Jim Crow 2.0 (Script & Sources)

Good morning, bad news: white racists in power are manufacturing fake outrage about Critical Race Theory while simultaneously stripping BIPOC of their voting rights, in a direct effort to create a second Jim Crow era and a permanent second class for people of color.

Let’s start with the overwhelming backlash against “Critical Race Theory” which, for some reason, is the top headline on every single right-leaning media platform. If you’re just tuning in, “Critical Race Theory” is simply an examination of how America’s legal system has historically worked to disenfranchise and punish people of color. It states that white supremacy exists and has been effectively weaponized through laws and social culture to subjugate those who are not white, and the only way to achieve progress in racial equality is to start by challenging those laws and social culture through education and advocacy.

This idea is not even remotely controversial, the US has a long and obvious history of legal and social discrimination against people of color, and not only is it impossible to ignore, but it’s also impossible to deny.

And yet, if you spend even 10 minutes channel flipping or get on the wrong side of TikTok, you’ll see people aggressively denying these facts, and saying that acknowledgment of them is equivalent to violence against white people. But here’s the thing, if you listen to their arguments… they’re not really making any. And that’s because rejecting critical race theory is not about proposing an alternative theory, it’s about promoting white supremacy.

And that becomes blatantly obvious when you look at the context of what’s happening right now in the United States.

First of all, the proportion of white people as the majority in this country is dropping. In the last decade, white people fell from 69 percent to 60 percent, and among people under 16, or the future of this country, it fell to 49 percent. Young people are not majority white for the first time in US history, and for whites in power, that’s terrifying. And yet, among lawmakers, billionaires, executives, and other power brokers, disproportionally, more than 80% are white.

So, how does a rapidly dwindling majority hold onto its power when it becomes a minority? The obvious answer is: by subjugating the majority by using the existing political, legal, and social power that they hold - and we’re literally watching that happen as our voting rights are being stripped away in parts of the country that already subjugate people of color. And as we clearly see, the current political structure has literally no plan to protect this dismantling of democracy other than to beg a single right-leaning senator who is obviously not going to save us.

Not by coincidence, the exact same groups who are working hard to take away your voting rights, are working just as hard to demonize the premise of Critical Race Theory. And if you consider that the only way to end legal and social discrimination is by, at the very least, identifying that it exists, then it becomes pretty clear that anti-CRT advocates are doing everything they can to maintain the existing discrimination that they’ve spent generations establishing - and by removing the ability to vote against them, and challenging even the acknowledgment of them, they’re trying to cement those discriminations, so that they exist even after white people lose their majority.

What’s particularly interesting is that this entire movement is not even remotely new. In the aftermath of the Civil War, there was a deliberate effort by groups like The United Daughters of the Confederacy to reject the racist reality of slavery and its effects on US law and social culture, by claiming that slavery was moral and benevolent, and that actually the Civil War was about trying to destroy Southern identity and their way of life, by painting the North as aggressors who didn’t fight fairly and were morally corrupt and anti-Christian. These groups were not only explicitly tied to the Ku Klux Klan but used this false narrative to build hundreds of confederate monuments and to promote the violence and legal discrimination used against people of color after the Reconstruction era in the form of Jim Crow laws.

It should be no surprise that the parallels in the white post-Civil War backlash against people of color have been essentially the same throughout the late 1800s Jim Crow, the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and the civil rights movement we’re currently experiencing in 2021. Their argument is nothing new, their methods are nothing new, and their violent reluctance to admit defeat is also nothing new.