Claims of white privilege a damaging farce
By By: Steven Nemcek | Feb. 26, 2013In the late 19th and early 20th century, de jure racial segregation was a cultural phenomenon prevalent in the United States. Known as “Jim Crow segregation,” Southern states sought to divide black and white communities in the public square utilizing “separate but equal” facilities. In Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled state-sponsored school segregation was unconstitutional; what is separate is inherently not equal. Later, the remaining state-enforced segregation laws were generally overturned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. While the case can be made that the Civil Rights Act may have overreached in terms of the rights of private property owners, no one today seriously argues that public (taxpayer-sponsored) programs should be allowed to segregate based on irrelevant characteristics such as skin color, gender, religious creed or sexual orientation. Or, so I thought.
