The Equality of Interpersonal Racism: Sharing the White/Black Binary

This egalitarian society envisioned in the 1960s, however, could not have been further from the truth, and what Black people really got instead was much more insidious.

When the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964 and amended in 1968 with the Fair Housing Act, many Black people in the United States thought they would finally receive an opportunity for Racial parity. The emphasis on desegregation and integration into white spaces and places, specifically within education, housing, and employment, was positioned as a panacea for equality, equity, opportunity and justice. The idea was strictly economic; sharing these spaces and places would cause an equality paradigm shift through erasure of color as a distinction. It was thought that if a viable comparison could be drawn among Black and white people through shared economic struggle, an intersection could be placed smack in the middle of economic success and a colorlessness nation could finally be achieved with Black and white people living and working together. Most who believed in a colorless nation even went so far as to pretend the founding fathers were actually attempting to accomplish the very spirit of a more perfect, colorless Union, by transmuting their newly…