Black and brown lives have never mattered as much in America as white lives. Never. Not in law or in practice. There is no debate over that. There is a mountain of evidence to prove it still is true. America is not yet by any means a “color-blind” society. Like climate change, denial of the problem is certainly not a solution to it.
The present day American right-wing may not believe racism is embedded in our code of laws but Adolph Hitler and the Nazis sure did. “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” a 2017 book by James Whitman, presents calm logic and sound evidence that Nazi lawyers had a sustained interest in patterning their anti-Jewish laws after Jim Crow laws in the south and other restrictive “anti-Negro” laws. Many of the American laws the Nazi lawyers admired have been rescinded, but many of the more subtle ones have not.
By the measurement of some, for them to be doing well someone else has to be doing poorly. In America, that has always been people of color. In human history, thousands of gallons of blood and tears have been shed as a result. A large quantity of that was shed during our own Civil War that the South fought believing it was their right to keep Black Americans doing poorly.
My concern is that, given the level of red-hot hostility currently displayed toward the Black Lives Matter movement and critical race theory, where will that go in the future when the white race becomes the minority in America? Demographic forecasts show it is coming by the mid-2040s. The aggregate non-white population of America will exceed the white population.
What distant, irrational shore will the white rage displayed at Charlottesville and elsewhere carry us to? There is sure to be a demagogue waiting in the wings to exploit that rage. Will it be like Jan. 6, or will it be much, much worse?
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
