The Ethics of Living Jim Crow response

Being a white kid living in a town that is predominantly white, in the 21st century, it has to go without being said that racism is something that is pretty much nonexistent. Not in a utopia-like sense, where everyone considers everyone else completely equal, more of that there is no real exposure to humanity's prejudices on that level, at least. The most exposure we get here is in the reading in classes, or history films, showing the plights of Martin Luther King Jr., or Gandhi. Sometimes it feels like it's almost shoved down our throats about things like this. Now I can be quite cynical, I mostly am unfazed by these means of information. So, I was very surprised by the recounting on life under Jim Crow laws that Mr. Wright painted in his memoir.

More than anything, I think it was because the autobiographical viewpoint best captured the life that blacks had to endure in the South during the 1930's. Most of the people we have heard from, describing the racism of the past, were people that had not experienced said racism themselves.

It's easier to not necessarily understand the dire straits of those effected by the Jim Crow laws, but to at least picture what the straits were. The fact that they always had to say "sir" to a white man, that they were still not considered human, that even their own families admonished them if they "stepped outside their boundaries."