Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

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I'm struggling to understand how one would attempt to claim that the racism of today is equally or more pernicious than the racism of first and second wave antiracism movements? Is it your genuine belief that racism today exceeds that during 2nd wave antiracism? That people in 2018 suffer racism of equal magnitude as compared to poll taxes, explicit refusal to hire certain races, de-facto legal lynching, etc. ? Or first wave antiracism (abolitionism)? It seems incredibly difficult to make either of these claims.

No doubt, any amount of racism is more than what is ideal. But to criticize the article for, "implying that the racism of today is less pernicious, and leaving no scope for it to be equally as pernicious" strikes me as non-sensical, since the overwhelming majority of people would agree that it is less pernicious.

Liberals have a tendency to focus on legal frameworks and equality before the law while ignoring the material conditions and the lived experiences of black people.

In some sense, it's trivially true that legal equality means things are "better", but there's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that material gains won by the civil rights movement have regressed significantly.

For example, in many places, schools are more segregated than they've been since the 60s [1]. Further, the housing crisis erased gains in black wealth back to levels of the 80s and 90s [2].

This is too large a subject to get into in an HN comment, but if you're curious, I'd highly suggest reading Michelle Alexander's excellent book The New Jim Crow[3], which focuses particularly on incarceration.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get... [2]: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017... [3]: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/ctp/The_New_Jim_Crow.pdf

No doubt that the lived experiences of black people aren't entirely captured by legal changes. But the point remains: how can one reasonably make the claim that the lived experiences of black people between reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, or before abolition of slavery are the same or better than today?

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