The Sept. 17, 2018 issue of Time Magazine offers a booklet-length essay “Don’t Let the Loud Bigots Distract You: America’s Real Problem with Race
Cuts Much Deeper”, by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr , who is the Willisam S. Tod
Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton. He is author of “Democracy in Black: How Race
Still Enslaves the American Soul”, from Deckle Edge, hardcover (2016) or Crown,
paper.
Glaude notes that for most of the last few decades, through the
Obama years, most of us believed we weren’t racist – we didn’t mention race in
the workplace (and usually not religion), we neutral. We qualified people for jobs based on merit.
But at the same time, we exacerbated the inequality of
opportunity with artificial resegregation.
I remember that from Dallas in the 1980s, when companies gradually moved
from the close-in areas to far North Dallas or Richardson or Plano to have
better (white) school districts for their own kids. We paid for schools with property taxes, and
conducting tea parties.
We also didn’t admit a streak in some of us, where (as Umair
Haque points out on Medium) where some of us would get off on the idea that
some people are “born better” than others.
Trump, Glaude says, was a president who would play on our darkest deep
prejudices. We didn’t think it could happen. But enemies divides us, and knew a lot of us
didn’t care enough personally.
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