Negating History

The many forms of protest that arose day after day after police officers killed black citizens remind us, rather than reveal, that in the United States you have a right to be racist. The civil rights from the ’60s? They have been reduced to an accident of history.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a sociologist who specializes in black-white relations, became famous in the academic community when he stated — after a careful examination obviously — that the situation in the United States can be described as “racism without racists” — a society in which many individuals deny being racists, while often maintaining unconscious hierarchical relationships with people who are different. In short, to believe that the civil rights movement put an end to racism is illusory.

Let’s not mince words. Some calculations made by Bonilla-Silva and many of his colleagues reveal a terrible truth: income inequality — and all that it entails sociologically — between whites and blacks is higher than it was in South Africa at the height of apartheid. Skeptical? The ratio of imprisoned blacks to whites is higher than it ever was in apartheid South Africa — the very South Africa, I might add, where the Aryan view of the world was an unsurpassable philosophy.

Whether it’s in life expectancy, health care, housing, employment, education, physical violence, nutrition, or other variables that affect daily life, African-Americans are always the losers. Yesterday as today, they face multiple forms of discrimination that have only been exacerbated by the economism that has reigned since the 1980s. Racism has basically become institutionalized. So much so…

So much so that this phenomenon, this pervasive racism, has all but relegated the struggle for civil rights and its key figures to a distant episode in history: as if the struggles of the ’60s should be equated with antiquity — a vice both historical and political; as if Martin Luther King was lost to history; as if blacks were condemned to be history’s perpetual damaged goods.

We know little — much too little — about the times when as soon as President Lyndon B. Johnson, and not John F. Kennedy, made a gesture or introduced a bill to further racial equality or to open certain doors, the leaders of creeping racism scrambled to counter these measures. For example, when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he strove to preserve white privilege by deregulating the real estate sector. And what else? It’s important to re-iterate and highlight how the political elites of large cities tried to counter the anti-racist offensive by strengthening the movement’s opponents with, among other things, the creation of geographic limits that would restrict and destabilize the voting process at the ground level.

This undermining of the legacy of Martin Luther King and the righteous people who supported him culminated — we can never repeat it enough — in June 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled that the trailblazing civil rights legislation that guaranteed the right to vote was no longer necessary. What the highest court in the land did was remove the requirements that were imposed on the nine Southern states in particular. The Court’s main argument? The United States today is not what it was yesterday. In short, they made a mockery of history.