Busting and Evicting Darkly Pigmented People

 AFRICAN-AMERICANS receive eviction notices  at more than twice the rate of European-Americans. they pay their rent, or don't pay it, at roughly the same rate, with drastically different outcomes. The difference, obviously, is race. That, for the elucidation of mainstream racism denying conservatives, as well as the openly racist far right, is but one if innumerable examples of systemic racism in the United States, which conservatives of all degrees tend to deny exists. Not so very long ago in the United States of Apartheid housing discrimination based on race was federal government policy. it ended, in theory, only as recently as 1968, with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which received  no conservative support at the time. If one thousand juvenile delinquents, half of them white and half of them black, commit or are charged with committing the same crime, the white culprits get a warning, probation, or short sentences, the black folks get long sentences. The facts, confirmed repeatedly and available to all, bear this out. The demonstrable manifestations of systemic racism in the U.S. within the criminal justice, legal, educational, medical, financial, and corporate systems are too numerous to articulate in anything less voluminous than an Encyclopedia Britannica lavishly illustrated, on paper. I should be neither shocked nor surprised when I behold some good ole red neck racist of the conservative sort exhort some garbage like "slavery was a long time ago", as it if were, or, "them lefties just caint leave it alone", as if mentioning racism is what causes it. and yet, alas, I am and always (shocked and surprised) have been. Strangely fondly I recall the the time when my uncle, who was born in 1924, which is how I excuse him, walked into my parent's house, greeted us warmly, then continued with : "y'all talk like niggers". He lived in Minnesota, and we lived in the lower Midwest. I guess he thought we had southern accents, and that black people did too. Personal racism America has largely been shamed into the closet, where homosexuality until recently lurked, and sometimes still does. I recall when my beloved uncle was middle aged, and proud of his racism. As he aged, he had his sociological antennae well enough raised to know to conceal it. Our current progressive endeavor to root out systemic, institutional racism is nascent, and will accomplish nothing until conservatives join the fight, or at least begin to acknowledge the existence of the racism deeply embedded in America's institutions. To date, they still deny all forms of racism, for convenience. Once upon a time America's right wing accepted and celebrated it, and just the other day some ofthe conservative legislators voted to commemorate the end of slavery, and whatever kicking and screaming they did, they did in private. That's progress.