Who we were then ...
Who we are now ...
In 1950s voter suppression meant that if you were black and showed up to vote, you might be asked to interpret an obscure passage from the Constitution. If blacks had been offered a free ID card that guaranteed the right to vote, it would have been construed as "victory achieved."
In the 1950's racism meant being kicked, beaten, or spat upon if you tried to go to the "wrong" school. Now racism means you might catch sight of a statue of some old man on a horse.
Until 1964 racism meant not being able to eat in a restaurant of your choice. Now the protections include making sure you won't see this monument if you're a student at Yale. (The musket was deemed to be possibly racially threatening and so the musket was removed from the carving.)
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| Before musket was removed from carving |
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| After musket was covered. |
Years ago entering the U.S. illegally was not only against the law but was a punishable offense. Now asking someone if they've entered the country illegally is a punishable offense in many areas if you happen to be a local law enforcement agent.
At the same time, no one should deny that situations arise regularly where people are judged unfairly because of attributes that often include race. (When I was a freshman at UNC in 1961 my English professor gave me a B+ on a paper and noted that as a graduate of a rural public high school I shouldn't aspire to anything more.) And a friend from Kentucky once noted that because of his southern accent he was regularly judged to be an easy target, a fact that had enabled him to achieve considerable wealth via business dealings with people who underestimated him because of his accent.
Jason L. Riley, an African American journalist who is a member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board says ...
Liberals make a fetish of Civil War monuments because it feeds their hallowed slavery narrative, which posits that racial inequality today is mainly a legacy of the country's slave past. One problem with these assumptions about slavery's effects on black outcomes today is that they are undermined by what blacks were able to accomplish in the first hundred years after their emancipation, when white racism was rampant and legal and blacks had bigger concerns than Robert E. Lee's likeness in a public park. Today, slavery is still being blamed for everything from black broken families to high crime rates in black neighborhoods to racial gaps in education, employment and income.
Riley then goes on to cite data which he claims demonstrates rapid improvements in the black community during the Jim Crow era followed by deteriorating black family structure during the years of the welfare state. An example from my own childhood is found in the fact that prior to the advent of federal agriculture initiatives many small farm operations run by blacks were quite viable. However, with the advent of federal support programs for farmers, discrimination in Dept. of Agriculture programs, i.e. blatant racism, put many small farms operated by blacks out of business because they weren't getting federal subsidies that the white farmers were getting, and the subsidies to large scale farming operations was by then working to the detriment of small farmers of any race.
