Better than Lou Gehrig’s disease, worse than Ruth’s Chris Steak House.

Comments

1
Cool fact: Forest Whitaker and David Oyelowo also worked together in The Last King of Scotland.
2
I have a really hard time picturing John Cusack as Richard Nixon.
3

Nice history, but I don't think that's the way it happened.

Civil Rights worked because there was something to bring a complaint to. An all powerful Federal Government, run, yes, by white people, a lot of whom wanted to make the system fair after seeing what an unfair system was like (Hello...it's Nazis!)

Then we entered a state or anarchy (1978-201?). And there wasn't much to appeal to, which was fine, because everyone was swimming in money who wanted to.

Then we ran out of money. Suddenly it's every man for himself. It still is. Don't fool yourself.

Trayvon Martin proves this. There were no riots. There was no vengeance. No one gave much of a shit other than what was pro forma. Why should they? We're post racial.

If you got the money, we got rights...all you can buy.
4
@3 I know it is a lost cause to argue with you, but I'll just say one thing: the federal support for Civil Rights reforms didn't occur because people suddenly wanted to make the system fair. Come on! Nazi Germany's governance structure was nothing like the US's! Why would Americans have to "fix" anything (the racists would have said)? No, it was Cold War politics.

Every single racist incident was 100% legit ammunition for Soviet claims that capitalists, and Americans, were ethically abhorrent and just itching to grind the world's black and brown peoples under their boots. Declassified evidence shows that Dean Acheson in the Truman Administration was particularly concerned about the optics of white violence, an interest continued by the Eisenhower Administration. Kennedy was a dick and didn't really care about Civil Rights except in a calculated, which-position-brings-me-votes way, but Johnson did and his government was the fulcrum to moving Civil Rights law enforcement beyond the massive pissing match which was the Cold War.

I'm sure this will simply rev you up into extra bouts of crazy, malinformed revisionism, but I had to.

Please wait...

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