You may be quite a bit older than me, but I've never seen racism or segregation in America.
I think people need to stop living in a past, that most of us (65% of the population in the united states are under the age of 50) have never once seen or experienced.
Those of us born in the past are still running the nation.
What is hard for younger people in America to fully grasp is that we American Boomers were born on a different planet than you were born on, a different planet than this one.
It's hard to grasp how dominating racial segregation was in America if you weren't there. I, personally, was in middle school before I ever knew a white kid by name. Most Boomers older than I were in the working world before they ever knew someone of the other race by name...if then.
There were three movie theaters where I lived. One was for blacks only, one was for whites only, and in one blacks could sit in the balcony. We had separate swimming pools, separate schools, separate play ares in the park.
Go to YouTube and watch some television programs prior to 1964. No black people in those programs, particularly not in any children or family programming. There were no black people on The Jetsons or on The Flintstones. There were no black people in Leave it to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet. There were no black people in The Andy Griffith Show or Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie. There were no black people in commercials and no black people in the backgrounds of the sets.
The vast majority of white kids growing up in the late 50s and early 60s grew up in a segregated world. He didn't see black people in his daily life, he didn't interact with other black kids. He didn't even see black people on television. The idea that it was okay for black people to be around him isn't what he was taught as a child.
"As the sapling is bent, so grows the tree."
"Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."
And
those kids are the adults still running America today. Those are still the people controlling industry, media, law, and politics. When John Lewis looks across the aisle, he's looking at the
same individuals who were opposed to him in 1963.
Now, for sure, many of them have overcome their childhood teaching--when they have determined themselves to do it. But that's not most people.
We Boomers were the last generation raised in racial apartheid. It was inculcated into us as children. We are locked into an unending combat that began on an entirely different planet like Autobots and Decepticons. The racial situation in the US is not going to change until we Boomers are dead.
We just have to die, because clearly we haven't changed as a generation, and we're going to stay in control, influencing younger generations, until we are dead. After we are dead, there will be a chance.
