I think they’re highly related – but the disparities in treatment of black and white people are due to racism, whether at the individual, institutional, or societal level. Covering them up might be due to corruption.
But you appear to have missed my point – that we’re not so far from the past as we might like to think. Vidor, TX is a real place that’s ~100% white, in one of the blackest parts of the country (east TX and south Louisiana), and as recently as the 90s, federal efforts to bring black people into Vidor public housing failed after a KKK march.
Absolutely – you’ll notice that I’ve never claimed to not be a racist. The best I’ll say is that I try my hardest to not say or do racist things. If I do so, I hope I get called out on it so I can improve myself. And I will call out racist things I see others say or do to help them improve themselves. It’s possible I’ll be wrong sometimes, and if so, that can start a productive conversation. It’s not the end of the world to say something racist, and it’s not the end of the world to call someone out and criticize them for it. I’ve certainly said racist things in the past, and I’m very regretful for it.
That’s a single week of data. It might have gone down day to day, but in the longer term than a week it’s up significantly. If you want to say it’s going down, let’s look at the entirety of 2016 in a few weeks, and then we’ll compare it to the entirety of 2017 after that. That 11/12 might have been lower than 11/11 doesn’t tell us whether there are more hate crimes due to Trump’s campaign and election than before.
Every terrible thing like that (slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, etc.) requires baby steps. If we move backwards towards things like sundown towns, and restricting voting, we’re actually recreating parts of Jim Crow policies and practices. Slightly Jim Crow is a lot closer to Jim Crow than I’d like.
Atrocities have happened, even relatively recently, in this world. The way to make sure it never happens again is to make sure we never have the attitude “it couldn’t happen here”. We didn’t have a Holocaust in the 20th century, but we did intern Japanese Americans, and that was justified politically for decades afterwards. Yes, it could happen here, if we don’t constantly remain vigilant. Imagine public opinion towards Muslims if, God forbid, there were a catastrophic terrorist attack – worse than 9/11 (say, a smuggled WMD). That’s not a 0% chance occurrence.