Benign Neglect

History has proven that throughout human history, the existence of the people of Africa and the people of African descent were subject to a plan or strategy to eliminate and to destroy these people. One word will say it better – genocide! Europe’s entire history of what they call civilization is predicated on this theory. Please understand that the root word in civilization is civil and there is nothing civil about their past! It was clear as far back as history records that wherever those people found black people the end game was to enslave, segregate, oppress and attempts made to destroy these people and their culture. One can conclude that murder was the case.

It is well documented but never taught that when they discovered Africa, they pillaged the continent for its wealth and made commodities of the human souls living on the continent, then and now. When Cecil Rhodes went into Africa, supposedly to bring civilization to that land it was merely another plan to pillage because as he said there was nothing there, but oh, he knew there was plenty of wealth and knowledge there; so he and others like him capitalized on it.

This was the beginning of the slave masters mentality. Everywhere these people went on the planet; they did the same thing stole what was there, conquered and took its resources. Throughout the ages, these people came up with polite Bible sounding words to justify their evils, so the first step in the plan was to bring in missionaries and erase their belief systems, give them a Bible and a new God. In fact, that was the justification to sanction slavery. It was sanctioned by the church, especially the Catholic Church! It is clear when those people landed anywhere on the planet – they killed and murder the native population and replace them with Africans.

After slavery had been abolished, they came up with a new system of oppression gave it a new name segregation but still things were still the same. Moving forward about one hundred years when the African descendants in America began to demand what they had been promised through rebellion and riots; they came up with yet another plan called benign neglect. What that mean is they had promised the black people of America equality or something close, which they knew would never be realized or given to them – like freedom! So they came up with this scheme.

Benign neglect was a policy proposed in 1969 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was at the time on President Richard Nixon’s staff as an urban affairs adviser. While serving in this capacity, he sent the President a memo suggesting, “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.” They realized that these unfulfilled promises were the cause of riots and hostilities. So the plan was to stop promising, which caused hysterics, paranoids, and hostilities on all sides surrounding the issue of race. They needed a period in which black people’s progress would seem to continue and the racial rhetoric fades.

The policy was designed to ease tensions after the American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s. Moynihan was particularly troubled by the speeches of Vice-President Spiro Agnew. However, the policy was widely seen as an abandonment of urban neighborhoods, particularly ones with a majority black population, as Moynihan’s statements and writings appeared to encourage, for instance, fire departments engaging in triage to avoid a supposedly futile war against arson. They returned to the always proven plan that has worked for centuries – put the black church out front to say one day – wait on Jesus and you shall overcome!

A Rand Institute report suggested that many of the fires in the South Bronx and Harlem were arson, but subsequent analysis of the data did not back this up. Of the fires in buildings, only very few were arson, and that portion was not higher than the rate of proven arson found in wealthier neighborhoods. However, influenced by the report, Moynihan went on to make recommendations for urban policy based on the assumption that there was “widespread arson” in poverty-stricken neighborhoods in urban cities. To Moynihan, arson was one of much social pathology caused by large cities that would benefit from benign neglect.

The term is today more widely known as a type of laissez-faire policy, in which a lack of regulation or investment is allowed in the belief that it will improve, or at least not hurt, the interests of the “neglected” group. But in reality, the system would not promise this group anything, and therefore, they would not expect anything because there was no word spoken, coupled with gentrification problem solved. Benign neglect is also used as to mean divestment from under-served communities, with the implication that resources will be diverted to preferred communities, usually suburbs and white communities.

This strategy replaced what was Jim Crow and continues to manifest itself in every policy action concerning issues that face the African American Diaspora! And that’s my thought provoking perspective…