Segregation was better for black people ??

[00:00:00]Friendly reminder, as a black atheist and deconstruction coach, I understand how deeply interwoven white supremacy and Christianity are. As a result, I have very strong opinions concerning racism, one such opinion being that segregation was actually better for black people. And though I rarely share the messages of pastors and things of that nature, this one pastor perfectly encapsulates my sentiments on the matter. Take a listen.

[00:00:24]>> Any of us, we we are we wanted integration.

[00:00:31]The older I get, the more I'm starting to realize I don't know if that was necessarily a good thing for us. Us, when we couldn't eat in their lunch counters, we built our own restaurants.

[00:00:42]When we were shut out of their hospitals we built our own.

[00:00:48]I'M BEYOND SAYING DON'T GO TO TARGET.

[00:00:51]WHAT I'M FOCUSED ON RIGHT NOW IS WHEN ARE WE GOING TO BUILD OUR OWN TARGET?

[00:00:55]WHEN ARE WE GOING TO HAVE OUR OWN PLACES? WHEN ARE WE GOING TO HAVE OUR OWN AMAZON?

[00:01:01]>> SEGREGATION WAS actually better for black people.

[00:01:10]>> White folks aren't touching this one.

[00:01:12]Happy Juneteenth. Jesus Christ, of all the clergy to quote, you went with the one who waxed poetic about America's horrible past in order to make a point about wealth inequality, and your only takeaway was that segregation was better.

[00:01:28]Really? Segregation is still within living memory, you know. Just out of curiosity, have you asked the folks who lived through it if things were better back then? My father was only eight when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, but he's also from the South. So, Jim Crow didn't exactly go away overnight.

[00:01:46]And he remembers quite a bit. And while I'm positive that no black folks from that era would say that all of the goals of the Civil Rights Movement have been realized, all things considered, I seriously doubt that any of them would prefer then to now. In fact, we don't even have to go back that far. Apartheid is within our lifetime. It only officially ended 33 years ago.

[00:02:12]It's 1953.

[00:02:14]It's 33 years ago. I'm old. American segregation rotted on the facade of separate but equal. And the concept of separate but equal is like communism.

[00:02:25]Might sound good on paper, but fails hard every time in practice. It's because there is no such thing as separate but equal while the idea of one group being superior over all others endures. Therefore, segregation propped up by those who either don't know or don't care how much they are advocating against their own self-interest is doomed to backfire. Sure, we had black businesses, black schools, black banks, black hospitals, black Wall Street, and very rarely did any of those institutions have access to the same funding or resources that the white counterparts had. Hell, Black Wall Street has gone down into near legend as this shining powerhouse of black wealth and self-made independence, and it was wiped out in a day and a half. When you create institutions that separate people in this way, so goes equal protection under the law. It always devolves into one sector of society having way more than the other. You can argue that it's already that way, but that's overwhelmingly based on socioeconomic class. How much worse was it when race was legally codified into it, too?

[00:03:32]Because it never just stops with separate businesses and separate schools. It festers into everything, creates castes enshrined in law as well as society. Black neighborhoods, but not by choice.

[00:03:47]Forced, by law, to live in certain and often financially depressed districts.

[00:03:52]Not to mention that black women always suffer the most under these kinds of institutions. To paraphrase Judith Nolda, it sets up a triple yoke of oppression, gender, race, and class. And not to belabor the point, but what about people like me? Yeah.

[00:04:10]I find this pretty offensive. And don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pretend that I can in any way compare my experiences to the mixed people who came way before I did. But going back to apartheid, there are people my age who can speak to what it was like. Trevor Noah, for example, has discussed at length about what it was like growing up in apartheid South Africa as the son of a white man and a Xhosa woman. By simply conceiving him in the 1980s, his parents violated a miscegenation law called the Immorality Act. That is the inevitable result of segregation, always. If we're not fit to live together, to work together, to be serviced by the same businesses and cared for in the same facilities, then we certainly can't be together. You think they won't undo a Loving versus Virginia?

[00:05:00]They undid Roe v. Wade. So, what then?

[00:05:02]We become a country within a country?

[00:05:04]Better ask the Native Americans how that's working out for them. Or should we form a real country?

[00:05:10]It's been tried. It's called Liberia. It sucks. A de facto Christian country, extremely poor. We have billionaires who make more money than Liberia's total annual GDP. Rampant government corruption. Has the worst rates of sexual violence in the world. And it all goes back to the idea that we can't be together. As a black atheist, you may want to re-examine this one. As a humanist, capitulation is simply not an option, as far as I'm concerned. We already know that it doesn't work. And that's coming from me, jaded and perpetually demoralized by the state of things. But I still recognize lazy thinking when I see it.