Crossing the Bridge: African-Americans and the Necessity of a 21st Century Human Rights Movement

Abstract

Despite President Obama's decisive 2008 election and 2012 re-election, racism is still very much a reality against which African-Americans continue to struggle. African-Americans also still wallow in socioeconomic inequality. A careful look at the insidious nature of the shift in social and legal discourse towards colorblindness, combined with increasingly aggressive conservative post-Obama, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-progressive expressions makes it necessary to question all of the discussion surrounding the issue of progressive and eventual racial justice and to challenge some very basic assumptions regarding African-American progress.

If the so-called post-racial, colorblind society is what awaits African-Americans on the other side of the bridge, then this bridge is an ill-fated bridge to nowhere. If African-Americans are to ever experience true equality, in fact and under the law, the United States must cast aside the shield of individual rights and confront the hypocrisy inherent to its white supremacist majoritarian democracy.