Kay:
Okay. So, next let’s just talk a little bit about what went down in the Civil Rights Movement. Now we talked about how we got here. We’ve talked a little bit about the history, but the Civil Rights Movement was a turning point for everyone in our country and there were some really specific conditions that kind of came forward that helped to catalyze this cataclysmic event.
Shi:
Well, I think it really bears kind of this underscoring here of why the Civil Rights Movement was able to take hold when it did. It’s not like there weren’t black people and coalitions and associations and movements happening before then trying to fight for equality and equity and justice, but the conditions did become right, and when you study social movements from a sociological perspective like I do with my students in my University teaching you really look at all of these different factors that it takes in order for a social movement to take hold. So, the conditions really did become finally right in the fifties and sixties, when the black people in our country had been working and struggling to advance the narrative for so long, finally, things came together. What are those things? Things like the Cold War.
Now you have to remember in the Cold War, the US was out there around the world espousing democracy and espousing equality and there were a lot of people in the world who were pointing back and going, “Errr, look at how well you treat black people in your country. You’re supposed to be the big democracy country.” So, this dissonance that was arising was a real political issue on the macro scale.
Kay:
So, then we look into the macro of the global opinion of the US and then bring it down into the micro. Let’s talk about every household having access to a television for one of the very first times in history, that level of mass media where things could be seen, brought the horrors of what was really going on with the fights for equality like people being hosed down by fire hoses and riot control methods that were being used on citizens that were…
Shi:
Peaceful protestors.
Kay:
Yeah, peaceful protestors were televised and shown that they were being treated like rioters and it was terrible and for the first time ever this micro experience for the white people of our country got really uncomfortable.
Shi:
And then we started to see change. We’ve got Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954. In 1965 finally, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Of course, we had the charismatic leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and so we get this kind of symbolic ending to the Jim Crow era and the ending of this overt racism was desegregated. We have laws recognizing the status of black people as equal. So, what happened is it felt like there was that moment to pat ourselves on the back and progress is always worth celebrating. But now we look at what has been leftover and it’s that much harder to scrub out residue because it’s baked into our systems that if we continue to just participate in, continue to perpetuate inequalities without our knowledge of us actively doing that.
Kay:
Now, remember 246 years of slavery in our land, right? 246 years of even being an independent country with almost 100 of those having slavery at the forefront, and then another 100 having this Jim Crow system in place. So, people’s social structures, people’s thought habits, people’s ways of going about the world were influenced heavily by their generations that came prior to them. And if we think about slavery only being only “200 years away from the Civil Rights Movement,” that’s only a few generations. That’s your great, great grandfather being a slave or a slave owner and so there are these really deep-rooted, both ancestral and social structures in place that perpetuated it, even though the laws changed.
Shi:
Right. So, you’ve got the end of racism, but the practice of racism was still very much ingrained in our dominant culture and in our system. So, when you fast forward to today, you see how this plays out. We’ve got black people disadvantaged at literally almost every turn and white people steadfast in their belief that they, as individuals, are not racist, and almost everyone is scared to talk about it for fear of being criticized. So, this is one of those hard moments and as a country, I believe as Americans, that our history has demonstrated we’re up for the challenge and that while it might be messy and slow and sloppy, that progress will continue to move forward. But it takes people raising their hands, saying I’m willing to be criticized. I want to understand, I want to be part of the solution and I want to do better, and that’s our hope when we speak up on topics like this.
Kay:
It’s one of the reasons that we raise our hands and come forward and maybe not always say things in a perfect way, but we try to do so with the solid heart of creating that level of harmony for all.
