The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: Whites were superior to Blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality, and civilized behavior; sexual relations between Blacks and Whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating Blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep Blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.
Continuing the Black History Month posting marathon.
This particular page is simultaneously frightening and maddening.
Bad things, unforgettable things, unforgivable things.
An unfair fight.
I figure one of the reasons they don't make some of this memorabilia anymore, at least not in the states, is because there are plenty of real-life caricatures of Black people saturating the media, so who needs dolls and piggy-banks when you can just stick a camera in front of a Charles Barkley or Flavor Flav, or whomever's currently sitting in best-selling gangsta rapper du jour's chair?
I would argue that things haven't really changed much.
The spirit, if not the letter, of Jim Crow lives on today, but its technique is so sophisticated it's hard to see.
Invisible doesn't mean non-existent, because although we can't see the air we breathe, we know it's there.
Our lives depend on it, just as the reality of America depends on a continuous undercurrent of race.