Racism and Hate

“Racism and Hate: An American Reality” is a provocative, new, and updated examination of Dr. Gunnar Myrdal’s epic study of the subject matter done over seventy years ago in the late 1930s. That study took a look at where race relations were in the country and the effect it was having on our democracy, some seventy years after the Civil War. That work was titled “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.” The author, in this work, looked back at our history here in America, dealing with race relations over the last seventy years and through exhausted research and analysis, concluded that the dilemma was not so much a particular people, but in fact, the dilemma had more to do with the man-induced, self-fulfilling prophecy of racism. To put a human face on the subject matter, he used his own family’s history here in Georgia starting in 1784 through slavery, through the Civil War, through the Jim Crow laws of the South, through Plessey v. Ferguson, clear up until 1954 when Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessey. The book takes a critical look at the year 1954, first analyzing the enormity of the Fourteenth Amendment rights violations that Plessey had allowed to occur, and then secondly, the ramifications of the Brown v. Board of Education case. The author also examines the lighting rod effect the first American president of African descent has had on bringing the hidden vestiges of Racism out of the closet and placing it front and center on the nation’s conscience.