Race and the Ghost of Jim Crow

[sheshe2]

According to political conservatives, racial discrimination is no longer an institutional issue, and there is no longer any need for policies that provide socioeconomic protections for Blacks. Political conservatives also say that if any racial discrimination is happening, it is being committed by only a few bigoted individuals. These individuals, they say, have been socialized to hold such bigoted notions and believe that Blacks are lazy and inferior and that it is okay to commit racist acts against them.

The Donald Sterlings and Robert Copelands of the United States have been undoubtedly shaped by a racist culture. The U.S. government sanctioned discrimination and gave Whites permission to denigrate Blacks openly. But these sorts of people don’t hold those beliefs anymore, right? After looking at demographics information, I’m not so sure. Consider this: according to the U.S. Census taken in 2010, there were more than 23 million Whites over the age of 70 in America. By contrast, there were slightly more than 39 million Blacks in all age brackets. Why is this significant? Because the number of Whites 70 years and older equals more than half of the total Black population, who are potentially voting on or in some way influencing policies that affect all Blacks. Whites born in the early 1960s (those over age 50) would have also been socialized and participated in the practice of Jim Crow Racism. They number more than 56 million.

If this lingering Jim Crow representation does not bother you enough, remember that these 80 million plus individuals had families, friends, and children. The racism of their social milieu became ingrained in their minds, and from them it spread passively and actively to their children and families: passively by imitation, actively by subtle, deliberate instruction. The end of legal, public discrimination has not prevented private discrimination from flourishing beneath the surface and continuing to have an effect on public policy, albeit in a subtler, more insidious way.

snip

It should alarm us that a large group of privileged people who were socialized in a racist culture still hold significant representative power over Blacks. It should alarm us, and it should remind us that the abolition of Jim Crow is not a good enough reason to think that Black people in America can ease up on the struggle for freedom and equality. Blacks cannot passively accept the racist ideology according to which race “no longer matters.” Race does matter, and it will probably always matter, and Blacks need to lobby actively for policies that protect their socioeconomic interests against the real threat of racial discrimination.
What is lacking in numbers needs to be made up for in tenacity.

Read More http://www.racismreview.com/blog/

This is why the questions need to be asked and answered.

[lovemydog]

1. Thanks sheshe2.

It's imperative that the democratic party and progressives everywhere read and understand the problems inherent in institutional racism.

It's not just 'Oh look, some bigot said or did something racist.' And it's not just a conservative problem.

It's much deeper than that. We must look at the criminal justice system and the prison system. Public schools. The way we think, talk and act. And much more too.

[sheshe2]

4. Thank you, lovemydog.

Thank you.

I can't say more.

[Solly Mack]

2. K&R

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Big K&R

[sheshe2]

5. Hey you.

I will let the post stand for me. I am fearful of saying more.

[freshwest]

6. These things must be discussed!

James Baldwin debates William F. Buckley Jr. at Cambridge University | The Resolution: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”

The video is long, but worth it to hear all that Baldwin says to Buckley:

James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)

Published on Oct 27, 2012

Transcript and comment:

Baldwin goes on to eloquently state the affirmative in what has to be one of the most encompassing and moving soliloquies I have ever heard. Excerpts follow, but do not sell yourselves short, watch it in its entirety:

“The white South African or Mississippi sharecropper or Alabama sheriff has at bottom a system of reality which compels them really to believe when they face the Negro that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity.”

“In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”

“From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially in the South—could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.”

"The Southern oligarchy which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This in the land of the free, the home of the brave.”

“Sheriff Clark in Selma, Ala., cannot be dismissed as a total monster; I am sure he loves his wife and children and likes to get drunk. One has to assume that he is a man like me. But he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. Their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color.”

“It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country—until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream. If the people are denied participation in it, by their very presence they will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.”

http://bacanisays.tumblr.com/

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

~Thomas Jefferson

[sheshe2]

7. The flag never pledged allegiance to you.

“In the case of the American Negro, from the moment you are born every stick and stone, every face, is white. Since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”

I am crying, freshwest.

[ismnotwasm]

8. K&R

[Cha]

9. uh huh. Of course they deny it.. that's all racist fucks do.. commit acts of racism and bigotry and

then deny deny deny.

It's still a blight on America and Thank Goodness for all the people who recognize this and are working to change it.

Not cover it up. mahalo she~

[brer cat]

10. "I'm not a racist, but..."

sigh. Sad that so often it is self-identified liberals starting that sentence.

[ismnotwasm]

11. One of the most appalling sentence intro's ever

In ALL its forms.

[brer cat]

12. A look at sundown towns

adds to this conversation. The following sections are quotes from:

http://thyblackman.com/2014/07/16/the-new-sundown-towns-and-racism-in-modern-america/

Sundown towns are not part of Americans’ discourse on race relations, despite the fact that they form a foundational aspect of it. It seems that our linear, historical narrative of American history has confined “racism in America” to the deep South and the years of Jim Crow laws. In short, we have come to think that racism is confined mostly to Confederate flag-waving southerners and even more disturbing, that it’s a problem we’ve managed to largely “fix.”

snip

The most shocking aspect of sundown towns isn’t their professed hatred for African-Americans, but the fact that they were not located in the South. This is a surprising fact for many. More disturbing is the fact that, since their origins, their numbers have not diminished very greatly in the U.S.

snip

Sundown towns were not just places, but a mentality (a way of thinking). This is a crucial aspect in understanding what sundown towns mean for race relations today. In the 1890s, this “sundown” mentality started as one of racial segregation, but today the sundown town mentality has taken the form of economic segregation and inequality.

snip

One must recall the bombastic comments made in the last presidential elections (particularly by Rick Santorum) regarding the connection of African-Americans to welfare. According to Santorum (though he is not the only one), African-American people are mostly the ones on welfare and they use the system purely out of choice. Thus, we have created a phantom culture in our minds–one in which African-Americans choose to live and operate on the margins of society despite mainstream American society has offering them “plenty of chances.” It should be added that this mentality applies not just to blacks, but to Latino’s as well.

Sundown towns give us a glimpse into a part of white America in the 19th and 20th century that was overtly racist. African-Americans were believed to be inferior because of their race and biology. Today, racism is prevalent but instead of labeling it “racism,” we talk about “gentrification” or “income gaps.”

Sundown towns as places may have been reduced, but as a mentality I don't believe much has changed. The confederate-flag-waving n*****-shouting racists in the south are a small part of the population, and while I wish they would disappear, they are simply the public face of a bigger issue. It is the sheer ignorance of conservatives as well as many liberals as to what constitutes racism that is the crux of the problem. It is why I come to this forum to read and rarely post.

[malaise]

13. Good post

[sheshe2]

14. I know you do not post much.

Yet, brer cat. This should be an OP.

[Uncle Joe]

15. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, sheshe.