Political Memes

While we're at it, here's another excerpt from the video I linked that's even more relevant to the thread at large:

If you were to ask a white northerner to describe a black person in the 1850s, before the Civil War, they would've used words like "loyal," "dutiful", "reliable," "hardworking," and "trustworthy." While still servile in nature, I hope we can agree that these are mostly positive traits. By the 1890s, when convict leasing and debt peonage were widely practiced, they were "a threat," "uncivilized," "demonic," "a lascivious beast roaming the country."

This is it! If you learn nothing else from this video, I want this to be it: Southern whites used laws like vagrancy, trespassing, and false pretense to convince northern whites that black people were incapable of living in civilized society. This is where the myth of black criminality comes from -- this is decades before the War on Drugs.

If that doesn't piss you off, I want you to take out your phone, turn on the camera, flip it to selfie mode, and then ask yourself why that is! My guess is that it's because none of the history I've talked about so far would have ever applied to you.