I believe the fact that racism is faceless, no longer presented in the open and wants people to believe it is gone is a good thing.
A society where racism is out in the open, and has a face to it is a society where racism is tolerated, accepted and even promoted.
The reason racism is hidden, faceless and has to pretend it doesn't exist; is because the majority of society hates it, vilifies it, and does everything it can to wipe it out. Now that's progress!
Ken
Maybe, maybe not. The difference was apparent in the 50s and early 60s in the difference between racism in the North (faceless, not present in the open) and racism in the South (tolerated, accepted, and even promoted).
In the South, a black man knew his enemy, knew his enemy's tactics, knew when failure was his own or the result of his enemy's attack. You knew why you didn't get the job: The sign said, "No colored hired." The loan officer laughed at you when you walked in the door, then bum-rushed you right back out the door. The sign at the entrance to the town said, "No colored after sundown."
In the North, it was never so clear. If a man was turned down for a job, was him or was it racism? If a man was turned down for a business loan, was it him or was it racism? If a man couldn't buy a house, was it him or was it racism?
I read a book back around 1972 called "Education of a WASP" by Lois Mark Stalvey. Stalvey was a white housewife living in a nice neighborhood on the west side of Omaha, NE. In 1961, she happened to meet a black couple--a doctor and his teacher wife--who lived in North Omaha--an undesirable part of town, but the part that blacks were relegated to.
Naively, she volunteered to help them find a house in her own neighborhood--it was not Montgomery, AL, after all. That's when her education began, and in a short time because of her efforts, her husband lost his job and both of them got kicked out of Omaha.
This was only a year or so before I wound up in Omaha myself, and found it hardly different a decade after the events she wrote of.
Another interesting book I read about the same time was "Soul Sister," by Grace Halsell. Halsell was a white journalist originally from Alabama who used the drug methoxsalen to turn her skin black (similarly to John Griffin, who wrote "Black Like Me").
But her "dark passage" was much longer than Griffin's six weeks. She spent six months as a black woman in Harlem, then six months as a black woman in her own native Alabama town.
Although her experiences in Alabama were personally more harrowing (including a rape attempt by her white employer), she reported that being black in Harlem was much more deadening of the soul.
The difference between 1963 and now is that racism everywhere is like racism in Harlem.
