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

The Blame Game a Prelude to Racial PrivilegeIn order to fully understand an easily debatable and highly contentious 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 cardinal periods in Americas past the post-reconstruction era, via Jim Crow laws, and today, by way 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 sharecropping, in which the land owner divided his property into several(prenominal) plots of land, each farmed by different individuals who paid for the use of this land with a predetermined percentage of their harvested crop. At its onset, sharecropping was a racially diverse program. Boyer et all notes that By 1880 white sharecroppers now outnumbered black ones, although a higher proportion of southern blacks, abou t 75 percent, were involved in the system (597). Tenants, most having no neat 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 both the landowner and the creditor were invested in the profitability of the farmers crops, they insisted that these farmers raise only easily marketable cash-crops, limiting 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 opportunity for the Democratic leaders of the Old South who wish to restore the power 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 August 196 3.Rai, Kul B., and John 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, crowd P. The Case for Preferential Treatment. Affirmative Action in the University. Ed. Steven M. Cahn. Philadelphia Temple UP, 1993. 286-90.