Not everything is racially motivated. Eventually speculation like yours crosses a boundary from legitimate social concern to conspiracy and seeing racist boogeymen in every shadow.
Dream City[1] is a good book about the history of DC. Part of the reason there is such a large Black population is that a lot of freed slaves moved there after the Civil War. In later years, Congress, which is effectively charged with governing the District, and of course included representatives and Senators from former Confederate states, definitely considered that when deciding whether DC should be able to manage its own affairs. DC wasn't granted Home Rule and its own city government until 1973.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-City-Power-Decline-Washington/d...
Regardless, the same holds. 'Non-fiction' can still come with heavy biases, especially on politically sensitive topics.
Nowadays, opposition to DC statehood tends to come from Republicans, who are motivated purely by electoral considerations, and who know that DC, now being a largely Black city, will vote Democrat. (Not considered: adjusting the Republican platform to be more appealing to Black voters. I digress.)
But when it was originally decided that DC would not be a state, this had nothing to do with race. First of all, DC's demographics were different at the time; second, enslaved people couldn't vote anyway; and third, the founders were concerned that a national elite would form in DC that would tyrannize the rest of the country, so the point was to weaken that (hypothetical) faction.
So it's ahistorical to blame DC's original non-statehood on racism -- it was a reasonably principled choice -- but the current reality (going back at least to, say, the '20s -- sometime post-Civil-War) does contain a lot of racial motivation.
Ironically, the current situation is the inverse of what the Founders worried about: They thought a powerful elite would settle in DC and rule the rest of the country in an unrepresentative way. Instead, the people who live in DC are largely from an underclass in need of representation. So DC statehood now makes sense. But they couldn't have known that when they were setting things up.
"One reader wrote to the Washington Evening Star, saying: “If you get rid of the 90,000 negroes residing in this city I am in favor of suffrage. As long as they are here I am opposed to it,” according to the report."[1]
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/04/14/dc-black-v...
Yea, it is ridiculous to assume that there is an intrinsic racial hierarchy. That doesn't mean that that US doesn't have one though. If you need evidence, just look at incarceration rates, police shooting rates, property ownership rates, intergenerational wealth, representation in government, hiring disparities, educational disparities, medical treatment disparities, etc. There are clear disparities that break down along racial lines, and from the numbers it looks like african americans and native americans are at the bottom.
> despite what twitter says that's largely not due to any deeply rooted systemic issue
Who needs to consult twitter to know about the US's history of racial oppression targeted at black people, and its lingering intergenerational effects?
* Redlining: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining * GI Bill restrictions for black soldiers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill * Block busting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting * Racially based deed restrictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(law)#:~:text=In%20th....
And then you can get into things like urban renewal of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Frequently the "renewed" areas were thriving black neighborhoods. And then the US, as a country, ignores that these things happened.
It's really comforting to imagine that today's problems aren't a result of things in the past that our ancestors (or even just parents) were complicit in, but that isn't the world we live in.
It's also quite misleading to throw out statistics like incarceration rates, police shootings, etc and assume it's automatically because of racism and not instead indicative of the violent culture that become pervasive in many black urban communities. I have no doubt that part of it does stem from racial prejudice, but let's not pretend like that's the only or even a major contributor to those statistics.
As for the other disparities, those are largely a result of poverty/low-income, not racism. I hear "well that's still pretty much racism since black americans are the poorest demographic" and that's not true. It's not the same because it isn't racism. It's unfortunate that historic events have made black americans the poorest demographic, but poor white, asian, hispanic, etc families have very much the same issues. Check those same numbers but control for income and see for yourself how it isn't racism but is classism.
Instead of harping on about the imagined ingrained racism in america let's face the real issue, which is cyclical poverty. The black community is the most effected by this due to relatively recent oppression, but they aren't the sole suffering demographic.
Was what happened in the past awful? Yes. Are some people still suffering today as a result? Yes. Does that mean that america still has ongoing systemic racism? No. When controlling for income, we all have very near equal opportunity to succeed or fail.
You keep bringing up how black americans were oppressed but can't seem to articulate what systemic racism still exists today. The only semblance of oppression left is the economic consequences of the past, which I've already spoken on.
Racism is not the only factor in play here (political balance of power is a huge factor), but to deny that racism has played a significant role in creating this situation is ridiculous.
I place that racism squarely in the laps of both parties since they both deserve that blame.
The last one though, presented a straight yes or no on statehood and statehood won by a significant margin.
Officially, both political parties tend to say they support self determination for Puerto Rico, but still nothing has happened.
You're right: not everything is racially motivated. Except for the things that so plainly and obviously are.
Also: please do not implicitly label my concern as being not legitimate. I'm not really that into clumsy gaslighting.
[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/...