Racism: Jim Crow And The Pre-Civil Rights Movement

Do These Colors Really Run
Many Americans assume that racism has been eradicated and simply has stayed in the past, in the eras of Jim Crow and the pre-Civil Rights movement. However, this is not the case, racism is still present in society today. While most people understand racism to be the belief that one race is superior to another; the definition of racism is more complex than that. Racism today is not like it once was, today it is manifested through micro-aggressions like locking your door at a red light in a “ghetto” neighborhood or the socially nuanced lunch room in school where the students segregate themselves by choice into groups of their own race or creed. Today’s racism is filled with fear of the other and the belief that both

While the institution of slavery in the cotton fields has ended, the racism that it was based on is still ever present and has become an innate American value.
Racism in the past was very overt in the way it was used to marginalize and demean blacks. For example, in the early and mid 20th century, when segregation was legal, there were signs in public spaces segregating who was allowed to use something as trivial as a bathroom or water fountain. However, Americans are no longer so blatant in how they commit acts of racism and aggression towards black Americans. Society nowadays is no longer segregated by a wall of black and white bodies like it once was before the Civil Rights movement. In his essay “Notes of a Native Son”, James Baldwin, a black writer and civil rights activist, notes that whenever someone would attempt to break this “wall” they would find themselves fearing for their lives. Much like Baldwin, who faced many obstacles and acts of violence as a black man in the 50’s and 60’s. In this time period as a black man, Baldwin was constantly told by others that, “Negroes were not served there, I was

In addition to this, blacks are still segregated in society; instead of the segregation being in public places of service, where the public would see the active discrimination, it is now in neighborhoods called, “Ghettos”. Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream” (Coates 79). Nowadays, whites don’t have water fountains and bathrooms just for them, but instead, they have the suburbs far away from any ghetto, far segregated from any “lower class” African Americans. The ideas of racism and slavery are still present today in society, however, they are merely hidden by layers of white lines and obscurity, just like many decades ago, in James Baldwin’s