(Intercollegiate Studies Institute) - This coming
summer, Black America will turn four centuries old, at the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the first shipment of enslaved Africans at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. In the quarter of a millennium of race-based chattel slavery and the subsequent century of segregation and subjugation that ensued, African Americans developed a culture and an identity of their own—one that both helped define America as a whole and set African Americans apart from it. Most black Americans also developed an instinct to be constantly on guard and on the lookout for any manifestations of prejudice against them.
The Republican Party’s predominant posture on race relations flies in the face of this reality. Calls for members of the black community to embrace “color-blind” politics are hopelessly naive in a country that has gone out of its way to persecute its black population for the lion’s share of its history.