Racism in the United States

This study will examine racism in the United States in 1989. The 1980s are inaccurately seen as a decade which has seen the diminishment of racism in the United States, but in fact racism has simply changed its disguise some twenty years after the so-called "civil rights era" of the 1960s.

Nicolaus Mills in his review of two books on civil rights in The Nation writes that the memory of the civil rights years has grown dim in the United States. It has also focused inaccurately on the struggle within the black rights movement which prevailed in the 1960s, which prevents us from forming a clear and complete picture of racism in 1989.

As Mills writes, "The civil war within the (black rights) movement that surfaced during the (Summer Project) and came to a head . . . with the expulsion of whites from SNCC has come to dominate the public perception of black-white relations during those years" (Mills 202).

Mills writes that the film "Mississippi Burning" in 1989 has altered the previous misperception and as a result, "The Summer Project - in particular the events surrounding the murders of (three civil rights workers) Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney - is news again. It is a shame so much time

had to pass for this to happen" (Mills 202).

Again, the film is important because it focuses the nation's attention on racism, but it is dangerous to assume that Americans will see the movie as anything more than a nostalgic look at a distant event in American hi

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l state structures. Existing theories of the state fail to account for the great variation in the local enforcement of national civil rights policies . . . . Race relations theories ignore the effects of local state structures that enforced racial discrimination and maintained southern racial politics. Local state theory addresses both problems" (James 206). Mills points out that the acclaimed motion picture "Mississippi Burning" may itself be fostering a kind of subtle racism in 1989. Mills writes that "The debate about 'Mississippi Burning' suggests that at long last we as a nation are prepared to see the civil rights struggle that the summer of 1964 brought to a head as an American revolution, 'our' revolution. The danger is that in seeing that summer in these terms we will insist on filtering it back to ourselves as a primarily white experience rather than a moment in history when blacks led the way for blacks and whites to complete our Second Reconstruction" (Mills 204). A number of telling remarks by polled readers in Ebony shed light on the nature of certain aspects of racism in 1989. For example, regarding de facto segregation in the workplace, we read that 37 percent of Ebony's black readers have "very little" co

Category: Government - R