The problem is white supremacy
‘Systemic racism’ conveys the pervasiveness of racial oppression, but white supremacy goes further by indicating that there is a rigid nexus of power that protects and enforces it.
By Barbara Smith
Why is this story, written almost 80 years ago, so relevant to what we face today? In 1943, the armed services had not been desegregated, Brown v. Board of Education had not been decided, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had not been passed, affirmative action did not exist, and no Black person had ever been elected president. In 2020, all of these markers of racial progress and many more are part of the historical record, yet Minneapolis and the entire country have erupted for the very same reason that Harlem did in 1943: A white police officer cavalierly executed a Black man. The reason America’s pattern of racial terrorism keeps repeating is because the system of white supremacy that spawns the terrorism remains intact.
Despite the hand-wringing that occurs when the nation’s racial value system gets exposed, usually by unspeakable acts of violence, the reality is that this country has never done anything to eradicate the root cause of these atrocities. America abolished chattel slavery, but quickly instituted peonage, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration; it extended civil rights then proceeded to erode them, especially voting rights; it ended legal segregation but preserved widespread de facto segregation in schools, housing, and jobs; and despite initiating affirmative action, allowed employment discrimination and vast economic inequality to persist.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/29/opinion/problem-is-white-supremacy/
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