Cheat To Win

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., argues that unlike South Africa and apartheid or Germany and the Holocaust, the United States has never fully confronted the legal oppression and widespread violence that occurred between Reconstruction and the civil rights era.
“If you only talk about the moment when someone achieved something, you look at this history as infrequent periodical achievements, as if that was just the only thing going on,” said Mr. Stevenson, whose group is working on a campaign to mark lynching sites and publicize the legal features of the South in the Jim Crow era….
Professor King, who is 39 — and like more than half of all Americans was born after Mr. Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss — said he was troubled by how little his students knew about Mississippi’s history. There is nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments, Professor King said, but he added that Ole Miss has an obligation to do much more.
“You have your memorials and you have your markers,” he said, “but you need to ask the harder questions. And that’s what a university’s for.”

This article in the NY Times touches on some issues I want to work on extensively in my PhD work: the lack of closure on racial crimes of the past and the oblivious nature of even the most liberal citizens to the racial crimes of the present.

Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., argues that unlike South Africa and apartheid or Germany and the Holocaust, the United States has never fully confronted the legal oppression and widespread violence that occurred between Reconstruction and the civil rights era.

“If you only talk about the moment when someone achieved something, you look at this history as infrequent periodical achievements, as if that was just the only thing going on,” said Mr. Stevenson, whose group is working on a campaign to mark lynching sites and publicize the legal features of the South in the Jim Crow era….

Professor King, who is 39 — and like more than half of all Americans was born after Mr. Meredith enrolled at Ole Miss — said he was troubled by how little his students knew about Mississippi’s history. There is nothing wrong with celebrating accomplishments, Professor King said, but he added that Ole Miss has an obligation to do much more.

“You have your memorials and you have your markers,” he said, “but you need to ask the harder questions. And that’s what a university’s for.”

This article in the NY Times touches on some issues I want to work on extensively in my PhD work: the lack of closure on racial crimes of the past and the oblivious nature of even the most liberal citizens to the racial crimes of the present.