Tumblin' Taylor
I'll use this Tumblr account to post things that I think are interesting, but don't have time or inclination to write a whole post about.
Think of the condition that European culture had achieved by the mid-1800s: the emergence of Impressionist art; the great novels of Hugo, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Dickens; the intellectual enlightenment of de Tocqueville and Descartes; the revolutionary ferment of Marx. Any average liberal arts student encounters most of these great cultural developments to some degree: the core of modern Western civilization was formulating overseas.
Meanwhile, Americans still thrashed fellow humans into pitiful servitude, and treated them legally as no more than personal property. This unavoidable element of our nation’s history is ignored over and over by ideological chauvinists who oppose Affirmative Action and civil rights legislation, who decry “reverse discrimination” and claim it is “unfair” to try to force integration or to ameliorate African Americans’ disadvantages at the expense of innocent European (or Asian) Americans. (“Hey, my ancestors immigrated in 1912. I’m not responsible for slavery!”)
That anyone could find in the predominance of poverty within black communities in America anything but the continuing legacy of human bondage is unfathomable, and truly frightening.
” - Changing the World, Chapter 1: Origins