DOS

No not the old archaic Disc Operating System (DOS). This acronym stands for Descendants of Slaves (DOS). I believe that given the assault on Black recovery from over 3 centuries of legalized racial oppression, DOS should become the legal term used, going forward, for targeted recovery assistance. The current efforts by whites to resist efforts to combat the legacy of black oppression, through government policies, require a new legal strategy. That strategy centers on using the proper legal terminology to protect our ability to hold the government to its responsibilities.

Whites and conservatives have improvised since the passage of the Civil Rights act some 40 years ago. They realized that they could no longer use racial laws to keep blacks down; therefore they developed a new strategy to twart the governments responsibility to help blacks get up. What they have discovered, by intent or accident, is that the language and terminology used to deny whites the legal ability to oppress black can be turned against blacks to keep the government from its responsibility in helping blacks to recover.

I term this technique “Racial Jujitsu”. Jujitsu being a martial art form in which the goal is to use an adversary’s strength and leverage against it. Whites and conservatives have thus taken the language of the civil rights movement, in regards to laws against racial discrimination, and turned it against programs aimed at helping blacks recover from 3 centuries of legal racial oppression. The conservative and white call for a color-blind society, at this juncture, is not for altruistic reasons as it appears at face value. Rather, it's an attempt to block efforts by the government to rectify its past wrongs hence preserving white privilege.

The reason that whites can successfully challenge these programs legally is due to the fact that programs, like Affirmative Action, use race as one of the targeting criteria. Its then argued successfully by lawyers before the Supreme Court that these programs violate laws against racial discrimination by giving preference to blacks. This is due to the fact that race is the explicit intent of the language used in the policy. However, targeting people for Affirmative Action based upon being DOS removes race from the explicit legal criteria preventing the policy from violating laws against racial discrimination.

We all know, for all intents and purposes, that DOS criteria will coincidentally result in all black beneficiaries, but whose fault is that? The University of Michigan gives preference to students applying for admission from obscure counties in Michigan. All these students are white, more than likely, because blacks do not live in these obscure counties in any significant numbers. Yet, this is not considered a racial set aside, despite the beneficiaries being white, because race is not used in the criteria. So it cannot be argued that this is racial discrimination against blacks. By the same logic, set-asides for DOS, even though it maps to black people, like the obscure counties map to whites, cannot be argued successfully as discrimination against whites.

DOS is actually a more accurate and efficient term for what America is attempting to fix. As much as I love my African Born Brothers and Sisters who come to America, they should not be part of the target pool due to the fact that their forefathers and mothers did not endure the assault here in America. Under the current methodology, Africans, I believe, can take advantage of racial set aside programs. The program should specifically target for repair the descendants of slavery or DOS. The DOS population is also the sufferers of Jim Crow, so in encompasses both the oppression of slavery and the oppression of Jim Crow. Moreover, it helps to define our condition as the product of being DOS and not the product of shared experiences of minorities.

Of course the million-dollar question that people will ask is how does one prove that they are descendants of slaves. I think that it will be a challenging thing to prove for individuals, but I do believe that given the will and modern means and agencies that over 90% of the people who are actually descendents of slaves can prove it via Court data, census data, DNA evidence and the like. It could create a whole new field of opportunities in providing service to track roots to slavery. Such would also, I believe, reconnect black people to a history that young people have forgotten or dismissed. I may be projecting but I do believe that such knowledge could possible change the enmity we have toward each other.

I am not suggesting that we stop calling ourselves African Americans or blacks and define ourselves as descendants of slaves (DOS). Rather, I am suggesting that for legal purposes that we hold government and institutions liable for repair not using the language of race but rather the language of the condition that caused the problem, which was enslavement. The fact that this nation choose to only enslave blacks does not make the intent of the current parties racially motivated, but rather, the intent of the enslavement racially motivated. It can be argued that the intent is to rectify the descendants of the enslaved, which can be identified by documents and DNA, and not by race.