After being married into a Black American family for about ten years and so in the decade of the 70s, the scene was changing in a positive direction from the perspective of the 50s, i.e. racial segregation was giving way to a somewhat more integrated society. Probably we can cite television shows and seeing Black people in areas of town they were not seen just a few years earlier. We are sure we were the first Black/White marriage done legally in AZ.
Yet the old structures remained firm and efforts to dismantle them were getting a backlash. Forty years later, Obama stirred up another backlash which resulted in the ascendency of the MAGA movement which permitted that old plantation owning Libertarian crowd to move into mainstream politics with Trump. My observation is that in future histories of the U.S., the whole 60s thing might be seen as a bump in the road to recreating a fractured society. While Blacks made up a significant element of the population, they never had political or economic power, only the vote and that only after 1965.
Which brings me back to my observations in the 70s: why were Black people so intent on integrating with Whites and therefore becoming dependent of the old social, economic and political structures, especially the law? My voice resonated with a few Black people and with almost (almost) all Whites. My view was pessimistic, out-of-step, etc. But I sensed an unyielding bedrock. It was Isabel Wilkinson’s book Caste that capped it for me, i.e. put into words this inchoate sense that not all that much had changed. Fortunately, my wife was on the same page with me. One of the people she looked up to was Morrison Warren, the first Black professor at ASU. We’d run into him in Luby’s Cafeteria and talk. What he said my wife repeats often to others: the worst thing that ever happened to us was integration. This coming from a man who had personally benefitted from all those celebrated and heralded moves into a bright, multi-cultural future.
Yet here we are: saddled with a president who promises immediate steps to deport several million people who his base believes are the cause of their personal and financial problems. Trump won’t expand into two or eleven or whatever million deportees; he’ll just have Fox show film of people being deported, in tears. Little will be shown of the insane disruptions that will cause and nothing said that 99.9% of undocumented people left behind here to mow lawns and lead major tech companies. But the cruelty is the point, right? The whole purpose is to reassure his base that they remain on top, no matter how uneducated, poor and toothless they are.
But isn’t that the status quo ante? Will TV shows still show commercials of mixed families? Will TV even exist? Who can predict? Only AI can. But don’t forget that bedrock of caste: SOMEBODY has to be on top and SOMEBODY has to be on the bottom. Guess who? [see my blog entry We the Who?]