But when I was young, careers for black folks were limited to mostly service jobs. Manufacturing jobs did hire black folks but only when they had to put extra people to work at some sort of crunch time. Black workers were the first to get laid off when the crunch was over.

I'm delighted to say that much has changed, although a black person in the halls of power is still newsworthy just for his or her presence.

The social oppression is going to take longer and will likely be a matter of attrition, people who lived with "separate but (un)equal" and thinking that was somehow a good thing leaving us and slowly being replaced by white folks who expect to see black faces everywhere they are. Until then, there will be too many people who see the black and ASSume the person is in the underclass, one reason the cops get away with pulling drivers over for DWB stops.

There will always be bigots of all colors, it's just part of the human condition. Over time, their numbers will decrease to the point that they won't run things to the point of sending an asshole like Trump out to run for the presidency.

Eventually we'll all be Americans.

My life experience tells me "it" never ends...you just plow ahead and do your best and never have self defeating ideas like "it will never end". It does get better, especially if you change your own reaction to the situation.

It's illuminating, at least about some fellow DUers.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141582466

There is hope but what needs to be faced is that oppression will NEVER end.

Every human being on this earth will not have the same exact opinion about something. The key is to find those people that live the same purpose as you and join forces with them.

It isn't going away any time soon. We've passively allowed systems of oppression that we naively believed were for our benefit. The credit system, Nancy Reagan and John Walsh tough on crime policies, The Patriot Act, gentrification, clandestine drug distribution in urban neighborhoods, deifying first responders allowing medical and insurance price hikes with zero accountability.
All mechanisms to widen the class division and weed out the "great unwashed" from the upper class. We thought they financially empowered us, kept us safe, made us feel better. We signed blank check after blank check while they turned up the heat of the pot we casually lay in.
With proliferating distractions of technology, minutia, materialism, and substances, the game is ramped up with each passing year beneath our notice.
Those with talent and knowledge well beyond the scope of the careers they are relegated to (of backbreaking work for minimal pay, because they were funneled into institutions early in life with calculated poverty and pain as the catalyst) could be making real change and adding value to the global community. Affordable housing stripped away with a slap of paint and insertion of a Whole Foods, decreases attainable housing. We are increasing debt at every chance just to afford survival.
With each passing war, we normalize a new form of racism. McCarthyism bastardizing all patriotic emblems with American Pseudo-Christianity and ushering in the same fascism of Soviet-era communism that it claimed to combat only served to increase acceptable racism, sexism, homophobia and classism.
Trump is their icon, because it finally allowed their clandestine social-terrorism that they have carried out for decades away from the public eye (that they glisten in as celebrities beyond reproach) to be socially acceptable.
If true freedom is to be had, the elite must be held accountable with the same unrelenting pursuit that is applied to the "bad guys". There is a seeming tax bracket and level of celebrity that is unafraid and unaffected by simple social measures such cancel culture. They seem to weasel out of every consequence, like an eel covered in grease.
If true freedom is to be extended, it must be to everyone. We need a swell of those who were told they could never rise above their station to run for office. Protests and petitions are all fine and good, but without policy makers, it just becomes white noise and is easily ignored.