Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/04/23/but-slavery-was-so-long-ago.html
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Typical libtards, ignoring the proof of a black usurper president.
/s
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I’m buying a shirt right now.
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Why is 1954 given as the end date of segregation? I mean, sure, Brown v. BoE of Topeka, but Rosa Parks’s protest wasn’t until 1955, and that was hardly the end of the matter. Racial discrimination in “public accommodations” wasn’t outlawed nationally until 1964.
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That’s an extremely overly optimistic graph. Something tells me it was made by a white moderate.
Brown vs board of education was in 1954. But schools dragged their feet about it, and white flight happened, and so on. Even today, there are lots of schools that are 90% or more black, and gosh, it just so happens that they are the poorest, most underfunded schools around.
Other forms of legally enforced segregation (lunch counters, buses, etc) slowly got outlawed by the courts piecemeal over the next decade, until the civil rights act in 1964 finally made the surviving Jim Crow laws illegal.
The fair housng act of 1968 had lots of provisions to enforce integration of American neighbourhoods, but the federal government lost its nerve and none of those provisions have ever been enforced more than extremely anemically. De facto housing segregation (which is the root that leads to all the other kinds of de facto segregation) is still fucking going on, often just as bad or in some places even worse than it was in the 50’s and 60’s.
Edited for accuracy.
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Okay, I’m not buying a shirt until someone adds 10 years.
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As of 2016 there were still children of former American slaves living, and as far as I know there may still be a few left. There are certainly a large number of grandchildren of former slaves still around.
At least one slave’s daughter got to vote in 2008:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=96581933
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Legal discrimination lasted until at least 1975 I believe, with things like red lining. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
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And it’s still basically alive in racially disparate sentencing and disenfranchisement of felons.
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“But slavery was so long ago...”
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Except it wasn’t 1954, it was (at best) 1964 – and in far too many ways not even then.
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These are all good points. It should have more of a fade than a line, really.
As for the schools, it’s not even a matter of there being lots of schools that are still segregated, but the high point of integration having been passed and the pendulum now swinging back the other way, just through other means.
The public schools in Boston are more segregated today than they were before anti-segregation busing was instituted, even without considering white flight to the suburbs. We have schools here that are 99% black and Hispanic.
The method of catchment assignment, where all kids in a neighborhood would be sent to the same school, never achieved that level of segregation, because Boston at its worst never had that level of residential segregation. Today’s method, where there is “school choice,” means that the few white parents whose kids are assigned to those schools all choose to pull them out and send them to other schools.
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Maybe, but as shown by so many examples (including those in the rest of your comment), racism in the U.S. is more of a changing same.
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I went to high school in the early 90’s as (slight) minority. I remember only thinking of desegregation as being history. In fact, meaningful desegregation was only about 15 years prior in my area. 15-year-old me stayed confused, and sometimes angry, about how race issues played out among the teachers and students. Looking back, I understand so much better–most of my teachers had taught through desegregation, with many of the African American teachers moving from holding a position of respect to being disdained once they started teaching in white schools. Of course, even if I could explain that to 15-year-old me, it would be a hard sell. I mean, at that age, 15 years is literally a lifetime ago.
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Yeah, maybe it’s a fade between Segregation and plain old Racism. I was reading a riveting article in last week’s NY Times Magazine that makes it very hard to deny the reality of continued racism.
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Ahem, I think you mean a post-racial president, in this post-racial era, AKA the green part. We also don’t make cruel jokes at the expense of orange presidents, or any other color. Because post-racial.
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Came here to make this point if someone else hadn’t already. Really puts things in terms humans better understand, I think. There are people alive whose grandparents were slaves. That is recent history, very recent.
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Obama did it.
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If we were making fun of him because of his Prodistant Irish roots and calling him an orange man because of that, it would be totally wrong.
But we’re making fun of his choice of spray-tan colors. He literally made the choice to make his skin orange. It is not the by-product of a medical issue, it’s not hereditary, it’s not something that is out of his control; it is a conscious choice that he specifically did and does to himself.
Since it is something that he has chosen, and he has put himself into the public spotlight, fair game.
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The math certainly makes that likely. It’s not uncommon for men to father children well into their 60s and it’s not uncommon for people to live well into their 90s.
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