A musing

[John Bickers]

Indeed, it may be the symmetry of these three phases that routinely causes the most surprise for my students.  The most shocking moment for many of them comes upon reading the comment of Justice Bradley that the time has come when freed slaves must stop being "the special favorite of the laws" in 1883.
 
John Bickers
Salmon P. Chase College of Law
Northern Kentucky University

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Subject: Re: A musing 


The question is whether to maintain a political-economic-social regime in which white advantage over blacks is the norm and fact.  The question was never whether to create the form of equality with the realities of inequality.  Fifty years ago was 1960, when most of the political and economic reality sustained permanent white advantage.  Some groups have in the past fifty years sought means to overcome what otherwise seems a permanent factual subordination for blacks taken as a group.  That is the net effect of the civil rights revolution, so far as achieved.  Others, whom many participants on this list can doubtless identify, have sought a political-economic-social counterattack.  

More bluntly.  Over the course of American history, the question of the status of persons of African ancestry has been subject to three advances and three counter-attacks.  (1)  In Congress in 1790, the antislavery attack began.  Counterattack 1 was to make the United States safe for slavery.  (2) The Civil War produced formal freedom and formal citizenship.  Counterattack 2 was to establish white supremacy as the national norm, while accepting the Civil War Amendments as ritual,  and was effective at least through the first of the 20th century.  (3)  The civil rights era is well known and Counterattack 3 is the effort to negate so much of its effect and promise as possible. The ways in which such concepts as "discrimination" and "preferences" are employed are good indicators whether one has in mind advance or counterattack.
   
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