havesomeseichel, you wrote:
“It strikes me as weird- how come in over 100 years people are still complaining about the effects of slavery when no one alive knows someone who was enslaved!!??!!??”
Affirmative action isn’t just about slavery, it’s about the century of discrimination & outright attacks that followed. In another post you mentioned your knowledge of history. Surely, then, you are aware of events such as Jim Crow laws, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the hundreds of lynchings and other murders? And you certainly are aware of more recent events, such as the Birmingham church bombings, murders of civil rights workers, the assasination of Martin Luther King, and governors refusing to integrate schools? Millions of people alive today experienced this. Even Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves during the Civil War, didn’t believe blacks were or should be equal to whites; it took the Civil Rights Act of the 1960’s to codify this.
The term “driving while black” isn’t meant to shrug off responsibility; rather it describes the experiences of those who feel they were singled out due to the color of their skin. I can’t say I’ve experienced this, being white, but I’ve often heard frum people complain of being singled out due to their appearance.