The High Price of Stale Grievances

[Belsnickel]

I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with this piece. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. Whether a person of color is doing the discriminating or it's a white boy, that shouldn't matter. If you're being an asshole you're being an asshole and the color of your skin isn't going to play a factor in how I view that. I know quite a few activists, including some I enjoy reading what they write and say, who would come back by commenting about white people just getting a taste of the medicine black people have been served for years. I get that. I understand that there have been decades of injustices served upon communities of color. We tell children all the time, though, that two wrongs don't make a right.

All of that being said, the idea that slavery and Jim Crow don't have anything to do with the black community today is erroneous. The reason that black communities experience a greater wealth gap than white communities, why a black person with a college degree makes less on average than a white person with a high school diploma, why they have a harder time acquiring an education and wealth, is a result of those past systems of oppression. You have an easier time gaining wealth if you start with something. You have better access to education if you come from educated people. Present day inequality based on race can be tied to historical injustices in a direct way. This isn't an excuse to be an asshole, but it's not something that can be overlooked.