The Modern Day Civil Rights Industry Needs Racism

     The modern day civil rights industry has gone from obtaining previously denied Constitutional rights for minorities, which was achieved decades ago, to teaching minorities how to be offended by words, ideas and symbols. The legislation of the 1960s and 1970s, which guaranteed equal rights for women and minorities, does not have to be re-legislated every generation as the Left seems to want to do. The signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act by President Obama early in his first term is a good example of legislation which will never help one person it purports to, unless that person is a plaintiff's attorney.
     Legislative efforts like Lilly Ledbetter are designed to increase not only the window of time one has to sue if they feel they have suffered discrimination, but the very "acts of discrimination" which become a violation of law. These "acts of discrimination" in modern times have encompassed not only what someone does, which previously defined when a law was broken, but what they think as well. The almost Orwellian nature of so-called "hate crimes laws" is exemplary of how far down the road of statism we have progressed as a culture. Our founders could not have imagined a country where a person could be charged with a violation of law simply for what they think.
     The recent Supreme Court's reversal of part of the Voting Rights Act of the 1960s was blasted by the Left as a grave injustice and a sure return to the Jim Crow South. But in reality, the part of the law dismissed was unfair to certain states in the South that were being punished by the law because of what happened in those states in the distant past. Truth be told, the Jim Crow laws of the South were not a function of a majority of Southerners being racists, but of the prejudice and bigotry of the Democrat politicians who passed them. If the general population and business owners were racists and acting accordingly, there would have been no need for laws to force them into behavior in which they were already engaged.
     Just as white, Southern Democrat politicians used their power to impose laws that discriminated against blacks in the so-called Jim Crow South, modern day race industry participants like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barrack Obama and others, have used their influence and power to perpetuate the façade of endemic racism in this country. To admit that any significant progress has been made in racial discrimination over the last fifty years, like lifting the punishment on Southern states imposed by the Voting Rights Act, would be to signal the death knell for the "civil rights leaders" who have become wealthy by trying to extend that punishment to the widest swath of American public life as possible.