Kumbaya, y’all. Now stop flapping your gums.
If blacks and whites could just erase the barriers of segregation, if they could go to the same schools and ride the same buses and eat side by side at the same downtown diners, then things would be better.
If the kids sat in the same classrooms, they’d be judged only by the quality of their minds.
If the adults had an equal shot at public office, then people would be elected on the basis of their policy ideas.
[...] if we all swam in the same public swimming pools, well, then, childhood playmates would become lifelong friends, and so the shining bridge would reach down to all citizens, eradicating hate (an artifact of the bad old history) and strife and food-borne illnesses, and we would become, in a popular phrase, “color-blind.”
Fully integrated schools have become segregated again, as whites have fled to homeschooling and private academies.
Black separatist groups have been saying that forever, but now, it seems to me, there is an increasing belief across the board that maybe the integration paradigm ought to be rethought some more.
[...] the ancient wounds, the scars of slavery and war and Jim Crow, are unhealed.
[...] I think black people are really, really tired of white people telling them how (and what) they should feel.
In a truly regrettable newspaper column, David Brooks in the New York Times decided to teach the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates a thing or two about racism.
First Brooks praised Coates’ new book (“Between the World and Me”), calling it “great and searing” (perfect for the back cover of the paperback edition).
Yes, all races should work and love and play together, but also maintain a kind of zone of privacy, so the complexities of the situation can be hashed out without conventional pieties, or anyway conventional white pieties.
There’s an impatience with sensitive men and their really deep and mature feelings about women.
[...] men would be interested in working some stuff out too, solo, but the reality of the loathsome men’s rights movement (don’t want to be anywhere near them), and the failure of their own sex to own up to stuff — well, they (we) just better get some stuff under way.