Martin Luther King Day

I was thinking after the recent evidence of racist attitudes exhibited by the dotard in the White House that we haven't made the progress concerning racism that I thought we had.

I like to think that the younger generation doesn't share the same problem that the dotard's generation has, it is difficult to erase the lessons learned at a very young age.

In the 50s and 60s we saw blatant racist behavior in schools, voting, public transportation and facilities that slowly disappeared over the following decades.  However, if you lived through that period, many people started thinking of black people as inherently different.

This is the essence of a racist attitude, treating any identifiable group as different.

In those days it wasn't uncommon to attribute the situation that many blacks found themselves in to some innate flaw in their race.

We never really dealt with the effects of slavery and its repercussions so the millions of slaves that were freed were forced to try and survive as best they could without much support or property.

Fundamentally, eating and finding a place to live is more important than voting so we saw, especially after reconstruction ended, a system created where most freed slaves were barely better off than they were as slaves.

Some of course rose out of the poverty, but the Jim Crow society that grew up and was maintained for many decades provided minimal opportunities and it was only marginally better in the northern states.  Certain jobs were acceptable for blacks and of course within their own communities they could be teachers or doctors or lawyers, but they weren't generally expected to provide those services to whites.

Separate but equal became a catchphrase which sounded better than it was in actuality since the resources available were never equal.

Progress towards equality was exceedingly slow and it took the turbulence of the Civil Rights movement to identify and start to break the status quo.

We went form a period in the 50s where blatant racism was OK to a period where it could no longer be blatant, but for many it was still there.

It was apparent in housing discrimination, job discrimination, opportunity discrimination and the efforts to combat it, Affirmative Action, were treated as reverse discrimination by some.

As Dr. King said:

..." I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."