Great Article from The New Republic
People like Paul think that the rejection of racism as socially
incorrect would have happened anyway, just later. But that’s shaky
social history, presentist, as they say. A Rand Paul sees a certain
inevitability in whites shedding their racism because it’s all he has
ever known as a mature person, like humans supposing that evolution has
been a grand series of rehearsals for us. But my, the old order had
persisted for an awfully long time before it finally crumbled. The
social rejection of racism was driven in large part by the head start,
authority, finality, and even the drama of the legal banning of
segregation.
Maybe some think that the flower children alone could have done it,
or that maybe Stokely Carmichael just needed to yell even louder. I
doubt it. Could the Internet have done the trick? Just maybe – but would
we really have wanted black America to have to wait that long? I for
one am happy, as a black person born in 1965, to have missed Jim Crow or
anything like it as the result of the Civil Rights Act the year before –
even if the black America I have known has paid the price of a rather
tragic amount of cognitive dissonance in its wake.
Read complete article here
