You and I came from a day when racism and segregation were real problems. Even so, as a teenager in the 70s, I saw healing begin and I had black friends in my neighborhood. In the Army, our kids played together. I noticed a shift when Obama was elected, a black man at that. When the right didn't agree with his policies they were labeled racist.
I'd agree that's when a "shift" began, but I saw it from a different perspective. I'm old enough to remember segregation very well. I'd been in middle school before I'd even met a white person...I'd never even been on a playground with a white kid. To be honest, as I woke up that morning to the news that Obama's election was certain, I was mildly and pleasantly surprised. That was not something I'd expected to see in my lifetime.
But there were white people I had known from high school and my early military years--decades--who seemed to have been cool about racial issues become rabid racists after Obama's election. It was like watching them turn into werewolves. White Christians were explicitly declaring it was a sign of the end of the world. The election of a black president was clearly a step too far for a lot of people. Racism re-erupted in us like the raging of a mortally wounded animal. (Am I talking about every single individual? No...but a huge percentage.)
Up until then, I'd always thought that the Boomer Generation was the first non-racist generation. But I realized then that at best we might be the last racist generation...unable (as a generation) to fully erase the racism that had been so thoroughly inculcated into us as children.
I should have realized that earlier: "As the twig is bent, so grows the tree." Just as it took a full
saeculum for the Hebrews freed from Egyptian bondage to be ready to cross the Jordan, it would take no less than a
saeculum for America to cross the river away from racism. Just as the last Hebrew slave generation out of bondage had to die, the Boomer generation would have to die.
Interracial marriage is common now. Since then the media started to amplify every time a black man was killed by a white.
Young people who have no life experience buy into "systematic" racism. The media had to use the adjective to keep the drumbeat going. We have laws in place against racism.
In the end, it's to keep us divided so we can't talk about issues with each other because we've been manipulated by the media into tribalism. Seems no common ground anymore.
I believe that to the extent
structural racism can be removed by legislation, that job is largely completed. "Systemic" racism is a real thing, but it's rather like the freed Hebrews in the Sinai still lusting for the food of Egypt. God could take those Hebrews out of Egypt, but He couldn't take Egypt out of those Hebrews.
Those Hebrews had to die off.
A slave culture had been inculcated into black people in America that continued to be enforced by Jim Crow right into the 1960s. Government removed those enforcement mechanisms, but it did not and could not erase that slave culture. We can validly blame white people for doing that to us, but white people can't give us a functional culture. We'll have to find some way to do that ourselves...and frankly, we're failing.
What's happening instead is that academia and political demagogues, for their own advantage, have taken up the mantra that because everything hasn't changed, then nothing has changed. The new generation of black people believe it's the same today as it was sixty years ago. It's what CRT teaches them. It's an argument I have every day online and in person with young black people. I point out, "Look at how bad it was within my own memory," and they say, "Yeah, and it's just as bad right now!" which takes me aback because it so obviously is not.
But thinking that it's so is a set of blinders that keeps them from taking advantage of the advantages they have that I had and my parents did not. It's like the Hebrews who refused to cross the Jordan because they heard stories that the people over the river were giants.
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en.wikipedia.org
