The new Juan Cole blog on the vast racial disparities in the US as the underlying causes of the events in Fergason should be read and seen in its entirety.
Here are a few excerpts:
The New Jim Crow: Has the Right finally Repealed the Civil Rights Act?
By Juan Cole
The 45 million African-Americans in the United States are unequal before the law vis-a-vis European-Americans and becoming moreso. In the age of Jim Crow (the white South’s attempt to prevent them from having the full rights of citizens after their emancipation from slavery), African-Americans often were denied the right to vote and were subject to arbitrary, summary judgement and even lynchings. They could not so much as drink from the same water fountain as European-Americans.
Although segregated drinking fountains haven’t reappeared, in many ways the right wing in the United States has largely undone the advances of the 1965 voting rights act.
So, how much progress has the US really made? That places like Ferguson, Mo. were tinderboxes was obvious to anyone following these issues (see below).
Average household net worth of whites: $110,000.
Average household net worth of African-Americans: $5000
The wealth gap between white and African-American families tripled between 1980 and 2009, according to the Century Foundation:
Cole does an outstanding job showing how America has grown less equal not more over the last thirty years as the Reagan Revolution devolved into an America where racial inequities have grown significantly.