Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics:
All politics in America is not local but ultimately racial
One need only contemplate the history running up to the passage of the civil rights acts and the shaping of society in the wake of those statutes to see the profound impact race has had on the nation.
But one need not study that history if he is not so inclined, one need only turn on the television and watch our sitcoms and our dramas to see how racial politics play out on that stage.
One can visit our schools from pre-K through postgrad and witness how those institutions have been shaped by race in America.
There is scarcely any issue which cannot be connected to race in America, just ask Elijah Cummings.
I was recently stimulated by Hank Aaron’s comment that “nothing has changed” to think a new thought (not easy for an old guy).
What whites thought would happen as a result of the “freedom struggle” and what blacks thought would happen were, and are, completely different. In fact, they are virtually opposite.
Whites were, and are, ashamed of the structures that were put in place to respond to the end of slavery. Principally, these were legal segregation, social stigmatization, and special schools for black children. After several generations had passed, whites in general came to accept the premise that these structures were the cause of, and not the result of, the various differences between whites and blacks.
So whites generally anticipated that the end of legal segregation, “discrimination”, and black schools would make all those differences vanish, if not right away, certainly within a generation or two. And, as an extra added bonus, whites would be “free” also - free from the psychological, political, and financial burdens of maintaining a complex, multi-level control structure over blacks. This is why children in high school now know as much about Harriet Tubman and MLK as they do about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
What whites took as an anticipated benefit, however, blacks took as a promise. Blacks believed, not without some justification, that the structures imposed upon their communities by whites were the cause of certain social pathologies among their people. Just as we all do, they took a shred of truth and expanded it into the whole truth - so that, when the “freedom struggle” was won, that they, and their communities, would be as the whites were, and are.
The fact is that the end of the 1865-1964 era has produced radically different outcomes for blacks and for whites. And, given the fact that their perceptions going in were so different, it is not really surprising that their reactions to the outcomes are also different.
When Hank Aaron says “nothing has changed”, he is, from a certain point of view, telling the truth.