American blacks have embraced, adopted and accepted "new age racism" - the popular view of blacks as inherently criminal and responsible for their oppressed status - thereby absolving "the system" of primary responsibility for failing blacks, according to author Elaine Brown, who spoke Wednesday night in MacMillan Hall.
A founder and former leader of the Black Panther Party and the author of "The Condemnation of Little B" and "A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story," Brown is a prominent political and social activist for the poor and the black community.
Brown used the tale of "Little B," Michael Lewis, a 13-year-old boy from Atlanta who was charged with murder in 1997 and tried as an adult, to illustrate the concept of "new age racism."
Lewis' mother, a prostitute and crack addict, was declared unfit to raise him when he was 11 years old. He was put into a group home but then ran away and dropped out of school to work for a drug dealer. He was sentenced to life in prison at 14.
Lewis was called a "thug" and "super-predator" and associated with a growing movement to identify the "black criminal" as the scapegoat for problems with black America today, Brown said.
"The notion of the black criminal is part of the racist view we have begun to embrace and accept," said Brown. "Children should not be tried as adults, and the United States is the only country which does this."
She contrasted Lewis' case with that of Kip Kinkel, a 17-year-old Oregon student who killed both of his parents and three classmates in 1998. Instead of typifying young white adolescents as "thugs" and "criminals," community members tried to understand why he had committed the crime, hanging a sign in front of the school reading, "Why Kill?" He was just "a kid who went bad that day," she said.
"There are millions of Little B's," Brown said, kids who live in ghettoes where the only economy is drugs and "there are no Whole Foods, public libraries or movie theaters."
The United States has the largest prison population in the world, 50 percent of which is black, she said. Black infant mortality is double that of whites, and blacks have the lowest rate of house ownership and earn less than 1 percent of business revenues in the United States.
"How does this go on?" she asked. "How is it that we can still be in this state in the United States of America?"
Brown criticized former President Bill Clinton as "a racist from Little Rock" for a 1993 speech admonishing black Americans for the destruction of the family and the breakdown of values. Clinton was blaming victims like Lewis, when "the breakdown of the black family started in 1620" with the arrival of the first slaves, she said.
"We need to try to work towards a world (in which) there is an equitable distribution of wealth and resources" Brown said.
Brown chided the conventional idea of success in the black community, which she said was merely attaining a job and living in a leased house. "For me the saddest thing is how little we want," Brown said. "All we want is a job."
Brown said she was saddened that to succeed, blacks feel they need to become part of the U.S. consumer culture. "Our whole relationship to success has become how well we fit into a scheme we have no control over and we have not designed," she said.
Brown responded to questions after she spoke. Asked why some blacks had voted for George W. Bush in the 2004 Presidential election, she said, "You had some Negroes that got paid out of that faith-based money to promote the Bush agenda. I think there were some sell-out preachers." Asked for her views on hip hop, she said it has both positive and negative aspects, but "it is the only place where young blacks have a voice."
Rebecca Dumas '05 said she campaigned to bring Brown to campus after reading "The Condemnation of Little B." The lecture was sponsored by several campus groups, including Students for Sensible Drug Policy, the Sarah Doyle Women's Center and the Center for Race and Ethnicity.
At the end of her lecture, Brown implored students not to sit by and allow continuing racial and economic inequality. "Sartre said hell is a place where by design, nobody gets his needs met," she said. "America has become that hell."
