Post

Philip Bump
@pbump.com

I wrote this week about how recent Jim Crow was, to the extent that a quarter of Americans were alive while it was in effect.

Philip Bump@pbump.com

For all of the interest in pretending that inequalities are a function of will or that structural racism is in the distant past: 12 million people were born in Jim Crow states before Jim Crow ended — and still live there today. Gift link:

ctinsider.comPhilip Bump: How recent is America's past?Things that Americans think of as having long ago were, in fact, within the lifespans of most of us.

143 reposts613 likes

Weekend Editor
@weekend-editor.bsky.social

It always gives me pause to realize that my marriage would have been illegal in numerous states, within my lifetime. "The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- Faulkner, _Requiem for a Nun_, 1951.

Weekend Editor
@weekend-editor.bsky.social

You make an excellent point. I never thought the states would take the lead on marriage inequality, since it seemed to me at the time that civil rights were more federally driven. But I remember being proud the day my state stepped into the light on marriage equality.

smc84.bsky.social
@smc84.bsky.social

Same feeling when my state passed referendum to legalize in 2012. Once realizing it is a civil rights issue, you can never see it any other way in my view, or realize how wrong it was to deny this right to some.

Anarchists Without Borders
@anarchswoborders.bsky.social

Can you write about how America's past is America's present, one in three black men have felony convictions, how Angola prison is a slave plantation, and the Dozier school for boys was a child sex slave death and torture camp until only a few years ago (from which there was not a single arrest)?

PJ
@pjpuckrr.bsky.social

I'm 70, I remember in rural county of Oklahoma I grew up in, they had two water fountains, one for whites only and one for coloreds only. I really didn't understand why back then. Now I do.