Terry's Peeps wrote:
Dr. King's dream has been realized today.
We are no longer separated by the color of our skin for the most part.
Now it's all about rich and poor.
Excepting your last, largely correct remark, I wish the first two were the case.
I helped my grandfather sell his home on the South side a few years ago. On the title report was noted a racial restriction on property transfer. It holds no lingering authority, except to note that he needed to use a strawman to buy a home...in 1960 Chicago. It wasn't until 5 years later that a majority of Blacks could escape the poll taxes & literacy tests of the south. Yet, three short months ago the national Republican party actively worked to suppress many of my southern & Ohioan family members votes.
Twenty-twenty five years ago it was still not exactly frowned upon for the CPD to use electric shock & telephone books to coerce quick/false confessions from Black "suspects" who didn't have any connection to the underlying crime. But today I still live in a city neighborhood where diversity in the police force would go a long way toward actually preventing crime....because many continue to wrongly believe that a test score & political connections make the current majority of officers actually "qualified" to serve in and/or protect in much of the city. In part because many of the historic prejudices held by many, many like to wrongly believe no longer exist, or are just come from raging hypocrites.
As a kid, there were neighborhoods I couldn't safely go into because of my color. Six-eight months ago a Black kid was shot & killed in a gated community for walking while wearing a hoodie in the rain and holding candy and a can of juice. I still have to remind my son that imo the Univ. of Chicago police are a bigger threat to him than 99.9% of the people he will encounter in Hyde Park. There are still neighborhoods where I can go, wearing a suit & still get harassed by the residents and police.
I still hold a lessening grudge against the Univ. of Illinois because a counselor ignored both my application info (as a 16 yr. old incoming freshman) and the placement test scores of one day earlier and tried to put me in remedial level courses. Even though I placed out of Calculus. Yeah, at the same school that experienced a Klan style cross burning at a Black frat house, mere days before my first day.
I watched a tenured professor at NW Law attempt to attack and subsequently have a Black man arrested because he didn't think he "belonged" on our campus. That he had a speech impediment and was attempting to pick up his wife didn't seem to matter even after the campus police explained the guy was ok. Oddly enough, that was on the same campus where almost to a man each Black student noted that if called up to be drafted (Gulf War), we would accept, but our wealthy classmates largely actively noted how they'd get deferments or go to Canada. And to think that included many members of the Federalist Society.
I've had police wrongfully pull guns on me twice, wrongfully identify me as a criminal defendant in court proceedings twice, because "we" still all look/are the same. Even watched with amusement two assistant state's attorneys try to reform the cops' testimony (in cases that completely relied upon eyewitness testimony).
Every so often the reports still come out and note that if a person comes from an "urban"
neighborhood and has a certain kind of "ethnic"
name, that person's job application and resume has a greater likelihood of being tossed...in favor of less "qualified" candidates for the job.
But, those studies are routinely ignored. I still believe that there are still many glass ceilings most hard working people of all races cannot pierce, but especially Blacks.
I still come to sites like this, continue to hear the tired, whorish & faulty arguments about Blacks, Black communities and qualifications for us to be judged as qualified, or of some of our greatest even be qualified as "great". Hell, I heard the guy sitting in for drug abusing Rush Limbaugh call the POTUS' address as being of an eighth grade level. I read with some bemusement the racist screeches of several and think that their fears are like James Baldwin once noted, real in their hearts because they are illogically fearful of that which vengeful Blacks or other coloreds would do to them...if only because they realize that they, their fathers or grandfathers acted in that same horrible way....because it was ok, at least since they were Black.
Things haven't changed nearly enough, not in my opinion.
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