We appear to have dug up a stinking, fetid mass of putrid anger over the past 6 months, starting with the protests in Ferguson and continuing via both professional and mainstream media. These events - a string of black males dead at the hands of police, and the resulting nationwide protests against police brutality - have exposed a rift in America that has remained mostly hidden over the past few decades.
On one side of the rift are those who believe that racism is still a serious problem in America, and one which needs to be addressed.
On the other side are those who believe that the only race-related problem in America is that some minorities would rather complain and play the "race card" than change their situation.
Both sides are entrenched. There seems to be no way forward. Compromise is unlikely, if not impossible.
So.
Now what?
I think that most people don't understand what the problem is and therefore where we have to go to solve it.
Most seem to believe we, collectively through the government, are trying to stamp out racism, to change people's attitudes.
There is no place in the public, government sphere to try to change people's private attitudes. Our "soft" racists, Davka's Racialists, here are not in any danger of formal societal censure. While their own personal racist attitudes strain what many consider to be acceptable in polite society, it is a personal attitude and is not illegal. You are free to be a racist if that is what you want.
But you aren't free to act on it in hiring or public accommodations, in the public sphere. Yes, these are limitations that we put on your right to exercise your racism. Proper limitations.
So this one part of what we are doing, enforcing the laws that try to prevent people's personal racist attitudes from acting in the public sphere.
The other part that we are trying to do is we are trying to eliminate the lingering effects of the legal racism of slavery and of the Jim Crow era. The negative effects of 400 hundred years of legal oppression of racial minorities, especially of African Americans, would be hard to eliminate in just two generations or so, if all of the legal hurdles were eliminated. But unfortunately a entirely new regime of laws were enacted to maintain the existence of the subordinate status of a group of people largely defined by race.
The abolition of slavery led not to removing subordinate status of the freed slaves but to the new legal suppression of them from the Jim Crow laws. Likewise the elimination of the Jim Crow laws was met with a new legal regime to maintain the legal suppression by race. It is a much more sophisticated and subtle approach, one that is vitally immune to the legal challenges that took down the Jim Crow laws. One that on the surface has nothing to do with race but which has the same effect as the Jim Crow laws did, denying them them the vote and other benefits of citizenship and relegating them to a racially segregated, subordinated existence.
When Ronald Reagan announced his War on Drugs in 1982 there were 300,000 people imprisoned in the US. Thirty years later there were more than 2 million. This increase in the prison population is made up disproportionately of minorities. The drug war became the new Jim Crow.
The rich and the middle class, overwhelmingly white, caught in the WoD, go into drug treatment programs. The poor, disproportionately minorities, are incarcerated. When they are released they can't vote, they can't get a decent job, they can't get many government services. Jim Crow would be proud.
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This is the problem. It is instructive to discuss why we have this third round of minority suppression. Why we have so many "soft" racists, racism apologists, when I think that everyone would agree that the number of overt racists are down considerably from forty years ago.
I will do this later, I am tired. But I will leave a hint.
We aren't fighting about racism, we are fighting a class war.