<p>During the first presidential debate of the 2016 election, Republican nominee Donald Trump asserted that black people live in hell, which struck me as an odd statement. I am a native of Louisiana, and my family&#39;s roots run deep here. Louisiana skews how I read the Republican nominee&#39;s comments because the black community has a far more complicated reality here than in other parts of the country. As a black man here, I don&#39;t have to look far for the black community or culture. Louisiana is the most Africanized of all the states in the Union; meaning, that the language, music, food and philosophies that pervade here are all infused with blackness and direct derivatives of black culture. Black culture in Louisiana is unapologetically black.</p>
<p>Trump enunciated a view of black culture and communities that is common and has served as the historical frame by which large segments of white America conceptualize us: we are either savages or an endangered species. If seen as savages, black people are the criminal element in American society. We steal more, rape more, and kill more than other groups. Our communities are impoverished war zones because self-destruction is pathological in black culture. If seen as an endangered species, black people are in danger of going extinct because of liberal policies that ruined black communities with welfare and destroyed the black family. Both of these views center around the black-on-black homicide rate, which is the leading cause of death for black men between 15 and 35 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as evidence that black people are savages or endangered, depending on your point of view. Both of these views are expressions of the same ideology: &quot;The White Man&#39;s Burden.&quot;</p>
<p>&quot;The White Man&#39;s Burden&quot; is an old imperialistic world view that charged white people with the civilizing of the savage and endangered nonwhite peoples of the world. Another word for this is &quot;paternalism&quot; and it has long been an undercurrent in how America has framed black people. The savage-endangered binary is rooted in a view that black communities are dysfunctional. The Republican nominee&#39;s major policy measure for dealing with black crisis is to spread New York City&#39;s infamous stop-and-frisk policies nationwide, despite them having been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. District Court. To be clear, this is tantamount to saying &quot;the only way to save black people is to treat them all like criminals.&quot; With the recent killings of black people by various police departments under dubious circumstances, this is a puzzling policy suggestion until you remember that Trump&#39;s view of black people is inherently paternalistic.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Black communities are not dysfunctional. They are oppressed. Those are two radically different concepts. Dysfunction assumes that these communities are inherently flawed and need outside intervention in order to embrace the modern world and its mores. But black communities and by extension black culture is not dysfunctional. Black America, in the more than 400 years it has existed in North America, has created art, music, philosophy, science and political thought that easily compares with &nbsp;any civilization anywhere in the world. The prevailing notion and vocabulary of social justice in the United States and abroad is rooted in the Civil Rights Movement. Our cultural products are embraced and emulated in every corner of the world. Black America&#39;s problem is not dysfunction; the problem is that we have been targeted by policies designed to subjugate us for most of our history in the United States. We did not impose this poverty, mass incarceration and collapsing infrastructure on ourselves. Still, our communities are not hell &mdash; despite the United States taking every measure it could to ensure that they would be.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Black people have handled their oppression with a grace that is uncommon in human history. In spite of more than 400 years of active oppression in the territory that would later become the United States, black people have never embraced violent opposition. Our crime rates are no more disparate than any other groups. We do not need to be saved from ourselves. We need to be emancipated from systems that punish us for being what we are.</p>
<p>Nicholas Mitchell is a research fellow specializing in racism at the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2016/10/black_communities_arent_hell_t.html">ORIGINAL ARTICLE&gt;&gt;</a></p>