So the answer, as I understand it, is that it's complicated. The victories of the Civil Rights act were meaningful, they did make an important difference at the time, and they laid the groundwork for the world we had today. But you're right, that includes all the bad things. 1/ https://twitter.com/CuongLinhcc/status/1273161289251110913

One cannot overstate the horrors of segregation just as one cannot overstate the horrors of slavery, and so I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: there was a victory. 2/

The Civil Rights act ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. And it laid groundwork for many improvements.

But I think everyone now can say that these were insufficient remedies. 3/

The key thing, though, is that this victory was forced. These were concessions made in the face of social unrest. And the second they were signed, the white ethno/police state set to work, dismantling the networks which had won them and working to subvert the concessions. 4/

As every single black American knows, today you can be fired for being black. They don't call it that, but the erosion of labour law in Right-to-Work states means they can fire you for any other reason, and it's on you to prove they did it for racist ones. Good luck with that. 5/

And as people are noticing after the Ferguson uprising, black organisers are killed by the state. It's even happening right now, in this moment. There are black Americans disappearing or being lynched and ruled as suicides against all reason. 6/

Similarly, segregation was ended, but when the cops roll down the nice neighbourhoods they harass anyone who doesn't belong. And that underlying, pernicious, racial harassment is widespread across most of American society. 7/

Meanwhile, the state has reframed Martin Luther King as someone he was not, as a nice, wise, godly man who helped white people see the error of their ways and led them to concede change. He was not this. He was a political agitator, and a highly effective one. 8/

He also existed in a context where there were violent protestors and agitators who forced the state to compromise. And if you're forced to compromise, to save face, you must pretend it was by your own free will: that meant MLK persuaded, not Malcolm X forced. 9/

But the underlying thing goes back to the Civil War. The Civil War was about slavery, but what forced it to happen was economics: the Northern economies couldn't coexist with the Southern slavery-based economies. 10/

At the structural level, the Civil War didn't happen because enough white people had an attack of conscience and decided to free the slaves. Some did, but not enough. It was the economic conditions that really provided the fuel that kicked it off. 11/

Not enough people realise that Abraham Lincoln, the great emancipator, /was racist/. He didn't believe black people should have the same rights as white people, go look it up. He was against slavery, but he wasn't an abolitionist, he was a pragmatic politician. 12/

The rhetoric of the North was all about John Brown, an actual abolitionist, but this was war propaganda. He "lay a'mouldering in the grave" but it was the structural reality of incompatible economies that marched on, no matter the marching songs sung. 13/

And the real tell in all of this lies in the fact that, at the end of the war, they didn't dismantle the racist South. They didn't hand it over to the freed slaves. They let most of the well-to-do, smiling white slave owners stay in charge, and raise their monuments. 14/

And the emancipation of the black people of America was only half-done, because to this day you can still enslave people guilty of a crime. Cue the South industrialising crime and punishment, to subjugate black Americans back into their place.15/

To this day, today, right now, there are black inmates in Angola Prison picking cotton in the fields under the supervision of mounted white prison officers. Angola was a plantation, but it converted very quickly. 16/

Richard Nixon's aides went on record saying the war on drugs was designed from the ground up to lock up "hippies" (read: people of the Left) and black Americans, in order to deny them the ability to vote. And while they're not voting, they're slaves. Legal slaves. 17/

Roll that one around on your tongue. Say it. To this day, in America, there are black people who are subject to legal slavery. And sure, there are white people and people of all other ethnicities who are enslaved as well, but the criminal justice system targets black people. 18/

So what did the Civil Rights act really accomplish? Being brutally, painfully honest, it accomplished the bare minimum necessary to get black Americans to sit down, and give the state breathing room to more firmly put them back under control. 19/

It gave the state, dominated by white people and enforced by police, chance to work on undermining and subjugating black people without correcting any of the imbalance. They didn't learn to coexist; they learned more subtle means of social and political control. 20/

You see part of that control, and boy I'm going to catch hell for this, in @BarackObama. The state figured out that if you want to keep people in check, the easiest way to do so is to allow them limited political representation, and buy off its leadership. 21/

Hope and Change! And when a cop abuses a black man, bring them both for a beer at the White House and otherwise change nothing. Hope and Change! The hollowest of hope, and the bare minimum of change necessary to sustain it. 22/

There were really good activists, really good political agitators, who fought for change in the civil rights era. They were socially outflanked by the state through its control of media, politically marginalised, killed, and then their history sanitised by the victor. 23/

If freedoms, real, meaningful, enduring freedoms are won from this, it's because we get to learn from their failures and their successes. That's the real value of the civil rights era. To have seen the Civil Rights act do good, and to now know why it wasn't enough. 24/

Ultimately, the Civil Rights act was limited progress, and fell far short of what was needed. That doesn't mean it was bad, or that the sacrifices for it weren't worth it. Rather, it's an agonising shame that it was forcefully stopped there. And now it's time to press on. /End

Does that answer your question @CuongLinhcc?