Rethinking Racism: Part 6, Civil Rights … and Beyond

Critical race theory … Whoopi Goldberg suspended for comments about Jews and race … once again we are arguing about racism … welcome to the sixth in an eight-part series on how we understand America’s original sin. The series will be published on eight successive days. In Part 6, we track the rise of the abolitionist movement through the Civil War, the effort to grant full civil rights to freed slaves during Reconstruction, and the hostile reaction by white southerners which led to a century of legal discrimination and segregation. Above photo taken at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Hulton Archive, Getty Images.

I grew up in a small farm town in northern Illinois, in the 1950s and 1960s. As a youth, I remember reading a lengthy article in the American Peoples Encyclopedia about the three races that were generally recognized at the time: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. I don’t recall whether the article discussed any behavioral or cognitive differences between the ‘races.’

I did, however, have the impression that many of my neighbors and acquaintances felt that African Americans were ‘different’ from white Americans and, in some ways, not as capable. But they vigorously rejected the notion that they were racists, insisting that Blacks should have equal opportunity — even if they weren’t destined to prosper at the…