Showing posts with label Civil Rights Act of 1964. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civil Rights Act of 1964. Show all posts

Monday, March 25, 2019

Welcome to rampant racism for the ages


U of GA Tau Kappa Epsilon racism
The U.S. doesn't have an exclusive on racism; it is worldwide, says the site Global Issues. It also suggests an interesting concept that racism is a "misunderstanding of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution." It goes on...
"Some took Darwin’s theories to imply that since some races were more civilized, there must be a biological basis for the difference. At the same time they appealed to biological theories of moral and intellectual traits to justify racial oppression. There is a great deal of controversy about race and intelligence, in part because the concepts of both race and IQ are themselves controversial."
I do not believe the xenophobic red necks who hate anyone who is different than them are smart enough to figure out the above, thus, it is most likely attributed to their double-digit IQs. In other words, they can't rationalize the difference between a white and a black person so the black must be bad. And then there are those with a slightly higher IQ like the University of Georgia fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon.

I am originally from the South and experienced the worst kind of racial hatred, including KKK lynchings. And then along came the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and many of us believed we had solved the problem. Not so, and my gut tells me that today it is worse than those earlier times and for much of this we can thank Donald Trump.

Monday, February 27, 2012

Arizona mock Gov. Jan Brewer takes racism back to pre-1964

It was July 2, 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act that outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation. 


AZ Gov. Jan Brewer

It was bad enough that a troubled, less-than-capable head of state Jan Brewer greeted the President of the United States to Arizona with a finger-wagging in his face in an attempt to dominate him.  That was more than adequate to prompt charges of bigotry against the leader of a state known for its racists and an intolerant conservative legislature that, along with much of the state’s population, also hates Hispanics.

Now Brewer is not the greenest saguaro in the desert but Politico thinks she has ignited a “firestorm” around the potential of race becoming an issue in the 2012 election.  And there is no state better than Arizona to coddle this movement with known racist, bigot and recalled state Senator Russell Pearce and his buddy J.T. Ready, another racist and also a neo-Nazi, to fan the flames.  However, jaundiced Jan didn’t stop with her finger in the face of Barack Obama.

Following the incident and on Fox News and various other media outlets, she offered up several versions of the incident.  She accused Obama of being “thin skinned,” and said that she felt threatened by his attitude.  Harry Shelton, Sr. VP for the NAACP commented: “What were you afraid he would do, steal your purse?”  Although there are those who support her in Arizona, she and other state politicians like her continue to bring unbridled ridicule to the state.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson pointed out that we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War but are seeing an awakening of the States’ Rights movement of the 1940s, that fought the federal government because of its opposition to federally mandated racial desegregation.  I grew up during that movement and experienced several Dixiecrat Party political rallies in Tennessee that opposed integration.  The party was formed in 1948 and dissolved in 1948.    

PoliticusUSA says the fact that we have a black President doesn’t indicate any progress toward race equality.  Further, “The racism in America is not limited to hatred of African-Americans, and the past year’s negative rhetoric against immigrants, the poor, and Muslims has been a display of white supremacy that has permeated the general population and many of our politicians.” 

In other words, the feeling of superiority over others knows no bounds when they are different than we are.

PoliticusUSA also said, “Conservatives’ attacks on ACORN, NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center were not for their activism or defense of civil rights, but an attack on African Americans.”  Their concern is rooted in the fact that blacks, Hispanics and other minorities will eventually organize and use their voting power to oust the conservative bigots and make equal rights mean what the Constitution originally intended.

If you want a demonstration of Arizona racism, you must see the following Russell Pearce and J.T. Ready video:



Politico reports, “An AP-Ipsos poll taken just before the 2008 election showed that Obama’s support would have been as much as 6 percentage points higher had he been white.”  Because of the concerns over the economy, this “racial bias” will be played down in 2012.  Although the racial effects were there in 2008, they didn’t decide the election, according to Tammy Frisby, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution.


Getting along

If you must have your specific illustration of racism against Barack Obama, Politico says it is “visceral,” providing the following example: “That was true in 2008 — when a handful of rabid Obama haters sent out emails that included crude caricatures of Obama as a Muslim, a monkey, Buckwheat or worse.

Mary Frances Berry, former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, thinks we should focus on how the President handled the tarmac finger wagging and ignore Jan Brewer’s motives.  Obama characterized the moment as “no big deal” and moved on from there.  Unfortunately, Arizona, and much of the rest of the nation, isn’t able to do the same.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Church condemns interracial marriage then repents

A Kentucky Baptist church voted to ban interracial couples from attending their services.  This was all prompted by a nice couple, Stella Harville, who played the piano in the church and who is white, and her fiancĂ©, Ticha Chikuni, a black from Zimbabwe, who had sung at the church the day they were booted. 


Stella and Ticha
 After the service one of the redneck members came up to Stella’s father, Dan Harville, a member for decades, and said, “Susie and her boyfriend are not allowed to sing in this church anymore.”  He added, “Furthermore, Susie can take her fella back where she found him from.”

Kentucky is my birth state but it is a part of the South, and racism is still prevalent in that part of the country.  Of course this is true all across the U.S. these days and it seems to be getting worse, not better.  It has been 47 years since the Civil Rights Act was enacted on July 2, 1964, so I decided to do some research on Wikipedia to determine just what this epic legislation was designed to do. 

It clearly spells out the fact that you can’t do what the Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church in Pike County, Kentucky did.



The bill outlawed major forms of discrimination against African Americans and women, including racial segregation.  It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public.  It was the dream of John F. Kennedy, but ramrodded through Congress by then President Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s assassination.

The legislation was challenged in both the House and the Senate, in the latter by the "Southern Bloc" of 18 southern Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator led by Richard Russell (D-GA) who launched a filibuster to prevent its passage.  Sen. Strom Thurmond (D-SC) and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) fought the bill until the end when four other senators came up with a compromise piece of legislation that was finally passed in July of 1964.

So is the American public still not ready for interracial marriages?  If not you had better get ready because they have soared since the 1980s, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for nearly one in seven of all U.S. marriages.  President Barack Obama is the product of a black father and a white mother, which many feel accounts for those who claim to dislike his politics.  An important Pew finding was that the 18 to 29 age group has an 85 percent acceptability rate for interracial marriages.

That is interesting thinking back to growing up in a South where I would constantly butt heads with racists, even KKK members, who not only said I should get out of the South, but some added threats if I didn’t.  It was the young turks like me that refused to conform.  The point here is that Pew claims interracial marriages are important to examine since they could be a barometer for race relations, and these seem to have deteriorated again since the election of President Obama, and the fight now over the immigration issue.

What happened to the “melting pot” ideology?

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