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Chapter 16
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The hunger - and the reasons for it - which I had seen around
the bank man were not unique. Countless black children are exposed to mental and intellectual
destruction due to prenatal or childhood hunger. In many areas the mortality rate of black children between 1
and 12 months old is 8 to10 times higher than the white one. In comparison,
the black infant mortality rate was only twice as high as the white one during
chattel slavery (just as it is nationwide today).
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In other words, more than
6,000 black babies are dying yearly because they do not have access to white
health and nutritional care. Or even worse: more than 8,000 black babies would
not die each year if they had access to the free national health care, with
cash benefits, maternity aid, and weekly home visits by nurses both before and
after birth, which we take for granted in a capitalist country like Denmark.
New York Times revealed in 2005 that infant mortality is still higher in
America than in Cuba - a poor Communist country.
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But when in the 80's I looked at the official statistics to
find out
how many actually die from hunger, I did not find many, which at first
surprised me as I had seen listless, anemic children everywhere. But
malnutrition reduces the body's resistance to disease. Death from hunger will
therefore on a death certificate be explained away as, for instance, pneumonia.
Everywhere in the South I saw these little epitaphs hidden away in the fields.
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Actual death represents only the sad visible tip of the
iceberg. Millions of black children have been exposed to the danger of
irreversible brain damage from prenatal and childhood hunger, which also
results in indolence, apathy, alienation, and unemployability - a vicious
circle that afflicts depressed people also in the Third World.
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Usually it is difficult to get close to such sullen, withdrawn
children, since they are unbelievably fearful of strangers. Photographing
hunger is difficult since only a few of the fearful children are visibly
emaciated. Most of the malnourished become overweight instead, because they
have to eat a lot of carbohydrates in order to get enough protein.
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Over and over again in poor shacks I ate cornbread, grits, and
baked beans with a few lumps of fat. In better off homes I had more traditional
soul food: ham knuckles, hog maw, chitterlings, pigs' ears, feet, and tails,
and similar fat crumbs from the white man's table.
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But hundreds of thousands today get even less than the 3½
pounds of pork and bacon a field hand received weekly under chattel slavery.
Such a diet makes people lethargic and leaves them open to all kinds of
diseases, which is one reason why life expectancy for blacks is seven years
shorter than for whites.
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There is no excuse for hunger in a developed country. For -
unlike racism - poverty and hunger are entirely the result of our vote. Senate
hearings on malnutrition in the 70's stated repeatedly that "this tragedy cannot
be permitted to continue."
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Yet since the early 80's Americans have voted to further increase
the huge gap between rich and poor and expand the silent army of hungry to more
than 20 million. The
problem is that most Americans are unable to see the hunger. During the years I
have traveled I have found them increasingly blaming the victims for their lethargic
behavior, rather than Federal lethargy.
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They seem to forget that all the countries with most equality
and thus no or little hunger -
such as Denmark, Sweden and Japan - achieved the highest economic growth in the
world during the entire 20th century.
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The result has not only been sudden widespread homelessness in
the U.S., but a hunger which - according to a Harvard study - has reached the
worst dimensions since the depression with more than 22 million people going
hungry.
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Starvation also drives many to eat dirt. Many black women in Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina eat
clay even in the 90's according to New York Times.
This woman, listless and
exhausted from anemia, led me to the slope where she usually dug for the "food"
which she shared with her son.
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-Do you ever eat dirt?
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Sometimes...
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Does it taste good?
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Yes. (With surprise) Have you never eaten it?
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No, but I would like to try. What do you call it?
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We call it sweet dirt...
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- I thought it was called Mississippi mud. That's what they call
it up North. (Many blacks in the North still have it mailed from relatives in
the South).
- Do
you ever eat laundry starch?
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- Sometimes.
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Who else eats dirt around here?
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My mother and my aunt up in the white house. Everybody, I think.
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The personal encounter with the constant whining, restlessness, and snotty
noses of those children who cry incessantly because they go to bed hungry,
seems almost a relief and infinitely preferable to the empty eyes and dead
silence of those children whom hunger has made so apathetic that they are no
longer able to cry.
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Can one really imagine just how such a hunger throughout history
has been stamped into the mind of black America?
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What effect
does it have upon the soul of a people who must look on all the time as mothers
relinquish their children to the grave?
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Or see mothers die at a brutal rate:
13,600 black women yearly die in childbirth. Only 3,481 would die if they had
access to white health care and fewer than 2,000 if they had Scandinavian
health care.
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America 1995 |
America 1975 |
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50.000 American babies would not die yearly if they had access
to the Free National health care of Scandinavia, revealed Ted Kennedy in
Congress when
trying to reform health care. |
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