In several essays on this website, I deal with issues of law and race from a different and unique point of view. In the background of all of the articles is consideration of differing cultural systems. I note repeatedly that the 400 years of slavery and segregation that existed in the United States produced a unique black culture. One aspect of that culture has been the strained relationship between the black culture and the legal system.
The legal system obviously originated in Europe-not Africa. African-Americans are not Africans, they are Americans. African-American culture is a unique product that has been developing for over 400 years. The cultural difference is not embedded in genes that originated in Africa: it is a product of cultural evolution.
In another essay, I point out the possible adverse impact of the black cultural heritage on the possibilities for economic development. Law is a pre-requisite for economics, and full participation in and support for the legal system is a pre-requisite to economic development. But historically, the best interest of the black culture was not served by willing participation in and support of the legal system. Therefore, there is, and has always been, a distance between the legal system and the Black culture. In our Black belt counties that distancing from law may be a built-in cultural impediment to economic development because of continued lack of confidence in law. The legal system is not the primary way conflicts are solved in Black culture.
Differences in culture and cultural institutions came to the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement. The legal system, in many instances, particularly in the South, actually supported segregation, and provided separate institutions. Segregation was an obvious barrier to full participation of blacks in the good-life of the culture of America. In Brown v. Topeka, the Supreme Court of the United States recognized that separate is not equal. The application of a concept of equality to various social aspects of complex of human cultural systems is very problematic. Equality is not nearly as exact or easy to identify as it might sound when applied to matters social. The Brown decision recognized that separate is not equal. It would have done well to recognize, however, that separate is still separate. I remember extremely well 7th grade Civics at Shorter High School, a segregated 12 year school in the 1950’s. We were introduced to the idea that America is the “great Melting Pot”. What that was supposed to mean is that people from Europe and all parts of the world coming into America were blended into the complex American culture. The Statue of Liberty was the iconic image. But that was not the point of entry for slaves. While the “melting pot” that had worked reasonably well for certain Europeans, it did not work universally. Nevertheless, that was a part of the mentality of that era. Another part of the mentality of the era was that proper education can solve everything. Those questionable beliefs were deeply embedded in the answers to the problems of segregation presented in the Civil Rights movement and Voting Rights Act.
The difference between desegregation (i.e. elimination of racial legal barriers) to integration (i.e. assimilation of the culture) is a subtle difference. I learned that difference from the late Professor Frank Toland of Tuskegee University, while working with him on the Foundations in Pluralism project that I discuss elsewhere on this website. The primary objective of the Civil Rights movement, according to Toland, should have been desegregation: elimination of the segregated bathrooms, segregated water fountains, segregated eating establishments, etc. Integration is a much more complicated matter, on which opinions in the black culture itself are much more divided, as evidenced but the works of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Countee Cullen, and many others.
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