I think a lot about things I see on Twitter. Alas, it's true, the abrasive, abbreviated, and opinionated nature of the app creates statements and discussions that are fascinating to watch, no matter how mislead and misinformed they may sometimes be.
Yesterday I saw a conversation on twitter that started with a tweet that read "Next to slavery, integration is the most damaging thing to have ever happened to African-Americans", and went on in further tweets to express how Martin Luther King Jr. mislead "our people." The discussion that ensued was entertaining to say the least. Of course those who normally engage on twitter many times are very clever, sarcastic, and sophisticated in their humor. This one produced some great nuggets including "Fr I hate when I go to the club and a perfectly good rap song gets integrated with EDM trash" I digress. This sparked my interest, especially because this summer I've been doing a lot of reading and listening to the works of Martin Luther King Jr, as a challenge for myself to diversify the way I think about race in America (I've mostly only really indulged myself in black nationalism). First of all, Martin Luther King Jr, who is oftentimes made the historical poster boy for "integration", said himself that he did not think that integration could be legislated, "But you can legislate desegregation." MLK never really advocated for the full, or really any, integration of races. Rather his movements in the early sixties were referendums against basic humiliation and robbery of rights. I think that this gets lost in Black Nationalism rhetoric. Most of Malcolm X's criticisms of MLK were of his tactics rather than his goals of human dignity and basic equality under the law (They actually agreed on many fundamental issues like black economic empowerment, denouncing american militarism, black cultural and ancestral pride, and consolidation of black political power). Little policy was ever enacted, and even fewer resources were allocated, for integration. The relatively small amount of integration only happened in the Jim Crow South where segregation was a legal institution, whereas in cities in the North such as Detroit, Chicago, New York City, Milwaukee, Oakland, Baltimore, and so on in which de facto segregation was occurring. No money was ever budgeted to the cause, no commission reports were ever established to track process, there were no subsidized housing grants, little transportation offered to further integrate schools, little investment in making public schools truly accessible to the public, no grants to start black businesses, and civil rights groups never really followed up with legal resources to make sure integration was being enforced. The only comparable policy, Affirmative action was modest in scale and only really lasted a maximum of 30 years. In reality, since the civil rights movement there have been more policies that entrench segregation than policies that break it up; redlining, drug laws, over-sentencing, and the cutting of social welfare programs have done nothing to entrench the distance between white and black america. Integration is for the most part akin to the 40 acres and a mule we never received.... This was a short winded post. I'm really just a history nerd. -515
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October 2018
Matt BruceViva DSM!! |