Denial is the Heartbeat of America

 black321 wrote:
 
That's a matter of (perhaps ideological) interpretation/emphasis. Clearly murder (or worker protection) involves morality/ethics as well as individual rights.

Depends on the quality of the attempts.

I see mostly stock conservative aversion of change.

 R_P wrote:
 
when the legislation/regulation deals with murder, worker protection...its not legislating morality, but protecting individual rights. 
correcting current behavior is good,
attempting to correct poor historical behavior will have at best mixed results?

 black321 wrote:
Some apparently said the same thing ~60 years ago...

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you’ve got to change the heart and you can’t change the heart through legislation. You can’t legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion. Well, there’s half-truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart. But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government. ~ MLK '63

 sirdroseph wrote:
 
laws should be moral,
but you cant legislate morality.

 sirdroseph wrote:
 

They (who?) prevented (how?)

Woman who wrongly accused Black teen is arrested, apologizes

“Many white liberals have adopted blacks as mascots, in order to ‘make a statement’ against American society. But mascots are only symbols, and their well-being is seldom a top priority.” - Thomas Sowell

 Coaxial wrote: 
Precisely.  They could have easily prevented all of this, but that would not have met their end. Talk about spinning the obvious.

Had it been minorities rioting at the Capitol yesterday just how many dead people would that little shit show have yielded?
I hope that everyone saw and fully understood the vivid display of racial inequality in this country displayed yesterday at the Capitol. We all must address this wound that has been allowed to fester for so terribly long. The time is now to remove this stain on mankind. Confront racism every opportunity you have...We must eradicate it once and for all.

Raphael Warnock’s Win Is One for the History Books

Political power in the former Jim Crow South, where few Black Americans have been elected to statewide office, is inextricably linked to race. And Mr. Warnock’s place in the political universe is distinct from the election of Ms. Harris, or Northerners like former President Barack Obama, previously a senator from Illinois, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Together, Mr. Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the other Democratic candidate, have the chance to expand the legislative agenda of incoming President Joseph R. Biden Jr. But Mr. Warnock alone was seeking to overcome a barrier reinforced in the South over and over again, crystallized in a saying that became popular during the civil rights movement: “The South doesn’t care how close a Negro gets, just so he doesn’t get too high.”

On Tuesday, Black Democrats in Georgia said such history was not lost on them. Neither was how long it took the party to seriously pursue the possibility of success in Georgia.

“It took Democrats forever to invest in Georgia,” said Frazier Lively, a 71-year-old who lives in Macon and attended a recent rally. “Now you would hope what’s happening here is a message to what’s possible going forward.”

W.E.B. Du Bois embraced science to fight racism as editor of NAACP’s magazine The Crisis

The NAACP – the most prominent interracial civil rights organization in American history – published the first issue of The Crisis, its official magazine, 110 years ago, in 1910. For almost two and a half decades, sociologist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois served as its editor, famously using this platform to dismantle scientific racism.

At the time, many widely respected intellectuals gave credence to beliefs that empirical evidence exists to justify a “natural” white superiority. Tearing down scientific racism was thus a necessary project for The Crisis. Under Du Bois’ leadership, the magazine laid bare the irrationality of scientific racism.

Less remembered, however, is how it also sought to help its readers understand and engage with contemporary science.

In nearly every issue, the magazine reported on scientific developments, recommended scientific works or featured articles on natural sciences. Du Bois’ time as editor of The Crisis was just as much about critically embracing careful, systematic, empirical science as it was about skewering the popular view that Blacks (and other nonwhites) were naturally inferior. (...)

Long Heralded as an Abolitionist, Johns Hopkins Enslaved People, Records Show
The Baltimore university that bears his name announced new research that “shattered” perceptions of the Quaker entrepreneur

Jones also researched how myths about Hopkins began to circulate. One key factor was a lack of evidence: Hopkins had no children, and he may have destroyed most of his personal documents toward the end of his life (“not an uncommon practice,” according to the Sun). Alternatively, the papers may have been lost in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.

This lack of a paper trail enabled historical revisionism by Hopkins’ grandniece, Helen Hopkins Thom, who penned Johns Hopkins: A Silhouette—a wholly romanticized account of her relative’s life—in 1929.

“Helen Hopkins Thom was not a historian,” Jones tells the Sun. “Her version of the family and of Johns Hopkins himself caught on and was relied upon and repeated and promoted, even by the university. We did not subject it to scholarly or scientific scrutiny until now.”

Later 20th-century articles about Hopkins’ life built on these questionable stories and exaggerated his so-called abolitionist beliefs to a striking degree. In fact, Jones has not located any evidence of Hopkins ever promoting abolition.

Manhattan DA Investigating Woman Who Falsely Accused Black Teen of Theft

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The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism

How USDA distorted data to conceal decades of discrimination against Black farmers

Putting Rap Lyrics on Trial is a Violation of Free Speech
The state of Tennessee is violating a rapper's First Amendment rights by trying to use his lyrics as evidence at trial.