America has made a lot of progress in fighting racism – I will acknowledge at least that much. By many metrics, the quality of life of black Americans, though still comparatively low, has improved greatly over the past several decades (with some hiccups here and there, like the Great Recession).
In some ways I do understand what some of the posters are saying. Newer generations of people relate less to the racial conflict of the past, and so without that background, it is perhaps a natural question to ask “Why is it important for me to care about the past? I had nothing to do with it.”
Understood.
But the whole point is that all of us inherit the past, whether we choose to or not. As someone else said up thread, all of us have an opportunity and a responsibility in the present to correct the impact of racist policies. The present generation has an opportunity to improve race relations, but this first requires accepting the social responsibility for taking reasonable measures toward improving the welfare of people.
There was a recent article in Politico that talked about the de-Nazification of Germany. The Germans who lived through the Nazi experience were resistant to give up their ideology and many simply regretted being on the losing end of the war (not unlike the Japanese in WWII). It was actually the children of Nazis who took ownership of German Nazism and who wanted a broader national discussion on what happened in the 1920s and 30s. You don’t see Nazi statues. There are a few buildings remaining but they are either mostly nondescript or they are, like one example in Berlin, used as museums to warn people against nationalism and fascism.
Modern Germany differs from the United States in that it has a deeper sense of commitment to the welfare of the population as a hole, and you can see this in some other countries as well. When you have a society that embraces the idea that ‘We should all succeed and try to help others who aren’t succeeding’ then you tend to see poorer people as less of a ‘cost’ or a ‘burden’ to those who are more prosperous. And in America, because race has been inextricably linked to American capitalism and class, it is natural that conservative white Americans look at black Americans as costs, as losers who are unfit to survive in American society. That’s because their ancestors did everything in their power to create blacks as an economic and political underclass - everything from ripping their family structures apart, to denying the ability to read (this was a LAW on the books), to denying them the ability to attend decent schools after they were ‘freed’, to denying them the right to vote, allowing whites to keep them from getting good jobs, allowing whites to prevent them from getting good housing, and doing everything possible to prevent them from becoming integrated into the economic, political, and social mainstream of society. Not for one generation, not for two, but for many, many generations over several centuries.
Even now, the attitudes of conservative Americans in many cases is that just wish the problem would somehow disappear on its own - they don’t want to pay the costs yet they’re completely fine with blacks have to pay for the costs of centuries of abuse. Their mentality is like that of a petroleum company that spills billions of gallons of oil on the beaches of a fishing village and rather than do the right thing and clean it up, would just rather move somewhere else and let others deal with the consequences.