jelun

OK, I admit it. I am on a there are way too many "Want to Read"s around.
This one is definitely on my list.
Somewhere here there is a thread about books to read, I can't find it.
Anyway, Kristen Green researched and wrote this book about the years following Brown vs Dept. of Education in this region where she grew up.
The whites in this area of Va. dug their heels in and created an "Academy", a private school to block integration.
I will avoid commenting on all of the issues that are so hot button about the end of slavery putting the brakes on inequality.
It seems like a must read to me. I bet others would find it informative as well.

https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062268693/something-must-be-done-about-prince-edward-county

About the Book

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Combining hard-hitting investigative journalism and a sweeping family narrative, this provocative true story reveals a little-known chapter of American history: the period after the Brown v. Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia’s Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community’s white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed.
Kristen Green, a longtime newspaper reporter, grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which did not admit black students until 1986. In her journey to uncover what happened in her hometown before she was born, Green tells the stories of families divided by the school closures and of 1,700 black children denied an education. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation’s past, her own family’s role—no less complex and painful—comes to light.
At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a dramatic chronicle that explores our troubled racial past and its reverberations today, and a timeless story about compassion, forgiveness, and the meaning of home.

Searching Loc: Rural Southwest VA

Well, since I live just two miles before the Prince Edward County line in Lunenburg County, living here, having moved from the MD suburbs of D.C., I can tell you it's all true and the KKK is alive and well here.

jelun

And we all know that whether the face of it, the embodiment of the bigotry is the KKK or held within a single individual, racism is alive and well all over the US and throughout the world.

Fluffy

I'd go as far as to say that the legacy of slavery and resulting racism is a major defining trait of America and it threatens to tear us apart. This is a serious problem that many people want to deny.

jelun

I would agree other than the America part.
It seems to me that anywhere there is a European majority we see the same thing. Australia is the same.
Of course, Japan has a similar issue. So that blows my European theory out of the water.
<shrug>
I have read that it was racism that caused Africans to be the majority of slaves here, the legislation creating lifelong slavery initially in VA was specific to Africans. For all the abuse of the American Indian, for hostages to be kept in slavery was not as wide spread.

Fluffy

Seems like humans can't thrive without some form of slavery. It's a brutal aspect of being human that puts us on par with ant and bee colonies. Racism seems to me to be a way to justify this drive, rather than racism bring the cause.

jelun

I think you have something there. It is mixed up in territorial control and power, with some of the hatred and bigotry as expressed by Markinny in the thread "How Racists Think" to enslave or deprive others as in Prince Edward County.
I will never fully understand how people justify these actions. How can a person or group pull education and opportunity away from a whole generation of children just because they have the ability to?

Fluffy

They've been spoon fed propaganda by the Republican Party for so long that they've forgotten what being human means. They've been brutalized by misinformation into acceding to their most basic, most brutal human instincts, which is kill anyone who does not look like you. Now that Trump has unleashed their inner beasts, which have been carefully cultivated for years with dog whistles and innuendo, the Republican elite, who profited from this brainwashing, are horrified. As they should rightly be. At the same time this elite was brainwashing their followers against scientists, intellectuals and liberals, who could debunk all the misinformation. It was a one-two knockout. Notice how they've reduced Michelle to a cartoon character and liberals to idiots. No nuance whatsoever. They don't think we deserve to live. They don't think anyone other than white people deserve to live. It's really weird.