I read these words in Fred Wilson’s post earlier in the week:
As my friend David Steinberg said to me last month, we are witnessing 1918 (pandemic) plus 1929 (economic crisis) plus 1968 (racial crisis) all at the same time.
There’s something that’s been bothering me about this. They call the current anti racism protests in the US (and elsewhere) a ‘racial crises’.
It’s not a racial crisis. The racial (or racism) crisis is what the US has had for over a century. The police didn’t suddenly start shooting black people at a higher rate. It’s just that everyone has a camera, so the racist excesses are being recorded and exposed at a higher rate.
What’s happening now in the US is a boiling over of the frustrations of the frequently suppressed black minority. The current events are their response—both peaceful and the not peaceful ones.
To label these protest events (and the counter events) as ‘a racial crisis‘ is not very different from Trump saying there were very fine people on both sides after the Charlottesville incident.
That a fairly liberal person used these words indicates how easy it is to use a soft term, rooting it deeper into acceptance.
