A Less Perfect Union
The Pretense of Race Liberalism is Fading Away. That’s a Bad Thing.
I don’t know when it happened, but over the last few years, I stopped communicating what I thought about race. Being African American, race has always been something I’ve have to contend with in my own life. It wasn’t some kind of burden, but since an early age,I’ve always been aware of who I was and how my appearance could affect a myriad of things in my life. It was also a way to compare how lived my life in the present as opposed to how say, my late father lived his life growing up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana.
My view of race in America hasn’t really changed- there are still serious problems that need addressing, but on the whole, life for African Americans is infinitely better than it ever has been thanks to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. But the wider discussion on race has changed dramatically in the last decade or so and I would argue these changes will hurt not only African Americans but the American experiment.
Somewhere in the middle of the last decade, the rhetoric on race changed. I’m hearing less about the Civil Rights movement and more about the Civil War and slavery. It wasn’t as if no one talked about the history of slavery-I can remember watching the miniseries Roots as a kid. But slavery became more prominent in…
