“I voted” flair and all. Link
:pinker: Line Go Up Things Get Better?
I don’t even know anymore. Its nice to think that when we functionally purged the Klan (for, like, the third or fourth time) from government institutions in the 70s and 80s, material conditions improved for the country. But I don’t see it in the numbers. Did the prison population go down? Did the country get any less hostile towards migrants? Did we engage in fewer wars? Did social services meaningfully improve? Did wages increase? Did life expectancy and infant mortality improve?
It seems like we didn’t bring colored folk up when we abolished the Klan. We just allowed more white folk to sink down, while a few token minorities were positioned as a new class of overseer.
As a Houstonian, I still see police wrestling with homeless black men on the street. I still drive through the slums and shop at stores full of low-wage minority workers. I still know where all the big prisons are. I’ve been down to Ben Taub Hospital, I’ve passed through the HISD school districts and talked to the teachers. I’ve volunteered at the Houston Food Bank and I’ve door knocked through some rough parts of town on behalf of a certain skateboarding would-be Senator.
I can’t tell you how things were in the 1960s, but I can tell you how they were in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. This doesn’t feel like a city that’s getting better, even if a few people clamber up through the cracks and make it into the upper-middle class.
The Klan went away for two reasons for one the industrialisation of the south removed the material conditions the Klan was a product of. and the Soviet union was using it as an example for why African nations should align with them rather than the US so their driving factor went away at around the same time they became a liability.
How life improved was segregation and lynchings stopped. America is institutionally racist but it still used to be worse when there was a terrorist organisation dedicated to making life unlivable for black people
The Klan went away
I don’t know that it did. I’d say it was just rebranded and reintegrated under the evangelical movement and then the Tea Party / Trump movements that followed.
How life improved was segregation and lynchings stopped.
Segregation wasn’t stopped. It was rebranded as meritocracy. Neighborhoods are no less segregated than they were fifty years ago. Schools and businesses continue to enforce racial divisions under secularized metrics.
Lynchings simply became a role of the state rather than the mob. Again, look to the modern prison system and police state. You’ll find plenty of lynchings. Now you can kill someone by SWATing them.
A ton of social democratic reforms happened during the 50s 60s and 70s in pretty much every western country, the same thing started to happen in reverse from the 80s onward in pretty much every western country again which leads me to believe that whoever is in charge just determines the speed not the direction of politics. Right now the direction seems to be "make more and more things accessible to the ‘market’ " so that companies can get another area they can get profits from to put on the balance sheet how company xyz grew and made more revenue.
