If you’re living off the grid summer is the best time to travel – less clothes to take, easier to hitch hike since more students are on the road, and you’d be surprised how much free food you can get if you know how to find a barbecque honoring a grad, dad, country or a vet, and that’s not even counting block parties.  Recently I have been traveling and I found myself in Washington, DC where I saw Laurence Fishburne at the Kennedy Center in the one-man bio drama Thurgood.  Just in case any next of kin ever read this, yes I wore a coat and tie.  And I was blown away.

Benito says he’d give back his JD, earned in the guilded halls of the ivy-league, if they would just relinquish his debt.  He calls the piece of paper worthless.  It is of course an understatement to say that Justice Marshall’s JD, earned in extremely more modest accommodations at a time where most law schools were still segregated was priceless, not just for him personally but for our country.  The play alludes to the fact that Justice Marshall saved up enough for tuition working in the service industry and that his mother sold her engagement ring and wedding band in order to help pay his way.  I know an author at the New York Times that would have frowned upon that.

Read on to find out why I think debt might be the new Jim Crow.

It is difficult not to tread into covered territory.  Benito just wrote about parents sacrificing to send their kids to school.  I wrote about HBCU’s about two months back.  So please forgive me if I get repetitive.

Fishburne portraying Justice Marshall stated that one of his early cases had to do with getting equal pay for African-American teachers in a segregated school system.  In a rare call home I was reminded that my own grandmother was a school teacher who NEVER received pay equal to whites and this was reflected in her virtually non-existent retirement well after the laws changed, and this lack of retirement transformed what would have been an inheritance for my mother into unpaid bills, bills which were coming at the same time that I needed help with tuition…help I eventually received in the form of a loan that to this day has gone unpaid, and has more than tripled with interest.  I don’t think my story is unique as far as the plight of African-Americans is concerned.

Now, with that in mind, let’s examine the purpose of Jim Crow.  If one accepts that the purpose of Jim Crow was to keep a race once held in bondage, as close to the state of bondage as possible, and in that sense Jim Crow was an evolution of the remnants of slavery…could this new debt regime be part of the evolution of Jim Crow? Something that is harder to attack through the courts and through marching?  It’s an established statistical fact that black families with equal incomes as white families are worth only a small fraction of what that white family is worth.  Tuition for both college and graduate school has grown far beyond what an individual can expect to earn prior to getting that education, thereby bringing generational wealth to the forefront and in a way resurrecting past discrimination to directly affect the first generation that never went to a segregated school.  And yes, this is the first generation of graduate school age that never attended  a segregated school.  Brown v. Board was 1952 but Boston was having desegregation type RIOTS in the 70’s.  We have a black president but his parents’ union was illegal in a number of states when he was conceived.  We haven’t come that far people.

Sorry I ramble.  Anyway, with me so far?  So, thanks to that meddlesome Justice Marshall we can go to school, but Beck, Palin, Coulter and the rest of the Klan want to hold us back.  How?  Well, we all know what a big deal it is when the first person in a family goes to, say college.  Why? Because that usually marks the beginning of when that family is able to accumulate wealth which is the beginning of freedom from an existence dominated by daily or weekly subsistence.  So, from the Klan’s perspective, it’s not the education so much as it is the wealth that is problematic, and what better way to destroy wealth than to assign debt?  Worst case scenario (again from the Klan perspective) is that the minority in question gets a good job and after three decades more or less breaks even and his children are regulated to the same, thereby preserving the massive inequality that exists today.  Best case scenario the minority has a hiccup in employment, or does public interest work, or has an illness in the family, can’t pay his loans and by the time he is 50 is in a worse situation financially than if he’d dropped out of high school at 15 and started working at the local fast-food chain or grocery store.

Sure this plan screws over poor whites, but poor whites have always suffered the residual side-effects of institutional racism.  Think any of the 15 year-old Confederate soldiers who died ever owned any slaves? Poor whites continue to be pawns of the system.  Borrowing heavily for school themselves they turn their anger toward African-Americans and resentment builds over the handful of blacks who benefit from scholarships or certain Affirmative Action programs…just like the elite power structure intended. 

It’s the same war.  As the enemy evolves battle becomes necessary on multiple fronts.  In the beginning their was one front, blue v. gray.  In the second act their was the courtroom front and the marching front.  Now the fronts are many. Debt is one of them.  Debt cannot be defeated with a musket, or a brief, or a sign with a catchy slogan.  I don’t know how we as the collective can defeat debt but I think the first step is awareness.