Price Me

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American Values

I begin this entry by asking how much is human life worth?  Okay, maybe you're saying this is an impossible question to answer.  Life itself is an invaluable, unquantifiable, mysterious, miracle full of potential most of which goes untapped no matter how hard we try.  There is no way that we can we put a price tag on it.  You may feel that the mere suggestion that there is a finite value on life to which currency can be assigned is an insult to God and humankind alike.  But there are others who may dwell on that question a bit longer and begin to assign value to individual functions of human life that may be have concrete dollar worth.  Certainly the professional labor has worth that can be added up over the duration of our careers.  We gain equity through the acquisition of real estate and some of us hope to turn profits on investments in stocks and such.  Certainly the successful bearing and rearing of children that grow to contribute to society has its own dollar worth if you had to think about it.  However, that doesn’t begin to account for all that life is but to the extent that that question can be answered, perhaps these are some ways to think about it and come up with some sort of thoughtful answer.  Still the question is absurd.  Or is it?

Once upon a time we didn’t think so.   In fact throughout human history there have been price tags placed on human beings most explicitly through chattel slavery.  I remind you that in this land it existed for at least 400 years during our colonial and antebellum periods and we’re just one hundred and fifty years removed from that system.  The pricing was pretty cut and dry.  It boiled down to age, gender, physical fitness, ability and maybe in some small way, intelligence to the extent that a relatively bright negro [sic] was an asset and not a threat.  Potential buyers made an offer for a slave based how well they believed that slave could satisfy the needs of his plantation, other business or home and that was it.  That’s what African-American life was worth then. 

Crude? Yes. Cruel? Certainly.  Inhumane? Undoubtedly and let's be clear that I am beyond glad that those times are far behind us.  There are many elements of current American life that I feel blessed to enjoy.  However, I argue that in absence of a numerical value assigned to human life, we have lost all respect for the fact that there is worth there.  So I ask again how much?  But to answer the question, I pose this as a guide: How much does it cost to end life?

I’m not referring to the repercussions of ending life e.g. imprisonment for murder or wrongful death suits.  I am focusing on the act of killing through the most efficient means we have devised yet—guns.  That, my friends has an answer and for the sake of simplicity I’m going to avoid the issue of assault weapons that certain members of Congress are rightly seeking to ban again.  So let’s look at the perfectly legal purchase of handguns.  Firearmspriceguide.com tells me that an all black 9mm Glock with plastic grips, should cost $300 without the ammo.   The ammo—a box of fifty brass rounds--can be bought for as low as $13.00 on luckygunner.com.  As we know, it only takes one bullet to kill so we’ll say that in this instance the price of one human being’s life is a mere $313.25.  That is a semi-automatic, however.  Maybe one wants to kill old school style—not too fancy.  Our fellow citizen entitled to his/her freedoms can purchase a Smith & Wesson 1903 Six-Shot Revolver for $250 and end a life cheaper than he/she could purchase the new iphone 5 for instance.  These are market prices, they only get cheaper when sold second hand at gun shows, or legally out of the backs of trucks in rural and southern states and on the black market in our urban streets.  There in certain areas of our inner cities, one can access a handgun more easily than he can purchase LeBron James’s new sneakers—see the problem there? Buy cheap gun.  Be willing to kill for expensive shoes.  This is one version of crude, cruel and inhumane 21^st century style.

If human life is so invaluable, I ask why is it so cheap to take?  More to my point, I ask, how much should it cost to potentially take a life?  We impulsive humans aren’t so deterred by consequences when desperate and irrational.  The cost can't be felt most acutely in response to the deed.  It needs to be immediate. 
Allow me, if you will, to present this base pricing system:  In the last days of slavery in the United States, the average slave was “worth” $1,658.   Adjusted for inflation in today’s market that is $24,012.43.  In most cases in slaveholding states, if a white citizen were to murder that slave and be proven to have just cause for doing so, he’d still owe the owner the full value of the slave and maybe even additional damages depending on the case.   Of course I am not suggesting that a pay off is in any way admirable or appropriate for taking one’s life but what about a more sizable pay up front—ahead of the killing?  In the 21^st century wouldn't it be a tad more appropriate if it cost at least as much to purchase the most basic, reliably lethal weapons as it was to pay for a life during that dehumanizing chattel slavery system?  I hypothesize that at $24K per pistol there would be far fewer so-called “gun enthusiasts.”  More importantly, folks would probably be forced to find other ways of dealing with their rage, paranoia, depression, etc.  Yes there would continue to be a violent black market for guns but law enforcement will have an easier target to focus on with fewer legal guns being purchased.  With fewer guns purchased—the ones remaining would be easier to track and larger purchases would be even more suspicious and worth investigation.  No one’s rights would be infringed upon just as no one is arguing about their rights when they spend a comparable amount of money for a new car.  If one attempt to purchase a fleet of cars at once, creditors would be alerted and banks would grow suspicious and so on.  Similar hurdles in the purchase of guns would ultimately cause a reduction mass murders, urban warfare, and small scale equally tragic shootings that happen everyday in communities big and small. 

I grant that this, in some respects, sounds ridiculous if not just improbable but we’re talking about murder after all.  What is ridiculous is the concept that one should be able to take a life at any price and that guns are neutral constants in the murder equation.  But if it costs dollars to acquire tools of murder, then shouldn’t it at least be a lot pricier than my smart phone, laptop, or an average domestic flight?  If not then what does that say about how much we value electronics or a plane ticket, for example, versus to the safety, our neighbors, ourselves, the six adults and twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT last week, the nearly 500 dead from homicide in Chicago this year—largely gun deaths, the twelve dead and 58 injured in a Aurora, Colorado movie theater this summer, the six killed at the Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, WI weeks later, the six dead and thirteen wounded in Tucson, AZ early last year, the 32 murdered and 13 injured at Virginia Tech in April 2007, Columbine in April 1999 etc?  Money talks in this world so I don’t want to hear about how much we value life in our hearts.  The fact is that in a country of 314,970,800 people and counting—living may be expensive but killing is comparatively dirt cheap and that, my friends, is the problem and the reason we keep finding ourselves here mourning a tragedy for as long as mainstream media finds acceptable.

Lost and Unbound

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                           Lost and Unbound

In this age of efficiency, Americans love to place everything from high-tech commodities to each other in neat, convenient boxes with easy to say names and one-size-fits-all utility.  This, of course, is human nature and par for the course in such an over-worked, multi-tasking, fast-paced society such as ours.  Who has time for complexities?  Our marketing plays on this susceptibility to catchphrases, simplistic jingles and boldly visual advertising.  The rule seems to be: the shorter, quicker and more to the point you can be—the better.  And who are we if not consumers?  It is in this environment that we become increasingly comfortable with referring to and identifying with the racial/ethnic descriptions: Black, White, Latino, Hispanic, Asian, Other, and God forbid you should be an “other.”

          

-->Don’t get me wrong, this is not a judgment and it is nothing new.  However, I believe that it is more important now in this truly globalized era, two generations removed from Jim Crow and all that that meant for all of us, that we pause and think about this packaging of people.

            Let us first remember when this idea of categorizing people in such a way began to catch fire.  From the African-American perspective, it is no coincidence that we label ethnic groups the way we do commercial items.  Spanish and Portuguese slavers shipped Africans to their territories in the New World including Florida during the 16^th Century much the way trucks haul loads from factories to warehouses and somehow identifying Wolof, Mandingo, Malinke, Bambara, Papel, Limba, Bola, Balante, Serer, Fula, Tucolor from Senegambia or the Teme, Mende, Kisi from Sierre Leone, or the Golo, Vai, or Baolo from the Windward Coast, etc. seemed like a mouthful and too difficult to differentiate.  These human commodities were given the Spanish word for Black—Negro. 

            Though British slavers interchangeably used their own labels: Africans, Blacks, and Coloreds—the anglicized word Negro stuck for a mighty long time.  Through the Black Pride movement following the Civil Rights movement, the antiquated 400-year-old label died in polite Western culture in the 1970s and thus we have, with some grumbling, settled on being called Black.  Is the term African-American also being used? Sure, but honestly, how catchy is that?

            Today everything is short-handed to fit our texting need, thus, so is our language and our story.  The art of story telling dies in this environment.  With that an entire culture is vulnerable to being lost and as Marcus Garvey put it in a far different time “A people without the knowledge of their past origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Conversely, even in the time it takes to say the words African-American, a short, simple story is told.  The story, though unique to every person who claims this identity connects one’s lineage to the continent of Africa.  The seemingly benign label Black does not make the same connection.  It is more of a crude description of one’s skin color just as it was when Spanish and Portuguese slavers labeled their captives Negro.  Through the use of the word Black, there is no acknowledgement of one’s true heritage, only pigmentation and when you don’t know who you are and from whom you’ve come, it is only natural to take on the associated characteristics of Blackness howejhver they appear to an individual.  It could be through Hip Hop music and their videos, the news good or bad, other media platforms, or maybe most effectively through localized representations (neighbors, family, schoolmates, etc.).  This process can have a variety of results.  It is too dependent upon too many variables.  It calls for one to piece together a collage of images, words, dialect, etc. to create a patchwork of a person.  One learns to adopt mannerisms, fashion, and behaviors simply deemed Black.

            You could say that this analysis is too deep and over-thought but I would direct you to the autobiographies of Malcolm X, Richard Wright (Black Boy) and Barack Obama, to name a few, to see this practice take place in the young men’s lives.  These were not simply coming of age stories, they were coming to terms with Blackness in America stories as well.

            I conclude with a grave fear I have for our children or the 21^st Century.  Certainly there are several others of my generation with profound and sound knowledge of the African American Experience in totality.  However, I fear this knowledge is being lost rapidly.  I fear that many deem the tragedies and most of the triumphs as being irrelevant to modern “Blackness.”  Without knowledge of from whence we came and how exactly we’ve come to be where we are then how can we ever represent ourselves in a light that respects the sacrifices of our ancestors and projects a dignified if not unified image to the world?  Is this too lofty a goal? 

            I do not expect a radical change in the course of things and I do find hope in modern triumphs of individual African-Americans i.e. the election (and hopefully re-election) of Barack Obama as President of the United States.  But, I also think it only proper to use the term Black with any consistency when you know what it means to be African-American.  That history, raw and unadulterated is more important to learn now, for the sake of our future, than it ever was.