Racial Privilege in America Past and Present Essay -- essays research

The Blame Game a Prelude to racial PrivilegeIn order to fully understand an easily arguable and highly controversial policy, such as racial privilege, one must first understand the political and social climates that led up to it. racial privilege has been practiced during two periods in Americas by the post-reconstruction era, via Jim Crow laws, and today, by musical mode of affirmative action.After Reconstruction in the American south, landowners reorganized their land in such a way that it could be farmed without the use of slaves. The most common structure employed share line upping, in which the land owner divided his property into several plots of land, each farmed by different individuals who paid for the use of this land with a predetermined pct of their harvested crop. At its onset, sharecropping was a racially diverse program. Boyer et all notes that By 1880 uninfected sharecroppers now outnumbered black ones, although a higher proportion of southern blacks, somewha t 75 percent, were involved in the system (597). Tenants, most having no capital letter with which to purchase farm equipment, livestock, and seed, offer yet another pre-determined percentage of their harvested crop as collateral and repayment for loans. Since twain the landowner and the creditor were invested in the positivity of the farmers crops, they insisted that these farmers raise only easily marketable cash-crops, change crop diversification (Boyer 598). When supply began to exceed demand, value of these crops rapidly declined. Sharecroppers, both white and black, were plunged heavily into debt and poverty.The failure of this system presented a window of luck for the Democratic leaders of the Old South who wish to restore the authority stru... ... Eds. Christopher Jencks, and Meredith Phillips. Washington, D.C. The Brookings Institution. 1998. 431-56.King, Jr., Martin Luther. I Have a Dream. March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Washington, D.C. 28 Augus t 1963.Rai, Kul B., and potty W. Critzer. Affirmative Action and the University. Nebraska University of Nebraska Press, 2000.Skrentny, John David. The Ironies of Affirmative Action. Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1996.Steele, Shelby. A Dream Deferred The Second betrayal of Black Freedom in America. New York HarperCollins, 1998.---. White Guilt How Blacks and Whites together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. New York HarperCollins, 2006.Sterba, James P. The Case for discriminative Treatment. Affirmative Action in the University. Ed. Steven M. Cahn. Philadelphia Temple UP, 1993. 286-90.