Author: David Brooks Source: The New York Times Publication Date: 22 July 2021 Link: How Racist Is America?
Stephan: I committed myself to foster racial equality when I was a boy of nine and witnessed an act of racial prejudice that I found inexplicable, offensive, and very unfair. When I stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and heard Dr. King give the "I Have a Dream" speech, then-President Johnson sign the Voting Rights Acts, and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 65, then watched Colin Powell, a Black man become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, the highest military office in the country, I thought that although there were surely still racist in the country that as a whole the culture had entered a new phase. Boy was I wrong. About a third of American whites, egged on by the racist in chief Donald Trump, I now realize are as deeply racist as their grandparents were. White supremacy I now understand, amongst that cohort, is as alive and well as it has been since America's colonial days. The only good news I see is that younger people do seem to be healing this cancer and that Hispanics clearly are doing better.
Credit: The New York Times
One question lingers amid all the debates about critical race theory: How racist is this land? Anybody with eyes to see and ears to hear knows about the oppression of the Native Americans, about slavery and Jim Crow. But does that mean that America is even now a white supremacist nation, that whiteness is a cancer that leads to oppression for other groups? Or is racism mostly a part of America’s past, something we’ve largely overcome?
There are many ways to answer these questions. The most important is by having honest conversations with the people directly affected. But another is by asking: How high are the barriers to opportunity for different groups? Do different groups have a fair shot at the American dream? This approach isn’t perfect, but at least it points us to empirical data rather than just theory and supposition.
When we apply this lens to the African American experience we see that barriers to opportunity are still very high. The income gap separating white and Black families was basically as […]
Decisions are arrived at idiosyncratically by systems of our minds which navigate and combine emotions, memory, factoids mistaken as knowledge. So when climate cliff looms fear rules. Running out of everything, having to get along with less, physical danger – all exacerbate our decision making. Racism becomes heightened. Running out of water in Iran is just one example. Chaos is emblematic of change. May we heal the 6th great extinction in time to save humans – all life!
Decisions are arrived at idiosyncratically by systems of our minds which navigate and combine emotions, memory, factoids mistaken as knowledge. So when climate cliff looms fear rules. Running out of everything, having to get along with less, physical danger – all exacerbate our decision making. Racism becomes heightened. Running out of water in Iran is just one example. Chaos is emblematic of change. May we heal the 6th great extinction in time to save humans – all life!