This is how they try to make America white again
Sunday, Nov 20, 2016 08:00 AM CST
This is how they try to make America white again
The process of integration is slow, methodical and incremental. It works. The catch? It also works in reverse
Dan Canon
Trump supporters at a campaign rally (Credit: Getty/Joe Raedle)
I am an American civil rights lawyer. At its core, the work I do, and the work done by my predecessors, is integrative. Litigation may seem divisive. It is. But there’s a long game. The goal is to ensure that everyone has the same rights, freedoms, opportunities and obligations as everyone else. The goal is to unite, not divide. The goal is inclusiveness. The goal is integration.
In a country as diverse and complex as the United States, that kind of work is not easy. It took a while for American lawyers to make any real headway toward integration. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court infamously affirmed “separate but equal.” Buck v. Bell upheld the forced sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities. In Korematsu v. United States, the Court said it was okay to ship Japanese Americans off to internment camps.
Little by little, we patched the holes. Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP started winning in the first half of the twentieth century. First, law schools were desegregated. Brown v. Board of Education, in theory at least, ended school segregation altogether in 1954. Loving v. Virginia decriminalized interracial marriage in 1967. After a series of defeats in the 1980s, we finally started chipping away at anti-LGBT legislation 20 years ago, resulting in marriage equality by 2015.
For the most part, even the staunch segregationists eventually accepted integration, in part because it happened gradually. We civil rights lawyers figured out incrementalism a long time ago. It’s slow, but it’s how we make progress. It’s how we achieve ever-greater ideals of American equality. It’s how we bring people together.
More:
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/20/this-is-how-they-try-to-make-america-white-again/
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