[JBG]

As the excerpted article below illustrates, society was once full of barriers that were cruel, divisive and served no purpose. Racism was not a cheap, one word attack whose primary function was to terminate debate, and denigrate an opponent making meritorious points, as it is now.

Back in the day, blacks were forced to stay separate, receive woefully inferior schooling, endure daily humiliations of using "Jim Crow" water fountains, beaches, schools, and bathrooms. This system was horrifically cruel to the black victims. It was also bad for the economy of the Deep South, which lost the productive resources of intelligent people with, at that time, strong family and work ethics.

The liberalism that I still love and pine for broke through these barriers. Black people now vote, can be employed, in short, are limited only by themselves and their own human limitations. Liberalism, at its best, was a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" ideology. Government, at least the Federal government, was a force for salvation, not a filthy cesspool. In short, it's liberals, not Liberanos, that I love.

Though we call our party by a different name, the result is the same. It's government for the sake of government. If the government is needed to protect minorities against a tyranny of the majority, that's what I, and I think most of this Board, wants to see. If the purpose of government is to enrich and comfort the comfortable, it belongs in the dustbin of history, along with enforced racial segregation.
==============================================

New York Times wrote:

The Ghosts of Emmett Till By RICHARD RUBIN Published: July 31, 2005

We've known his story forever, it seems. Maybe that's because it's a tale so stark and powerful that it has assumed an air of timelessness, something almost mythical: Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black kid born and raised in Chicago, went down in August 1955 to visit some relatives in the hamlet of Money, Miss. One day, he walked into a country store there, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something fresh to the white woman behind the counter -- 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife -- or asked her for a date, or maybe wolf-whistled at her. A few nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, yanked young Till out of bed and off into the dark Delta, where they beat, tortured and, ultimately, shot him in the head and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. His body, though tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, surfaced a few days later, whereupon Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder.


Maude Schuyler Clay for The New York Times

The remains of the barn where
Emmett Till was beaten and tortured.

Reporters from all over the country -- and even from abroad -- converged upon the little courthouse in Sumner, Miss., to witness the trial. The prosecution mounted an excellent case and went after the defendants with surprising vigor; the judge was eminently fair, refusing to allow race to become an issue in the proceedings, at least overtly. Nevertheless, the jury, 12 white men, acquitted the defendants after deliberating for just 67 minutes -- and only that long, one of them said afterward, because they stopped to have a soda pop in order to stretch things out and ''make it look good.'' Shortly thereafter, the killers, immune from further prosecution, met with and proudly confessed everything to William Bradford Huie, a journalist who published their story in Look magazine.

*snip*


Corbis Bettmann; Ed Clark/Time
Life Pictures; Ernest C. Withers/Panopticon Gallery2

Emmett Till in 1955, not long
before he was murdered; Bryant's Grocery
and Meat Market in Money, Miss.,
as it looked in 1955; an all-white jury,
including Howard Armstrong
and Ray Tribble (circled) acquitted
Roy Bryant and his half-brother,
J.W. Milam, of Till's murder;
the legal team that successfully defended
Bryant and Milam, at trial.

*snip*

Howard Armstrong. In 1995, he was, aside from Ray Tribble, the only living juror (who had voted to acquit the killers).

*snip*

''I'm glad I can't remember those old days,'' he (the juror, Howard Armstrong) told me near the end of our visit. ''You hear so much about 'the good old days.' The good old days weren't so good.''

[Patrick_Ross]

Racism is still alive and well, in a number of respects.
Racism is still alive as a practice that is undertaken in order to demean, marginalize, or even control "minorities".
However, I would agree with you that racism is also alive as a political weapon -- in many respects. While as many politicians point their fingers and scream "racist" to harm an opponent (especially if he represents the Conservative party), there are politicians who (thankfully few of which get elected) use racism as a common grounds to attract voters. Many political movements within Canada (including Doug Christies "Western Canada Concept") fall under this category.
It's a real issue that we all too often overlook.

[exroofer]

A good post. We need to be reminded sometimes. As regards our current Liberal govt.........You can go to jail in Canada for having english letters too large on your sign outside your business. And the Ottawa Liberals think this is ok.

"
some pigs are more equal than others" George Orwell. Animal Farm.

[exroofer]

As an afterthought.............Intelligent discussion to follow on this thread? I would wish to participate in that. Let's see if it gets sidetracked.

[Patrick_Ross]

It is.

Lily wrote:

It does make some of today's shrill cries of "racism!" seem a little shallow in comparison.

Sadly, there are more than a few people in our society who would love to go right back to that.

Lily wrote:

You'd think the defendant's brother-in-law would have been disqualified from the jury.

This was the deep south, baby... "we don't need to steeenkin' jury!"

Lily wrote:

Imagine where the south could be today if they had treated everyone equally right from the start. (same could be said for women, but that's a separate topic!)

When you segregate your society and ignore people's gifts, you place yourself at a distinct advantage... especially when you base that on belief systems that pre-date the 19th century.

[Patrick_Ross]

Actually, I meant "disadvantage", in the sense that your society is disadvantaged, but those who are privileged (shown favour by the system, ie/ (in this case) whites) are certainly advantaged. Touche.

Lily wrote:

I just realized that I think I know why there have been so few replies. The original post was so well written, what more can anyone really add?

On THAT note:

The Color Line: White People Think We Can Put Race Behind Us and Black People Don’t
By Knute Berger


Not long ago I visited Memphis, Tennessee. There are two major tourist attractions there. One is Graceland, a shrine to a demigod named Elvis. The other is the National Civil Rights Museum. I’ll bet you can guess which is the most popular.

I had the weird experience of visiting both on the same day—and I suffered extreme cultural whiplash. One is a place where a bunch of rockin’ good ‘ol boys ate fried banana sandwiches and shot holes in the walls with no mamma to tell them no. The other is a fine museum housed in the Lorraine Motel—a perfectly preserved artifact whose exterior looks like it did the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered there. It looks so much like a functioning motel that I met at least one person who tried to check in.

Graceland, with its tour busses and endless souvenir shops, would never be mistaken for an ordinary place. It’s a high temple of kitsch culture where you see what a million bucks worth of Naugahyde and shag carpet looks like. At the more understated Civil Rights museum, you wander through exhibits that put you in the middle of the black experience in America. There’s no Elvis Cadillac, but you can sit on Rosa Parks’s bus; and you can peer into the room Dr. King was in moments before his assassination—it’s just the way he left it.

Elvis might have sung Heartbreak Hotel, but the Lorraine is the real deal—the site of a national tragedy, the place where “the dream” died. It is an archive of a history that is powerful, and one we should all know better.

When so-called “race” problems come up, you hear people say, “We’ve got to put race behind us.” When I hear that, I know one thing: the speaker is white. That’s because white people think they don’t have race. Other people have race: brown people, black people, yellow people, red people, foreign people... you know, the people who are constantly complaining. But we white Americans like to think of ourselves as race neutral—we’re like glass, invisible when it comes to race. The fact that we can live with the illusion is a testament to the power we hold. Well, hello America: Elvis is dead and race lives.

But one of the things that becomes inescapable when you’re standing in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis is that what we think of as “black” history is also “white” history. The experience of African Americans cannot be told without both slaves and slave merchants, without Abe Lincoln and the Ku Klux Klan, without Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray. By shifting the lens from a traditional white perspective—where race doesn’t matter—and looking at the American experience from a Civil Rights perspective—where race does matter—you find a storyline that is shocking, agonizing, inspiring, and profound. You realize how impossible it is to banish race from today’s problems and discourse because it is so much a part of what we’ve fought about, so much a part of what we’ve done to each other. Or let me say it this way: so much a part of what we’re still fighting about, so much a part of what we’re still doing to each other.

To put race behind us is to bury the truth.


Taken from http://hnn.us/articles/100.html

[Blue_Nose]

Exactly... saying, "I don't see people differently. Everyone is the same." is absolutely ridiculous. People don't all look the same, act the same, or think the same way. Pretending everyone else is just another you in different skin is fairly narrow minded.

[Patrick_Ross]

The movement to get people to "ignore" their differences is forgetting that in many cases, it is these differences that makes our country diverse enough to be healthy.