White America – The Real Welfare Queens

ATLANTA, Georgia, U.S.A – Jeb Bush, the aspiring white Republican candidate for president, boomed to a crowd in South Carolina this week that Republicans could attract more African-Americans with a message of “hope and aspiration,” and not with promises of “free stuff” — a phrase that echoed comments made by another Republican, Mitt Romney, during and after his 2012 bid for president.

“Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” he said. “It isn’t one of division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff. Our message is one that is uplifting — that says you can achieve earned success.”

To many African Americans, the idea of ‘free stuff’ has been used by white conservatives, especially in the Republican Party, who disparage the African American community because they are by and large in support of socialist government policies – a universal single payer policy for healthcare, reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases, government reigning in on out-of-control student debts, and responsible policing.

Many African American community leaders have long argued that such policies have worked in Europe and they have also worked in the United States shortly after World War II to reduce poverty and in addition, these programs have increased access to affordable healthcare and education to the majority of Americans. Although those opportunities and the progress thereof were not, and have not been granted African Americans to the same extent that people of European descent have benefitted from them.

However, when politicians like Jeb Bush – and his father H. W. before him, and his brother W. before him – scold the African American community for ‘voting for leaders who give them free stuff’, they are referring not only to these socialist policies that have a wide support amongst Blacks, but they speak of welfare.

Somehow, Republican politicians have managed to convince their constituents that only African Americans benefit from the Federal Government Welfare system. The fact is, more white Americans are on welfare even though whites, by far, receive the largest and the most disproportionate share that the world has ever known of American earnings.

Abetted only by frantic white corporate competition, federal government accommodation, and just-in-time distribution advances, mass consumption has been and continues to be the dominant feature of the white American psyche. Europeanized American culture has rapidly changed accordingly. Consumption has been a frenzy and an end in itself for most of America.

But the pantomime of African Americans queuing for ‘free stuff’ has energized the Republican family base to the extent that not a single politician currently campaigning for election would explain to the base, or could escape its ridiculous grip, or muster courage to confess that these sentiments about African American ‘welfare queens’ and the gifting of ‘free stuff’ to Blacks are all by any extent of the stretch of the human imagination, patently false and even ungodly.

The asinine branding of whole communities of Blacks hence continues to dictate most agendas by local governments and even the federal government of the US wherever and whenever any white American who believes these gushes has any type of influence in them.

Whose free stuff?

What the majority of the Republican ignobles, together with most of America and their soft believes in these rigmaroles, do not seem to recall is that America’s Wealth itself is based on Black America’s free labor.

African slaves built America, and they did it by force and for free. So let’s face it. Whose free stuff? Today’s white Americans, Republicans in particular, are as much beneficiaries of that slave system that has put so much wealth in the hands of the ungrateful few. These Americans, not Black America, are the beneficiaries of a welfare state that for more than four centuries was based on the blunt exploitation of African Americans.

Together with the rest of the western world, Jeb Bush and his fellow Rednecks now obey the precepts of commerce. A bloody demanding religion, to be thoroughly precise. The do’s and don’ts change every season and none wants to be left out. This sort of rhetoric about Blacks continuously change to suit a function, a single aim. Maximum consumption.

White America, when it insults African Americans for wanting ‘free stuff’ is only engaging in on milking them even further. From the cradle to the grave. Face it.

Today’s American Prison Industrial Complex easily comes to mind. The War on Drugs started by the infamous Republican, Ronald Reagan, and exacerbated by the other Redneck Democrat, Bill Clinton, has shackled more African Americans in prison than all of the centuries of slavery that put Blacks in bondage.

America has the largest prison population per capita than any nation that has graced this humble planet. The vast majority of these unfortunate people are African Americans. Prisoners in America earn on average $0.40 an hour for any hard or menial work that America’s capitalists present. So, who’s getting free stuff?

Lest we forget, most of these people are thrown in prison for no apparent crime. More than two-thirds of American prisons are filled with human beings with no record of a violent past. That means, these people posed no threat or danger to nobody or anybody’s property. But they are kept handcuffed in order that they can be forced to work essentially for free, gifting the American economic system, which it likes to call capitalism, free labor – free stuff.

America itself, by all intents and purposes, is not a capitalist regime. It has been as much a welfare system based solely on the exploitation of Blacks and their labor. It still is a welfare state that continues to imprison, criminalize Black bodies and then exploit them for the continued sustenance and maintenance of white American greed and capitalism.

So the facts must be straightened. The ‘free stuff’ Jeb Bush and his fellow Rednecks refer to, that Republicans like to refer to, to portray African Americans as ‘lazy’ and always ‘looking for a handout’ is most appropriately the racist looking in the mirror. It is white America that is lazy. It is white America that continues to ask for free stuff. It is white American that seems incapable of coming off the free dose of stuff and pushes everyone else in the world to accept capitalism while they bask in their welfare states built on the exploitation of Black bodies.

Whose free stuff? It is solely white America advancing disproportionately from the free stuff they continue to extract by force from African American bodies – slavery, Jim Crow, and Mass Incarceration – and the African resources they gallivant the continent collecting, while threatening responsible African leaders with the Atomic Bomb.

What free stuff? White America are the Welfare Queens.