It is a slow death — a painful death. The cause of death does not show up down in the Southern states anymore. Southern plantation owners have followed their money right here, up north to Minnesota.
The benefits? Southern plantation owners that relocate to Minneapolis don’t have to do a thing — overseers make their job very easy. There is something wrong in a city where some of the mo st well-spoken and educated Black people in the United States do not mutter a word about critical disparities in the Black community. I humbly turn my head to Minneapolis and the ongoing battle for justice, civil rights and the need to see results and remedies for what some say is a list of the worst post-slavery injustices in history.
We, Black people, do not need a study or report; the subduer and the subdued do not speak the same language. Killing Black people in Minneapolis can be done in 2015 without a rope, knife, gun or severe beating. White Minneapolis no longer has to use its White privilege to deny opportunities to Black people in Minneapolis.
The killing of Black Minneapolis has been outsourced to Blacks in Minneapolis who remain silent on every past and current issue for the last 15 years. In 2015, weapons of mass disruption to kill other Black men, women and families are education, economic opportunities and the abandonment of jobs, contract compliance and enforcement of that compliance. The lethal combination of silence and abandonment has killed more Blacks in Minneapolis than AIDS, cancer or heart disease.
Again, what I’m talking about is silence. An excellent comprehensive story written by the Star Tribune’s veteran writer Randy Furst titled, “Our Black-White jobless gap: Worst in the nation,” described a catastrophic breakdown in not only Black and White relations in Minneapolis, but also an economic disenfranchisement between a race of people that have been used for over 50 years to gain funding from local, state and federal agencies in the name of God and helping poor people. Still, there are no reports.
Solving poverty in Minneapolis has never been a priority; making payroll is. We also must look very closely at civil rights in Minneapolis. A solid comprehensive plan to address both internal and external problems must be looked into.
Yet, the silence still kills us. Some of our own have sold us like in the days of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Our (Black) people have become a multi-billion dollar cash-crop, disparity-ridden industry, much like trying to find a cure for a disease and watching a telethon year-after-year raising millions of dollars and still no word on a cure. Somebody’s getting paid while community members are getting played.
Black people in Minneapolis are perceived as a cure-less people, sold out by our own people, politicians and clergy who have backed us into a corner of submission and slavery and crushes new leadership. Disrespecting our strong Black women and marginalize those who do not drink the Kool Aid has just become a part of the norm.
Minneapolis’ Black community needs a reset.
Don Allen is founder of OurBlackNews.com. He welcomes reader responses to ibnnnews@gmail.com.
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