alma mater,<\/em> North Carolina. None at Yale and Princeton yet. Let alone in West Point. Let alone in combat in the military. The word \u201cgay\u201d hadn\u2019t even been invented. No, nothing for disability. No seatbelts in cars. TV ads incessantly promoting cigarettes as healthy, sophisticated and invigorating. That\u2019s 50 years ago.<\/p>\nWallace pledged to protect segregation. Only 50 years ago. He failed. But in his failure, he invented most of the language that is chillingly contemporary today in resenting the government and the political activity that forced about these changes for equal citizenship through the doorway of race and then opening up to everybody else. He started cussing, when it was no longer respectable to stand up and defend segregation, he started cussing the government and the politics that people resented and feared for these changes ahead. He talked about pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to run your business, and where you had to send your children to school. And that they were in cahoots with a biased national media that had a racial agenda. Whose effective goal was to concentrate all \u2026 power in the central government in Washington.<\/p>\n
That language is contemporary. It\u2019s the language of \u201cgovernment is bad.\u201d \u2026 It started out consciously in resistance, though Wallace\u2019s \u2026 second step, after inventing all of these ingenius terms that we live with, his second one was to insist indignantly, whenever questioned, that he had never<\/em> said anything in his whole public career that had any bad racial reflection on anyone. And that there was no racial motive in any of this. Because that was the sine qua non<\/em> of creating unconscious memory in culture. And it became comfortable for a lot of people, because most people are in the business of making themselves comfortable.<\/p>\nBarack Obama is not. Any minority person lives having to stretch themselves across the boundaries, because their<\/em> accepted world is not the accepted world. So Barack Obama is the first elected African American president, but he\u2019s also the one who\u2019s mentioned race least since Dwight Eisenhower. And whenever he does a storm comes up. If he says his son would\u2019ve looked like Trayvon Martin, the whole world goes nuts, saying that he\u2019s being too black. \u2026<\/p>\nSo it shows that we are accepting, and we are moving forward, and it is vital, but we\u2019re doing it on our<\/em> terms, that is, the majority culture is doing it on our terms, and we\u2019re blind to the fact that our unconscious assumptions \u2026 our political discourse \u2014 anti-government, in which \u201cbig government\u201d is bad, is out of phase with what ought to be a very bracing and optimistic view of what we\u2019ve accomplished in the last 50 years that ought to steel us for the task of again stepping outside our comfort zones and again trying to tackle difficult problems today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Taylor Branch: “Wallace pledged to protect segregation. Only 50 years ago. He failed. But in his failure, he invented most of the language that is chillingly contemporary today in resenting the government and the political activity that forced about these changes for equal citizenship”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[69,17,22],"class_list":["post-13280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-antigovernment","tag-equality","tag-indignation"],"yoast_head":"\n
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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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<\/a>In a South that had segregation embedded in the constitutions of the southern states, and in the institutions widespread across the North. In a society that was so segregated that it\u2019s beyond the memory we take for granted all of these things \u2026 College sports in the South were segregated. \u2026 There was no Sun Belt, it was poor. Segregated by race down to the public libraries. Segregated by gender to the point that there were no female students at the University of Virginia, very few at my old alma mater,<\/em> North Carolina. None at Yale and Princeton yet. Let alone in West Point. Let alone in combat in the military. The word \u201cgay\u201d hadn\u2019t even been invented. No, nothing for disability. No seatbelts in cars. TV ads incessantly promoting cigarettes as healthy, sophisticated and invigorating. That\u2019s 50 years ago.<\/p>\n