The Actual Problem

The descendants of Black-Africans in global diaspora are survivors of a 500-year legacy of legalized systemic racial oppression – slavery, segregation, colonization, and criminalization – that continues to impede the progress and survival of African (Black) people, particularly in the United States, though the oppression of Black people is so deeply rooted that anti-Black racism thrives worldwide, even within communities of color.

For the record, here are the actual problems:

This era of history has included genocide,
terrorism,
miseducation,
political & economic disenfranchisement,
cultural theft,
re-enslavement and
psychological trauma (this list is not exhaustive).

All of this is the foundation for people of African decent living in the most devastating present-day circumstances of all ethnic groups in the US and world.

These are the outcomes of said problems (note, some of these numbers are debatable):
8.8% (highest) unemployment rate;
6% of the wealth (lowest) of a White household;
41.5% (lowest) home ownership rate;
68% (lowest) rate of marriage by age 46…

This list could go on to include highest incarceration rates, lowest life expectancy rates, widest opportunity gap rates, etc. Several social entrepreneurs frame these statistics as the problem, but they are not. These statistics are symptoms, or more specifically, yields of the legalized oppression that proceeded.

Considering all of the atrocities African-Americans experienced over hundreds of years, the actual problem is that this era of history has not included any space or time for healing the very real psychological traumas African people have been subjected to in the past and present; even though this trauma is academically legitimate and international examples exist of where such trauma has been acknowledged. Additionally, African-Americans still have not had access or resources to a reconnect to the history and heritage that preceded the enslavement of their ancestors, which is foundational to uprooting the intergenerational psychological impacts of slavery. In fact, African and African American history is virtually absent from K-12 schools. How does a Black child see herself outside of white supremacy if her history starts with White enslavers and African slaves? Beyond this, there has not been fair grounds to reconstruct Black family units, which are the critical building blocks for neighborhoods, communities, institutions and aggregating resources that serve the needs of African-Americans. By not addressing these problems, the root problems, we will continue to see the same statistics (symptoms).