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Showing posts from August 15, 2015

THE LONGEVITY OF RACISM IN THE UNITED STATES

  A mass murder in the heart of a major southern US city recently   brought to the fore once again the lasting effects of racism on US society, a century and a half after the bloody Civil War that ended the kidnapping and enslavement in that country of millions of black Africans. Victims of the Emanuel AME massacre Despite the hard-fought battles of the US civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the undeniable advancement that, against all odds, African Americans have achieved in the last fifty years, no objective analysis of American society today can conclude that deep-rooted racism is no longer an issue there, or that black society as a whole has achieved overall equality with white society. And the massacre of nine African Americans carried out by a lone white gunman at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier this year is not an isolated case of continuing racial unrest in the US, but rather, a high-profile sy