The New Jim Crow: Final Paper. Social Sciences Essay

The New Jim Crow
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Father John Misty in his song Bored in the USA highlights some of the challenges of living in the land of the free. He satirizes the dream that Americans have and keep pursuing while the odds are stacked in their favor. He points out that ‘By this afternoon, I’ll live in debt, By tomorrow, be replaced by children’ which is a metaphor of the ever ballooning national debt that continues to burden the American people and it is unlikely that it will be repaid by the current generations and it will be passed on to future generations. He also notes the other issues that ordinary Americans continue to grapple with; subprime loans, craftsman home, useless education, addiction to drugs orchestrated by the big pharma. His cries are echoed by Dead Prez in his W-4 song in which he describes the plight of being a person of color in the untied states. Prez questions why do ‘good people suffer so much and bad people prosper so much?’ Prez also questions how the system that has shackled him in poverty came to being where he works 9-5 and 8-12 faithfully but he still has nothing to show for it. He also questions why blacks still experience food insecurity, are exploited by their bosses, unable to pay rent, stereotyped when looking for a job yet they sleep in the streets even in winter and their families are ravaged by drugs. He also points out that they do not vote because things do not change and blacks are still paid peanuts, the government still taxes them and because of desperation they take to crime. He describes that black community is has very few options left for them and circumstances leave them o choice but to either do crime or go back to the plantation and do the same jobs their ancestors did. These two songs desire the chilling reality of millions of Americans who are victims of the system. It begs the question; how did we arrive at the present reality?
One of the reasons why we arrived at the present reality is institutionalizing racism. It is undeniable that America, the land of the free still grapples with racism. The Jim Crow Museum in Ferris University shows how Jim crow was not only laws or racial segregation, but an entire system that evolved to portray blacks as second class citizensCITATION Jim13 \l 1033 (Jim Crow Museum, 2013). It is a deeply etched problem in the societal fabric in America that has continually weighed down the progress of the nation. For nearly two centuries since it was founded, not all Americans were equal in the face of the law. The society was deeply divided along racial lines with the larger share attributed to whites and the rest to the people of color. It was a problem which largely limited the upward mobility of the people of color and stacked the odds in favor of whites. The civil rights movement of the 1950s led to the civil rights act which made all Americans equal in the face of the law. However, the institutions that had given whites their advantage were largely unaffected by the new legal framework. The Stone Mountain in Georgia that features the sculptures of leaders of confederacy who wanted to continue enslaving blacks was completed and opened in 1972. In 2001, Georgia passed a law prohibiting ...