Oakland Effect: Scholar says 'black violence is the unfinished business of the post slavery period'

Oakland Effect: Scholar says 'black violence is the unfinished business of the post slavery period'

This is an excerpt from reporter Scott Johnson's blog, which focuses on the impact of violence and trauma on the community. Go to www.oaklandeffect.com for updates on his reporting.

When the architects of apartheid South Africa were drawing up their urban plans, they paid special attention to the highways. In the seaside city of Cape Town, for instance, the white rulers pushed tens of thousands of blacks and people of mixed racial ancestry out of the cities and into squatter camps several miles outside the city, in a barren wasteland that came to be known as the Cape Flats.

The government then built highways from the city center out to the flats and beyond. The idea was simple. In the event of an armed insurrection by the black majority, the South African army, controlled by the white minority, would be able to rush out along the highways with tanks and armored personnel carriers to crush the rebels.

Furthermore, when the government deigned to formalize the squatter camps and build proper homes for the residents, they also made sure to ring the camps with a Byzantine network of roads that encircled the population. There was one way in and one way out, and this too made it easier for government forces to crush would-be opponents. The flats were designed to be a sort of prison -- an open air prison, to be sure -- but a prison nonetheless.

The history of the white man's oppression of black people was the subject of a recent conversation I had with a professor at UCLA. His name is Boyd James. He's originally from Trinidad, and he speaks with a deeply resonant, Caribbean-inflected accent. These days he spends most of his time trying to understand why, as he put it, "black boys are constantly battling other black boys."


Boyd said he is fed up with theories about absentee fatherhood. He said countries where whites have systematically oppressed people of color are those where so-called black-on-black violence is the worst. He points to South Africa, Nigeria. And to the U.S.

"I've always believed that black violence is the unfinished business of the post slavery period," he said. "What we in the black community are not willing to face is what slavery has done to us. I won't leave out slavery in any work on violence."

Boyd James argues that slavery created a vacuum in this country, and that the vacuum is best defined as a "lack of connection of blacks with other blacks." He goes on to say that violence in the black community is a "normative engagement in the absence of creative activities." I asked him what this meant.

"When a set of factors in someone's life become chronic, it creates absences, and youth act out," he explained. "It's not that black youth want to be violent. But post traumatic stress makes you less capable of managing violence and more apt to do violence. You can't manage your right brain hemisphere affect. You can't manage extreme situations."

And, he added, many of the kids he works with have known nothing but extreme situations their whole lives.

"Did the people whose houses were destroyed in those recent tornadoes have a choice?" he asked me. "You can't talk to me about choice with some of these kids. The forces at work in their lives are that big, that out of control, they have no choice."

I told Boyd James his views would be controversial with many, and he agreed. He said he gets into arguments with his colleagues all the time.

"I'm flat out angry," he said. "I see a deliberate attempt to destroy black males in America. When you don't have a mother and father in a home regulating your expectations and your mood, and when you have these kinds of pressures, you become destructive."

I don't believe in everything Boyd James said. But I think it's interesting. Slavery was abolished in this country a long time ago. Are there remnants of it still entrenched in our systems? Probably. Is it insurmountable? Obviously not. By way of comparison, it is interesting to note that South Africa, where institutionalized slavery and oppression ended just 15 years ago, has become one of the most crime-ridden and dangerous not-at-war countries in the world. Fifty people are murdered every day there, and the vast majority of them are blacks or other people of color killing other blacks and other people of color.

I remember speaking with an academic there named Antony Altbeker, who wrote an analysis of the crime statistics called "A Country At War With Itself." He told me that there were many reasons for the violence. Some of it was economic. Some was just opportunistic. But much of it was unexpressed rage over centuries of maltreatment and oppression. There was no other explanation, he said. Until South Africa dealt with its past, the problems would continue.

America has dealt with much of its past. But it still has a ways to go. Or at least Boyd James thinks so.