Ethics and Business? Please

II

I called Fred bright and early with exciting news. “OK, Chippewa seems the best route to go. They got the most Casinos. The Apaches ain’t got shit. Granted, they fought back the most. You get more flies with honey...”

I got an unexpected response.

“I'm done with you. That's why people look at us with the side-eye now; I mean us, Black folk as a whole. We are willing to exploit anyone and everyone to get what we want. It doesn't matter if they did anything to us or not. I can't exploit the red man like the palefaces did.”

Well, that rankled me some. “I'm not exploiting the red man. I am exploiting the paleface system that believed you cure centuries of Native oppression with a few business opportunities.” Self righteousness was always strength of mine.

There was actual sadness in his voice. “But in turn you are exploiting them too, because that was laid out for them. You… you're going to try to exercise a ridiculous loophole to get paid.”

I changed tracks. I kinda needed him to work this with me. “ Hmmm...Never thought of it that way. Is it the double dip, Casinos AND reparations that's the overkill?”

“You’re fucking kidding me. Nope. The overkill is that you're taking advantage of a benefit that was not meant for you, redfoot.”

“That's PROUD BLACKFOOT, Gut Crusher. Bearing in mind: people are going to look at us how they look at us. I can ignore it with expensive enough sunglasses purchased to view the desert sands of my new casino... That’s Black folks’ problem. We spend a whole lot of time worrying how we are perceived, and believe me, other people have made billions off of our perception issues. We need to get over that. I don’t care if white people or anyone else looks at me as some conniving whatever…please. The business history books are filled with ‘em, and those are the successes. The good guys? No one mentions them.”

Now he switched tracks. “How would you like it if the government announced reparations and you had to be 1/8 black to get them, so when you go to get in line there are these WASP republican types in line around the block because their great-great grandfathers had children out of wedlock because they went creeping in the middle of the night to the slave house? But that makes them 1/8 black and the blond-haired blue-eyed devils are standing in line to get YOUR money...Doesn't sit too well with you, now does it. That would be just one more way that the white man screwed us.”

I laughed. “Wouldn’t bother me one bit. If they are one eighth Black, according to laws still on the books in this fine republic, they Black. If they chose to pass for a number of years and then come out for their share of the pie, well, hell. Sounds American to me. No no no. Black folk keep getting shit on because we are ALWAYS fair, ALWAYS trying to do the right thing. We gotta play the game like everyone else did. Do whatever to get ahead, save our money, and move to the suburbs. Actually, that's what's happening. I have yet to see real Native Americans own these places, and I bet the boards don’t live on reservations.”

I could hear Fred throwing up his hands. “So why would you want to be one of them? I thought we had to be better than that?”

“Man, this is America. Land of the loophole. Why is it the people who could benefit from loopholes spend time pontificating about why they shouldn’t. Then they get on Black radio and bitch about the fact they don’t have what the loophole exploiters have. That’s crazy. One good thing about reparations is it would expose all of the Negroes that have been passing for the last 50 years. I wanna know.”

“But this is for THEM!”

“If genealogy says I am one of THEM how am I wrong? Dude, there is a lot of shared history between our peoples. The non reservation boarding schools alone are a blot on history that would make any decent person cringe. You are going to correct that by allowing gaming? These people went to lengths to “Americanize” them that were inhumane. Perhaps if people of color, Africans, Native Americans and whomever else, stopped being so damned concerned with ‘fair’ and ‘right’ and learned to do unto others as they do unto us, or before they do unto us, we’d be better off. Sorry. I can benefit my people more by generating funding and using it to help folk who look like me than by sitting around lamenting what’s ‘right’.”

“Is this about helping your people?”

“Sure. Starting with those whom share my last name. Which includes you.”

The line went dead.

I spent the better part of the afternoon digging through the Native American Rights Fund website, along with any of the other research I had piled high on my desk. I had some understanding of Native American history. Mostly the bad. I remember a colleague once telling me about how bad the reservations were. She told me a story of how some native came into a bar where she and her friends were drinking, slit a man’s throat, and walked out. She explained that because the bars were on Indian land and the victim was an outsider, there was noting that could be done.

“I mean, these were our bars, bars owned by white people,” she explained, “but we had no power there.”

I was not listening so intently that I was against reminding her that I, in fact, was not white. Nowhere near it. I was tempted, however, to taunt her with the fact the natives had probably felt that way about Caucasians for a long time. Hell, I thought. Was it justified?
The schools natives had been sent to at the turn of the century were an even worse tale. Tribesmen were sent to these boarding schools that basically attempted to beat the “savagery” out of them. Really? The Native Americans may not have been perfect, but could leaving them alone have been that bad of an idea? How did their savagery compare to that of the Europeans who supplanted them? I’m no romanticist. When my own people try to sell me on the innate humaneness of Africans, and how if we were left alone, we’d never fight, I have to look at the Derg, Rwandan genocide, Mobutu and Idi Amin to counter that. Actually, I have to look no further than the neighborhoods of my native Chicago to dispel that nonsense. People, I believe, are always trying to rule other people. The easiest and most sure way to do that is through violence. Whenever folk want to argue that I tell them to go learn elementary school history over again and then come see me.

In exchange for a lot of headache, heartache and outright abuse, was financial compensation really enough? And would it work for Black folk? That was the biggest argument against reparations. You can’t just issue a group of people checks. You can, but every group has its haves and have snots, and the haves are usually much better with money. That’s probably why they are the haves. They’ll invest theirs and find ways to profit from the one group that will quickly do business with them, no questions asked: the have nots. Eventually you have a Black upper class and lower class, and the lower class has accumulated a lot of temporary assets. Cars, consumer goods, and what not. In many cases, they may spend what they get trying to survive and never think about the long haul because life for generations has been about survival, and happy times have been about finding ways to forget that you are just surviving. What happens when their money is gone? Folk may riot. Hell, people riot when athletic teams win championships. This could cause the apocalypse.

So the Native American solution might work, with one caveat. It was easier for the government to grant certain land and business rights to the natives, because technically, they were already on what’s considered their sovereign land. What an irony that is. We stole the country from you and wanted to make you like us, but we’ll allow you to have certain rights on land that we tell you is really yours. Crazy as it was, however, it was working. But how?

That said, I was realizing I would probably have to do some research on a reservation before moving forward with my plan. This was not going to go over well with the missus, who last night gave me a tongue lashing for having the kids do the feathers and photos thing. She practically washed out poor Scoompi’s mouth with soap for using the term “Indian.” Scooter, who knows where he gets his bread and butter, had no problem letting the “freedom, justice and equality” thing slip.

My wife was raised a Black Muslim. I got none last night.

Oh, well, I thought, fighting off the nagging feeling that a vodka tonic was just what I needed right now, a new casino, they’ll love me in the morning.

There was a knock on my office door. “Doc? Can we talk about my paper?”

I put my research aside. Andy Chen was one of my best students, proudly living up to that stereotype.

“Dunno, Andy,” I said, glancing at my calendar. “Think I used up all of my Asian time this week.”

“Work it out,” he laughed, pulling up a chair, “you people are bad with time anyway.”

“Touché,” I said, offering him a 7-up out of my fridge. “Now, here was my issue. Your thesis was solid, but you and I both know with just a little more digging…”

Casinos would have to wait.