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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsElie Mystal: My Black Generation Is Fighting Like Hell to Stop the Whitelash
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/voting-rights-black-heroes/It now appears likely that I will be part of the first generation of Black people to do worse than my parents and leave a crueler world for my children than the one I inherited.
When I say worse, I dont mean by a metric of homes owned or acres plowed or yachts docked or whatever measure white people mean when they bemoan doing worse than their parents. In fact, Im doing better than my parents economically, as are a visible minority of Black people my age (Im 43). Instead, I mean that I inherited a legacy of civil rights, a stone of freedom each Black generation since emancipation has pushed relentlessly through peaks and valleys towards the summit of equality, but mine will be the first generation to lose more ground than weve gained. We will leave our kids further from the promised land than our parents left us.
White Americans my age are one step removed from their Greatest Generation. It was their grandparents who went to Europe to fight the Nazis and then returned and settled right back into the apartheid system that was well-established here. The Black civil rights generation, our greatest generation, fought those forces of fascism and white supremacy here, on the home front, several years later, and in so doing forced America to live up to its empty promises of freedom and equality for all.
Thanks to their efforts, my generation was born into more opportunity than any generation of Black folks in the history of the New World. We havent squandered it. My Black generation has enjoyed unprecedented social and cultural influence. Some of us have achieved wild economic success. We even got to see the very first Black president. If you start the clock in April 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseball, youll see that Black Americans have accomplished one of the most successful nonviolent political and social revolutions in human history.
*snip*
IrishAfricanAmerican
(3,815 posts)Thanks for posting.
luckone
(21,646 posts)From your link
But my generation has not been the cause of those victories, merely the beneficiaries of our parents and grandparents successes. Even Barack Obama understood that. When he met Ruby Bridges, the woman who, at the age of 6, integrated the first elementary school in Louisiana, Obama said, I think its fair to say that if it wasnt for you guys, I wouldnt be here today.
Maybe thats why white people are trying to ban Bridgess story today. A new Tennessee law bars the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools. While there is, obviously, no such teaching going on in Tennessee public schoolsCritical Race Theory is, for the 1,000th time, an academic legal disciplinethe white parents pushing this know what theyre after. They highlighted four books they wanted taken out of the Tennessee curriculum; Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story, by Ruby Bridges, was one of them.
Bridgess generation made Obama possible. My generation has lived to see white people try to erase those gains
And those white people are winning.
mopinko
(70,078 posts)as is the whole damn thing.