Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

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It seems something that many of us don’t want to think of but in the years prior to Word War II, the United States practiced a form racism call Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws,
(named after a popularly stereotyped caricature in stage and radio shows), were laws that openly denied blacks the right to live, play, and generally exist equally to whites.

Today, that history was revisited by Congress in a public apology for years of what they described as forms of slavery.

Excerpt from Congressional transcript:

It’s hard to imagine, in 2008, that such a society existed and was sanctioned by law, that the laws of the nation provided for segregation and enforced slave fugitive slave laws. In fact, the history of slavery goes not just through the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to our constitution, but as so eloquently written, just yesterday, in “The Baltimore Sun” in an editorial by Mr. Leonard Pitts Jr., that slavery existed up until about World War II, but it was a form of slavery where people were bought and sold for debts, it was slavery by another name. In a book called Slavery By Another Name by Douglass Blackman, a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, when he talked about a convict leasing system in the south where in poor black men were routinely snatched up and tried on false petty or nonexistent charges by compliant courts, assessed some fine they could not afford, and then put into the servitude of an individual who bought them.

But now I pose the question to you, where does this leave us today? What effect has the past of U.S. racism has on the culture today: The poor, the rich? How has it affected your own views on race? Let me know in your comments and be sure to wax poetically!

(Click here to read the transcript and listen to the NPR radiocast).

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