BRATTLEBORO — I am prompted to write by the Jan. 2 letter to the editor of the Brattleboro Reformer by Dwight Zeager, written in response to the daily paper's editorials about police and race.
Zeager presented opinions there that are trumpeted by every surviving white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan group in the nation. Though it is simple for anyone familiar with the history of the United States to refute Zeager's opinions, it is nonetheless necessary.
As the late Duke University Professor Emeritus John Hope Franklin, a respected historian and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, noted: “All whites […] benefited from American slavery. All blacks had no rights they could claim as their own. All whites, including the vast majority who owned no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves[...].”
And, lest one imagine that the use of uncompensated black labor ended with the Civil War, the leasing of legitimately and falsely imprisoned convicts continued in the steel and coal industry in Birmingham, Alabama until it was stopped by direct presidential intervention in 1942. Meanwhile, sharecropping abuses, voter suppression, peonage and vagrancy laws, and raw violence were used to economically, socially, and physically confine blacks well into the 1970s.
The educational, social, and economic deficits that centuries of persecution put in place remain significant obstacles to a fair and equal society.
The right to vote, which was only universally re-extended to blacks in 1964, is now under assault by Republican lawmakers under the guise of solving a voter fraud “problem” that does not exist.
Old Civil Rights battles are being re-fought, and the media's publication of uninformed and unjustified opinion pieces like Dwight Zeager's is part of the problem, not the solution.
Both the benefits of being white in America and the penalties for being black have been compounded over time. Every white person has benefited from the economic legacy of slavery, whether their family owned plantations, slaves, leased convicts or not.
And every black person in America still struggles under the burden of a society that was founded on the principle that a working person could be legally excluded and separated from the fruits of their labor.
These are not, as Zeager might submit, excuses. They are historical facts. Zeager's white privileges are invisible to him. But not to the rest of us.
If one thinks that race hatred is disappearing in the United States, all one need do is look at Zeagler's letter. Or for a more objective take, check with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). In 2008, the SPLC identified 926 active white hate groups - up from the 888 groups in 2007, and far more than the 602 groups documented in 2000.
Hate speech is becoming more common. It has no place in the Brattleboro Reformer.