A Quote by Heather Cox Richardson
Since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, Movement Conservatives have tapped into the idea that an activist government redistributed wealth to lazy minorities. But they have also pushed hard on the idea that true Americans are Western individualists.
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In the 1960s, Movement Conservatives created a cast of villains. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and President Eisenhower's use of troops to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957 enabled Movement Conservatives to resurrect old white fears that government activism was simply a way to funnel white tax dollars to African-Americans.
My association with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is sort of predated by an effort that we were a part of here in New York City regarding the reaction to this 1954 Supreme Court [Brown v Board of Education] decision.
The political construct that idealized cowboys fell into disrepute during and immediately after the New Deal. In those years, Americans turned away from Western individualism and toward the idea of an activist government.
Since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy men control the economy and dominate society. This idea repels most Americans.
As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.
The hardest problems of all in law enforcement are those involving a conflict of law and local customs. History has recorded many occasions when the moral sense of a nation produced judicial decisions, such as the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which required difficult local adjustments.
There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.
The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure - all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern - should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.
Brown v. Board of Education was arguably the most important decision of the Supreme Court in the 20th century.
Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.
Activist Supreme Courts are not new. The Dred Scott decision in 1856, imposing slavery in free territories; the Plessy decision in 1896, imposing segregation on a private railroad company; the Korematsu decision in 1944, upholding Franklin Roosevelt’s internment of American citizens, mostly Japanese Americans; and the Roe decision in 1973, imposing abortion on the entire nation; are examples of the consequences of activist Courts and justices.
Since Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the New Deal in the 1930s, radical conservatives have railed against the idea that the government should intervene in the economy.
Within the model minority rhetoric, Asian Americans are represented as “good” minorities and African Americans are represented as “bad” minorities. Here, the achievements of Asian Americans are used to discipline African Americans. As model minorities, Asian Americans achieved the status of “honorary Whites”. Again it is important to point out that the honorary whiteness of Asian Americans was granted at the expense of Blacks. It is also significant that as “honorary Whites,” Asian Americans do not have the actual privileges associated with “real” whiteness.
[To the cultures of Asia and the continent of Africa] it is the Western impact which has stirred up the winds of change and set the processes of modernization in motion. Education brought not only the idea of equality but also another belief which we used to take for granted in the West-the idea of progress, the idea that science and technology can be used to better human conditions. In ancient society, men tended to believe themselves fortunate if tomorrow was not worse than today and anyway, there was little they could do about it.
Southern conservatives care about government's moral stance but don't mind when it spends freely on behalf of their constituents. Western conservatives, by contrast, are soft-libertarians who want government out of people's way on principle.
Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.
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