democratic candidates like Tulsi Gabbard, Amy Klobuschar, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang.
However, now, all of a sudden, after the launch of Marianne Williamson's policy platform, everybody with any esoteric claim to 'blackness' is suddenly "vying for social consideration from others as being #ADOS.
On one side of the debate, you have people advocating for what might be called 'colorism' (i.e. I have dark skin...therefore I am black and entitled to something because of that).
On the other side of the debate, you have people advocating for the lineage of a person, actual descendancy from someone living in the slave-era American south prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (or some other historical marker such as the Emancipation Proclamation) to be the determining factor.
There are a number of 'characters' in this play, and, in order to understand how they interact with each other, they should first be clearly delineated. They are the:
- History and nature of slavery itself
- Quality (or lack thereof)of record keeping of who were and weren't slaves; and
- Evolution of the moniker "African-American" and why it has been advocated as politically correct.
- Origin and reasoning behind the creation of the hashtag #ADOS; and
- Debate over who should (or shouldn't) be allowed to identify as 'descendants of slaves' and, therefore, use this hashtag (#ADOS) in reference to themselves.
What is 'Reparations'
At its core, 'slavery' is an unresolved labor dispute.
"Reparations", as it were, is a reference to a promise made to freed slaves when the anti-slavery 'North (blue) defeated the pro-Slave South (gray) in the American Civil War that ran from 1861 to 1865. At the end of that war, the victorious North, in association with the declaration of slaves as 'free persons' promised every previously enslaved black farmer 40 acres of land and a mule as a kick start for economic recovery from enslavement.
To this day, that payment has never occurred, and, aside from adjustments for inflation, the very nature of this pre-industrial-revolution promise would have to be re-examined and adapted to modern currency to be implemented, and even the appropriateness of that offer would likely be reexamined.
What Was American 'slavery'?
As it is commonly understood, there was a trans-Atlantic slave trade that started in the 1600s, which involved shipping unwilling humans, held in bondage, to America. These people were abducted by fellow Africans, in western Africa, primarily in the areas around what is known today as nations like Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Liberia. They were then shipped to the American south to be used as involuntary farm labor and house hands, in industries such as cotton, tobacco and fruit production.
Despite the focus on labor, there was also a social order that grew from this which rendered these slaves virtually invisible members of this new society under indisputably-appalling work conditions that are now known as sexual harassment or rape, physical assault, corporal punishment and murder, at the whim of what would, today, be considered "employers."
This new social order defined certain people as 'negro' or 'black' and, having been labeled such, made them classified as slaves due to this physical trait. The traditional definition of 'black' or 'negro' was determined by something called the 'One Drop Rule' which proposed that anyone who had "even one drop" of 'black' or 'negro' blood in them was, effectively, tainted and therefore 'black.'
How Did Skin Color Affect Labor Assignments?
Because this arrangement was a social construct, and because female slaves were sexually exploited, people were born of varying shades of brown, and, depending on the whims and whimsies of the plantation owner, allowed to work in more privileged positions. Accordingly, people with lighter skin were made 'house slaves' (folding napery, washing dishes, setting tables, cooking, etc.) and given labor tantamount to what one might have seen in the servant class on the popular television series Downton Abbey.
Darker slaves, however, were typecast as intellectually inferior and assigned hard outdoor labor.
The most popularly-referenced depiction of this arrangement is a television mini-series called 'Roots' based on the book by Alex Haley, which appeared on free-to-air television in the United States during the late 1970's. Even to this day, much of 'black' culture's understanding of what slavery was is informed by that television series, including a difficult-to-watch portrayal of a young African adult male called 'Kunta Kente' who is whipped in front of his family while hanging from a rope until he is made to relent and accept that he has been renamed, as an adult, "Toby" by his new master, rather than his original African-American name.
Literacy rates were deliberately kept low, so that blacks couldn't participate in the legal processes of life or government and could be easily controlled. This, combined with the requirement to only speak English, despite the absence of education results in the sort of pidgin English that you hear even today.
It's why people say, "Let me axe you a question," instead of, "Let me ask you a question."
To this day, this is why you see 'black Americans' who carry names like Williams, Jones, Smith, etc., despite physically looking like people who are still, and always have been, residents of places in and around Ghana, Ivory Coast or Liberia.
Below is a photo of the Ivory Coast football team in orange tops and white shorts. On mere appearance, they could easily be mistaken for African-Americans in, say, Florida.
The Moniker "African-American"
It was in about the early 80's that the term "African-American" came into use in the United States.
As you can see from the picture below, the word Negro preceded it. By the 20th Century, the word 'colored' took hold. I recall my grandmother often telling a joke, over and over, as elderly people tend to repetitively do, that a black man said to a white man, "When you get scared, you turn white. When you're embarrased, you turn red. When can't breathe, you turn blue. So, why is it that you call ME 'colored'?"
Well, throughout the late 70's, Jesse Jackson championed an effort to 're-brand' blacks, by giving black Americans a name that was attached to a place, rather than merely a color. To some, calling people simply a color made it seem like that color was the product of some sort of illness or defect.
Meanwhile, people who willingly migrated to the United States knew exactly where they came from, when and why, leading to family folklore that in which black Americans couldn't share. People exchanged charming stories of life in 'the old country.' They identified as Italian-American or Irish-American or Lithuanian-American.
Others were just 'black.' It wasn't perceived as human ethnicity. It was received like some sort of rare, genetic and perhaps even contagious, 'skin condition.'
So, to humanize the 'black' person, the term 'African-American' was adopted in the early 80's. It couldn't be said what country within Africa. that ancestor came from, what port they were shipped to, or anything like that; but, at least it pointed to a continent.
Fast-forward to 2019, and people are having their ancestry tested through DNA hoping to be told what 'tribe' they come from, or, at least so they believe.
Self-Hate/Self-Pity and Other Intergenerational Psychological Trauma
Slavery promoted the social dynamics of a leper colony.
That thinking might very well be what was behind popular bans on blacks swimming at the same beaches and swimming pools. It simply wasn't understood on these shores that this was a natural physical trait that belonged to millions of people.
Some people still, today, carry a kind of self-pity or self-hatred that, to be fair, should probably be dealt with as part of anything like a financial settlement. Some would say that this deeply ingrained mindset is what led even Michael Jackson to make the cosmetic changes to himself that he made, despite clearly being loved by millions of people all over the world.
Look at the rapper Lil Kim.
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/pictures/lil-kim-how-her-face-has-changed-w204002/
Black hair care companies continue to this day to sell African Americans hair-straightening products because people aren't comfortable with their own looks.
There is even a debate about the family dynamics in African-American communities centered around a document that is either real or, depending on who you ask, an urban legend. The document is called the Willie Lynch letters, which is a document that purports to be the writings of a slave owner on how to break down male slaves in front of their families so as to garner the fear, respect and unvarying cooperation of his wife and children.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lynch_speech
These sorts of intangibles are the kinds of things that make African-Americans who DID come from slavery uncomfortable with the idea that someone who grew up in a country where one's African appearance was NOT necessarily rare or the 'minority.'
The Hashtag #ADOS
In what I would describe as the roots of the YouTube community, three people have been advocating a distinction between black-Americans and other people in the United States, especially immigrants, who also identify as "black."
It is for people who have the backstory that I described above that I would argue that the entire concept of 'reparations' was created. If you got off of a plane at JFK airport in Queens with your parents holding your arm, while you had a teddy bear in one arm and a Rubik's cube in the other, this is not about you.
I don't care if you're skin is black as the Ace of Spades. This is not about you.
I don't care if the KKK itself burned your house down in upstate New York, where slavery was never legal. You have a case with your municipal government or your state.
Reparations is about southern slavery and the promises made to people residing in those states at the close of the American Civil War.
It's about the enactment of the 13th Amendment, to make prison labor out of what was formerly slave labor, as an economic remedy to the southern states' loss of free labor due to losing the war.
Sensible debate over who should be allowed to identify as 'descendants of slaves' and, therefore, use this 'hashtag' in association with themselves would likely center around how much documentation is realistcally available to connect recipients of this historical identity and/or any financial benefits that may come from it, to THOSE EVENTS.
The US Government may or may not have a duty to pay descendants of slaves. That is a separate discussion for the nation itself to have. I think we can all agree, though, that it does not have an obligation to pay people simply because said person identifies as 'black' even if credibly so.
Record Keeping
Because black Americans missed out on so many educational opportunities over the centuries, and didn't earn compound interest on any investments, you won't find any black Mellons, DuPonts, Kennedys, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, Rockefellers and the like. "We don't own railroads," the argument goes.
In many cases, even who the original slave ancestor was isn't noted. More meticulous records were kept of certain breeds of dogs and cows than of so-called 'black' humans.
To me, the idea that someone who didn't go through all of this would even THINK of trying to write themselves into the discussion about reparations, having arrived in a post-Civil-Rights legislation America is absolutely foul. It seems to me that, at a minimum, someone should have to be able to attach their descendancy to a resident or citizen identifiable as 'black', 'colored' or 'negro', living or born in a Civil War state, prior to the 1968 Civil Rights Act, and that seems extremely generous to me.
It only depends on the ability to get one's hands on birth certificates of 2-3 generations that are far more likely to have been created at birth and in a medical facility, required for census purposes to print one.
None of this is to say that what others experienced in other countries might not have been equally horrific or oppressive. It is simply to say that any reparations for those events are the business of citizens of THAT COUNTRY. To try to muscle in on what happened to American 'blacks' simply on the basis of skin color seems criminal to me.