Rosa Parks and government racism
Published by Yazad Jal October 28th, 2005 in Culture and SocietyRosa Parks, one of the heroes of America’s civil rights movement, died recently. Amongst the many obituaries and tributes, I stumbled upon this insightful gem from Thomas Sowell — Rosa Parks: Pursuit of Profit vs. Racism.
Most people look at the government as the savior from the dignity sapping effects from racism. But segregation in the American South was government mandated and worse — if service providers didn’t comply, they faced the prospect of jail. If there was a savior, it was capitalism. Even if the capitalists themselves were racist, the profit motive forced them to serve both blacks and whites.
Yazad, I’ve lived in the US for 5 years now, long enough to know that there is no such entity called “The Government”. The US has an incredibly distributed system and though all you hear on the news are the actions of the Federal Government, it has little or no control or power about what goes on in the states. Each state can make its own rules and regulations and only have to ensure that it fits into a broad framework.
Also within each of these separate governments are departments and agencies, each of which make their own rules and regulations for their jurisdictions.
So when you talk about the government, you are in fact talking about a bunch of loosely separated organizations with little or no communication who sometimes cooperate with each other but at most times do their work independently of each other.
Those of us in the know just shake our heads when somebody says ‘government mandated’. Mandated by who? Who is this government. Are you referring to the State Government, the Federal Government or the State Dept. of Transport or the local municipality…perhaps the local school board or is the governor’s office?
I strongly recommend a book called Cobweb by Neal Stephenson if you want to really understand how ‘the government’ works. Set just before the first Gulf war, it give you an idea of just how many entities make up the government and how they are never all on the same page - the CIA and and Executive branch did declare war on Iraq but the Dept. of Agriculture never did and continued to trade and maintained strong diplomatic ties till well after the war started.
SCOTUS did the desegregation not the Administration… through seminal cases of Brown v Board of Education and making illegal the Jim Crow Legislation of the South…. Through the liberal revolution in the judiciary during the Earl Warren Court era….
Very good point CK. So basically, those who advocate government regulation on an issue should understand that in practice, the regulation that they advocate will work differently from what they are hoping for. When it gets implemented through the Byzantine structure of the government, it will have unpredictable results, sometimes achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted it to. Usually, this means that you are better off without the regulation than with it.
and, whats with the fetish of stating where you live?
happy diwali pal.
I liked ur article on Che. True I guess for most terrorist leaders..
There are some of us who want to make it better and some of us who want to do away with it. In either case both parties need to understand what they are dealing with - those who simply refer to ‘the government’ as if it is some single entity that makes decisions which instantly get implemented - only demonstrate that they do not really understand what it is that they are fighting or trying to improve.
What do you say about Capitalism today in US of A ? This question is not entirely related to the post though.