The second part of the definition of ENTITLEMENT is:
A right to benefits specified by law or contract. I will continue to say whites have no room to talk about how others have an entitlement mentality. I am now about to present why. Whenever the conversation is about race, inevitably we have to listen to a lecture about how whites were never given anything. I have been told how blacks should do things more like whites. That blacks need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. History shows these comments to be at best, a misstatement. Anyone making such a comment really needs to do an honest assessment of how whites actually accomplished what they have. I am not sure they want us as to do things the exact same way. Doing so would include creating laws to confiscate all property and money whites have, creating laws making it illegal for whites to educate themselves and pass laws making whites chattel. Just a few things to consider because there are many more and none of them are good. Some folks might want to slow down on the lectures. Let us look at a few examples of how benefits were granted as specified by law or policy.
In 1618, the Virginia colony passed "the Great Charter of privileges, orders and laws." Among these laws was a provision that any person who settled in Virginia or paid for the transportation of another person to settle in Virginia would get fifty acres of land for each immigrant. The right to receive fifty acres per person, or per head, was called a headright. It got even better for colonists as those who paid for slaves also got 50 acres per slave. The practice was continued by the government of Virginia after the Virginia Company dissolved. This procedure remained in effect for 161 years until May 1779. Headrights were not only limited to Virginia. The
headright system was used in Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Headrights were just the first of many government handouts of free stuff or guarantees providing whites with economic development assistance.
A right to benefits specified by law or contract. The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of this land. Included in the constitution is the 3/5th’s compromise. The Three-Fifths Compromise is found in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the
United States Constitution. It says:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
There are all kinds of stories telling us how the so called founders struggled for several years to figure out how to figure out how much of a person blacks would count as human in order to be determined for representation in congress. After all blacks could not be as human as whites, no way! Starting in 1783 our wise and omniscient founders began to try figuring out how to count slaves as population for representation. By 1787, they figured it out. This ridiculous “conclusion’ blacks did not agree to, allowed actual humans to count as 3/5th’s of a person because they were slaves. Whites still counted as whole people. Yet there were free blacks so the compromise would not have conferred entitlements just on whites, so according to white conservative Limbaugh logic, this renders my claims as simply a black man whining.
“This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
Thomas Jefferson
Let me keep on crying and show you another example. On March 26, 1790, the United States of America decided who could be a citizen of this country for the first time. This was a congressional decision named The Naturalization Act of 1790. The act states: “any alien, being a free white person,” could apply for citizenship, so long as he or she lived in the United States for at least two years, and in the state where the application was filed for at least a year. The new law also provided that “children of citizens of the United States that may be born … out of the limits of the United States shall be considered as natural born citizens.” Please notice the first 7 words. Only whites were entitled to be citizens of this country. Never mind the Native American nations already here. Blacks could forget about it. But hey “we’ve never been given anything because of our race.” Everybody knows you had better not be standing behind a horse when it raises its tail because you know what’s coming. When whites say the government has never given them anything, it’s the same stuff.
One of the greatest miscarriages of justice in this nation’s history was a direct rebuttal to the claim of all men are created equal called Dred Scott v. Sandford. I am not going into all the particulars of this case. I am not a law professional or legal expert. The court’s opinion says all you need to know. “A black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.” Just think about that one. Can anyone say special rights or extra rights? Because that is the end result of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Whites were given additional rights and special status while blacks had no rights and no constitutional protection by law. I guess the equal protection clause did not apply to blacks at that time. But hey, that’s just how they thought back then. Funny how that rationale is not applied to Nat Turner since the slaves back then thought about killing whites who enslaved them.
"But not only did they give them land, "they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms."
"Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to
farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with, and this is the reality."
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
There was a series of acts in beginning in 1850 that primarily provided whites with one of the greatest government economic assistance programs ever. They were called the Homestead Acts. These acts gave 600,000 families or 1.6 million Americans land basically for free as incentive to move west.
“And be it further enacted, That to all white male citizens of the United States or persons who shall have made a declaration of intention to become such, above the age of twenty-one years, emigrating to and settling in said Territory between the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty, and the first day of December, eighteen hundred and fifty-three; and to all white male citizens, not hereinbefore provided for, becoming one and twenty years of age, in said Territory, and settling there between the times last aforesaid, who shall in other respects comply with the foregoing section and the provisions of this law, there shall be, and hereby is, granted the quantity of one quarter section, or one hundred and sixty acres of land, if a single man; or if married, or if he shall become married within one year after becoming twenty-one years of age as aforesaid, the quantity of one half section, or three hundred and twenty acres, one half to the husband and the other half to the wife in her own right, to be designated by the surveyor-general as aforesaid: Provided always, That no person shall ever receive a patent for more than one donation of land in said Territory in his or her own right: Provided, That no mineral lands shall be located or granted under the provisions of this act.”
The Donation Land Claim Act of 1850, Section 5
This act gave FREE land to whites to settle in what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming and Montana. This land was given away from 1850 until 1854. In 1854 the government decided to charge 1.25 per acre. The law expired in 1855. In addition, several government programs were created to help whites in this westward expansion.
For those who do not understand the reality of how the past extends into today, I present you the Morrill Act of 1862. Early American society and the economy was based on agriculture. In the mid-1800s, the U.S. population was over 80 percent rural. So as Dr. King so eloquently described, the government saw the need to provide education and services to assist whites moving west in order to help them survive on the free land the government provided. Because of that the United States Congress passed the Morrill Act of 1862 better known as the Land Grant Act. The act gave each state 30,000 acres of land per senator that was to be used to provide education in agriculture, home economics, mechanical arts, and any other profession available during that time period in American history. They used the grants of land to build colleges, thus Land Grant colleges are one result of the Morrill Act.
The Homestead Acts began more than one decade before the end of slavery. This alone should provide evidence of the limited benefit this act had for blacks in America. The overturning of Field Order 15 by President Andrew Johnson also reduced the positive effect such land grants would have provided for blacks. The 1863 Homestead Act provided that a person had to be a citizen in order to qualify and blacks were not given citizenship until 1866. But the major impediment for blacks in regard to homesteading was the lack of documentation. This lack of documentation was due to slavery. Many of the newly freed slaves did not have the documents needed to prove their identity, such as birth certificates. Blacks were able to get the documentation after registering for citizenship once freed but that documentation was not considered proof by whites This was one method whites at that time used in order to restrict the freedmen from acquiring status.
After a lifetime of slavery it should be noted that many freed blacks did not have complete knowledge of the law. Because it was illegal for blacks to read or write, it should not be surprising that many blacks did not have the documents needed or the ability to write wills in order to pass down land ownership to succeeding generations. If land was not specifically passed down to named people, the property would go to all of the next in line, and they could sell their land without informing anybody else. This inability to provide documents proving identity made it hard for newly freed slaves to gain ownership of land and many other things. The disingenuous argument is made declaring how blacks could homestead, but that argument will not recognize or mention the impediments blacks faced in order to do so. These impediments limited blacks, yet it did not stop them. In a lot of cases white violence did.
Needless to say, blacks were not allowed to attend many Morrill Act institutions. So in order to combat this, the U.S Congress came up with the Agricultural College Act of 1890, (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.) or easier remembered as the Morrill Act of 1890. Signed on August 30, 1890, the Second Morrill Act made it so that black Americans could be admitted into Land Grant Colleges. States having separate colleges for blacks and whites were required to create colleges to train black students in agriculture, mechanical arts, and architecture just like whites. This law created some of the Americas legendary HBCU’S, but until desegregation became the law, black land grant colleges were not equally funded. These land grants established white economic advancement and as Dr. King said, they established an economic floor for the European immigrants that entered America. At the same time blacks were freed from slavery and that economic floor was ripped out from under them thanks to President Andrew Johnson.
On April 16, 1895, the United States Supreme Court rendered one of the sorriest decisions in American history. It was known as Plessy vs. Ferguson. From this decision came the principle of separate but equal. This decision was steeped in racism because it determined that blacks were not worthy to be in the same facilities and that racial segregation was fine just as long as equal facilities existed for blacks. So while whites believed blacks were inferior, they were supposed to make certain that blacks and whites had equal facilities even if the races were to stay apart. States made certain to enforce the separate part, but the equal never came. Not for blacks. For whites though, it was an entirely different story. Black public facilities were often cheaply built and blacks schools were underfunded. Black communities lacked amenities white communities had.
Does she know that you have such a low opinion of black people in general?
