Ironed Orchids

The problem is that Marks seems to think it’s okay to require black kids to be “special” to “succeed.” I don’t.

The economic and social policies that require black children to be “special” to succeed in America made a lot of sense to the racist lawmakers who designed them during Reconstruction. When they sat down after the Civil War to decide how freed slaves and southern whites would interact, Congress explicitly rejected proposals to level the playing field between them, refusing to provide blacks with land, reparations, or equal education. They did not want to create actual equality between blacks and whites. In fact, at the time, many Americans still believed that black people were genetically inferior and therefore incapable of achieving equality. As the Reverend Jared Waterbell, a northern liberal writing for the American Tract Society, opined in 1865, “Hence, even with strenuous efforts for their improvement, the African race must still acknowledge the superiority of the Saxon race.”

In lieu of equality, Congress opted to give black people so-called ‘equality before the law,’ and began amending federal law to give our ancestors the same rights on-paper as whites. We all know what happened next. For the first 100 years, the U.S. government didn’t actually enforce the laws at all, giving rise to the Civil Rights Movement. But even more important than their failure to enforce those laws is this: those lawmakers knew full-well that equal rights would never create equality between blacks and whites, and for most of them, that was precisely the appeal of the policy