BY TONY BOUZA
America’s hands wring in agony over police-black tensions now characterized by the Black Lives Matter movement.
What a mystery!
Cops treat blacks badly.
Mirabile dictu!!
Look at any analysis of American social, economic or judicial life and who will you find—literally or figuratively—on the ghetto corners of urban blight?
Slavery—after 244 years or so—was erased.
Hallelujah.
Reconstruction was subverted, and to learn how, go see “Birth of a Nation,” which, amazingly, idolizes the Klan.
Jim Crow laws followed—for a century—which carefully segregated blacks and regularized their secondary status—everywhere and in everything.
Then the truly historic 1965 Civil Rights Act ended Jim Crow.
Another hallelujah.
But racism’s slippery slope—capable of chameleon shifts—devised a new approach—imprisonment.
Thus were the police assigned to sustain the exclusion and suppression of black aspirations. In a bitter personal irony, as a Spanish immigrant, I lived the American Dream withheld from blacks.
Has progress occurred?
Yes.
Is racism dead?
That, as Hamlet put it, is the question.
Look at the jails—disproportionately crammed with blacks. Look at the jobs—not crammed. Look at our institutions (the Oscars, for God’s sake!) and you’ll see the true motives behind society’s actions.
Ours continues as a racist society, notwithstanding some pretty breathtaking—and even impressive and promising—shifts.
Gunnar Myrdal’s “An American Dilemma” posited “the Negro Problem” as our No. 1 obstacle—70 years ago.
What’s No. 1 today?
The more things change—the more they remain the same.
The cops have been assigned the role of enforcing America’s racism. That is one helluva task.
Good luck with the Black Lives Matter movement.
