,
10 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Did you ever hear of this little thing called racial apartheid that was visited upon the descendants of the enslaved and was not ended in all aspects of American life until1968? That allowed codified discrimination in housing, schools, public accommodations, employment, lending?
These people are still alive. These people are my father's generation. Many of them are not even elderly.
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court actually has a name for this: It's called badges of slavery because black people uniquely suffered from these laws passed *only* because they descended from the enslaved.
I mean, one could easily make an argument based on black exclusion from the New Deal discrimination against black people in programs that produced the largest white middle-class wealth in the history of our country. cf.linnbenton.edu/artcom/social_…
I am always perplexed at how intellectually lazy some people are. Like, the "all the slaves are dead" argument is literally the oldest one in the book. Do y'all really think no one has an answer to that hot take?
This is why reading books matters. People get on here with hot takes and do not even have a fundamental understanding of the country in which they live.
Let's calculate the wealth lost from redlining, being denied federally insured loans, from being denied the ability to work the most well-paying jobs, from being denied access to equally funded schools, from paying taxes for libraries and parks you were barred from using.
Let's calculate the wealth lost from real estate assessment processes that are still based off the artificial inflation of who home values in white neighborhoods based on federal standards.
If a loved one dies tomorrow because of medical malpractice, do you think your family should be denied compensation because the *actual* victim is dead? Of course not. There is an understanding of the need for restitution and to recoup the financial loss of losing income.
But, as always in this country, start talking about treating black people fairly and everyone loses their minds.
