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Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction.
Thus, before there was a United States of America, there was the caste system, born in colonial Virginia.
“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.
Hitler especially marveled at the American “knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.”
“The one-drop rule was too harsh for the Nazis.”
Individuality is the first distinction lost to the stigmatized.
He is under the control of the law, though unprotected by the law, and can know law only as an enemy.”
Rather than encouraging a greater understanding of how these disparities came to be or a framework for compassion for fellow Americans, political discourse has usually reinforced prevailing stereotypes of a lazy, inferior group getting undeserved handouts, a scapegoating that makes the formal barriers all the more unjust and the resentments of white working-class citizens all the more tragic.
Little more than one in five African-Americans, 22 percent, are poor, and they make up just over a quarter of poor people in America, at 27 percent. But a 2017 study by Travis Dixon at the University of Illinois found that African-Americans account for 59 percent of the poor people depicted in the news. White families make up two-thirds of America’s poor, at 66 percent, but account for only 17 percent of poor people depicted in the news.
The people hardest on women employees can sometimes be women supervisors under pressure from and vying for the approval of male bosses in a male-dominated hierarchy in which fewer women are allowed to rise.
“There is never caste,” the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. “Only castes.”
In the more than half century since that prophecy of 1964, no Democrat running for president has ever won a majority of the white vote. Lyndon Johnson was the last Democrat to win the presidency with a majority of the white electorate.
“Trump was ushered into office by whites concerned about their status,” Jardina writes, “and his political priorities are plainly aimed at both protecting the racial hierarchy and at strengthening its boundaries.”
White men voted for Trump at 62 percent. White women at 53 percent. Latino men at 32 percent. Latina women at 25 percent. African-American men at 13 percent, and black women at 4 percent.
“if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
A win is not legitimate if whole sections of humanity are not in the game.
