Legally Black, Illegally Black
Banned Histories of Race in America
Hugh Davis was a white man. Even so, on the 17th of September, 1630 the Virginia Assembly sentenced him to be whipped. What could get a white man whipped in Colonial Virginia, you might ask? Probably a lot of stuff, honestly, but certainly what you’re probably thinking. They said Davis had “abus[ed] himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro”. And so, the grand American tradition of “you wanna act like one, we’re gonna treat you like one” was officially established!
Having legally defined Black people as less than white, Virginia soon set a legal difference between white indentured servants and enslaved Black people, passed a hereditary slavery law and decriminalized the murder of enslaved people (They didn’t call it murder, of course, because you can’t murder property). In other words, according to Virginia law at the time, Black skin signified an inherited trait that demanded enslavement, worn by a creature only worthy of living so long as any given white man might allow.
For Black people, these laws meant such a dehumanizing lack of agency that the very idea of safety was incomprehensible. Not just safety from white people and white institutions, but safety from the elements as escaping slavery often meant living in the woods or on the street. In fact, not only was slavery one of the original causes of homelessness in this country, current statistics on homelessness reveal the active legacy of those original Virginia laws.
Black people are just about 14% of the population of this country, yet we make up 39% of the unhoused population. In my home state of Maine—the whitest state—Black folks make up just 2% of the population, yet five years ago we were 19% of the state’s unhoused. Two years ago, we grew to 26%. Last year we were 35%. This year Black people are 47.3% of the state’s unhoused population.
If you’ve listened to my podcast 99 Years, then you already know that Maine is the whitest state for some very deliberate reasons. One of those reasons is that that state’s biggest city, Portland operates under the city manager form of government, an anti-democratic white supremacist design created for the purpose of subjugating Black people. White supremacists in the Chamber of Commerce, the Press Herald and the KKK conspired to install the form of government in Portland nearly 100 years ago. The results are a segregated city with disproportionate Black poverty far worse than the rest of the state and country on average.
Last December the Portland mayor and city council named two of their top priorities as addressing housing/homelessness and viewing their work through a lens of racial equity and inclusion. As an institution designed with the sole purpose of attaining and preserving white supremacy, claiming to champion racial equity and inclusion feels a little… oh, I don’t know. Is there a word that means “disingenuous cruelty with a slight chance of hubristic naivety”?
It’s just that the unelected city manager runs the city, the city staff answers to the city manager and the city council and mayor – your “democratically elected officials”— have literally no power other than to lobby the city manager and staff. They literally don’t have the power to even fill a pothole, so promising to address anything at all, let alone problems their system perpetuates smacks of… I don’t know. Maybe callously Orwellian privilege-based corruption with the enthusiastic glaze of arrogant dumbfuckery? Again, I don’t really have the words.
How’s Portland been addressing the housing shortage and homelessness? Well, on May 16 the city appointed the interim city manager to permanent city manager. That same day, with shelters already at capacity and somehow without any other plan, the city swept an encampment of approximately 150 unhoused individuals. As far as how the housing shortage is going, Question A on the upcoming June 13 Portland city ballot was created by a local group of wealthy landowners and landlords in order to give them permission to rent gouge. If it passes, that’s exactly what will happen, which will inevitably lead to an even larger and more disproportionately Black unhoused population and on and on and on.
A repeating theme of American history is wealthy racists creating systems to hurt Black people. Because wealthy bigots don’t really care who else gets hurt in that process, Black people aren’t the only ones who suffer under these systems. It only stands to reason that replacing these racist systems would solve the problems of everyone who suffers under them. But you have to identify the problem before you solve it. Historically, those in power never quite seem ready to do that.