I took a bike ride in the country last week on a blustery day.
I was faring quite well riding into what I thought was a headwind until I rounded a corner and met a blast of wind that nearly stopped me in my tracks. In reflecting on that feeling later, I thought a good name for that blast of air trying to stop me advancing and even pushing me back would be the “Jim Crow” wind.
I don’t have to explain to my African-American brothers and sisters what “Jim Crow,” “Jim Crow laws” and “New Jim Crow” mean. But White Americans like me, especially those of us who are males and in the middle class, might shake our heads and say, “I’ve heard the expression ‘Jim Crow,’ but I don’t know where it came from or what it actually means.”
There is a good reason White males like me don’t know much about “Jim Crow.” We’ve never experienced “Jim Crow,” and, as a result, we might even go so far as to argue that it doesn’t exist. For us, the strong wind is behind us, giving us a boost, not hitting us like a brick.
The term “Jim Crow” came from a white actor in early 19th century minstrel shows who applied blackface and offered a mocking image of African slaves as feeble-minded and laughable figures.
But the real damage of the “Jim Crow” term came when it was applied, especially after Reconstruction, to laws passed that restricted the rights of now freed African Americans. Separate restaurants, bathrooms, swimming pools and water fountains — those were all made “legal” by Jim Crow laws. Separate units in the military, separate baseball leagues, separate neighborhoods, separate hospitals and separate and grossly unequal schools — those too were created by “Jim Crow” rules, both written and unwritten.
I first met “Jim Crow” when I was a boy on vacation in the South and saw the signs for “colored” water fountains and “whites only” stores. But I first sensed what “Jim Crow” might be like for African-Americans when my seminary class in Los Angeles spent a few days in the neighborhood of Watts.
I will never forget one stop on our “tour” of Watts, when we were taken to the meat department in a corner grocery. Even before our leader pointed it out, we sensed something strange about the packages of meat in the cooler. Part of what was strange was that the price of the cuts of meat was higher than what we paid for meat in the suburbs.
But the real surprise came when the person leading our group asked us to notice how much redder the meat looked. He explained that the cuts of meat were all past the use-by dates of meats in our supermarkets. In fact, the meat we were looking at was meat that hadn’t sold by the use-by dates in suburban stores.
And the heightened red color? That was food coloring painted on to make older meat look fresh and appetizing.
Want to know what “Jim Crow” is? Jim Crow is bad meat painted red and sold at higher prices.
I’d love to write that Jim Crow is a thing of the past. But the “New Jim Crow” is flexing its muscles right now, not in meat counters but in our voting system.
A reasonable person might think that a democracy would want every citizen to have the same ease and right of voting. But if you have the Jim Crow mindset, you can’t celebrate the high number of people of color who voted in the last election. You have to label that fraud.
Trapped in a Jim Crow mindset, the right wing of the Republican party is doing all it can to make it harder for people of color to vote as easily as voting is for Whites. Limit mail-in voting? You bet. Make it illegal for people to pass out water bottles to those waiting hours in line to vote? You bet. Limit the number of voting places in urban centers of our country? You bet.
The new Jim Crow is just an updated version of the old Jim Crow. It’s embedding discrimination in our country under the guise of “perfectly legal” laws. But legal isn’t the same as moral.
Let’s not be fooled. Jim Crow will always be bad meat painted red and sold at higher prices.
David Carlson of Franklin is a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion. Send comments to [email protected].
