The Gilded Age Desegregation Myth Still Promoted
The Hunger for White Narrative Dismissal
Part II of Brown of was written because Part I was so divisive, even though the Supreme Court knew it had no teeth. That is, the guns and money to force desegregation in those 15 or so states that had it — the Court made Part Deux to do a little withdrawal, allowing a loophole to open up. Part II said: OK, maybe, we don’t have to move so fast. I make this point because the narrative I find in articles, even minor ones like I did today, describe the flat and untrue ideas propagated by a white narrative that say, “whatever came before is over, we’ve turned a corner and moved on to new country.”
Here’s this narrative generates: Finally, we can live in a non-racist present. This repeatedly happens in reporting especially because it is white narrative engine for fiction and non-fiction alike. But it doesn’t have to happen always as a result. We can look deeper perhaps into why it keeps doing it.
Let’s just start by assuming the opposite: some Americans never moved onward beyond a racist past, didn’t want to, while some Americans always sought to move toward the promise of democracy and the freedom it offers. The first group we could call the most fervent believers confederate whites and the next by the most repressed, the poor black enslaved.
