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Furthermore they should teach that other countries have wide spread use of public transit and even wealthy people use it. Meanwhile in the US Rosa Parks made public transit a last resort option for those too poor to care about being stabbed.
Do you believe that the thing keeping people from being stabbed on public transit was that blacks had to give up their seats to whites when the bus was full?
It's kinda connected. The particular regulation isn't, but the practice that ultimately developed that having and enforcing a policy of removing disruptive people who are minority members would result in painful legal action whereas just letting shit happen wouldn't, was.
The radical policy of putting criminals in jail without segregating the bus would have permitted Montgomery to have avoided the bus boycott entirely.
Sure, but they were segregationists; it wasn't about crime.
Come to think of it, what was the point of separating blacks and whites? It's easy to think of Southern segregationists as moustache-twirling villains who wanted little beyond stigmatizing blacks and keeping them down, but perhaps there was an actual practical reason for this type of segregation?
To have an exploitable, dehumanized underclass? I get that overlaps a bit with stigmatizing them and keeping them down, but that was the core reason they were brought over in the first place: coerced labor. It’s also the central reason for literally the only time a significant chunk of this country rose in rebellion: because they believed that system was under threat, and they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve it. And a big portion of that formerly rebellious chunk then passed and vigorously supported laws designed explicitly to keep that underclass in an excluded and subordinate state long after formal slavery ended.
Sometimes people just do awful things to other people because it materially benefits them, and they and their ancestors build all sorts of moral, cultural, and legal justifications for why it’s okay, actually. I don't see why that's so hard to believe. People have literally been doing some version of this for as long as there have been people.
Labour in the postbellum south was generally very cheap, with no shortage of poor whites doing the exact same jobs as blacks.
Sure, I won’t argue that cheap labor wasn’t available elsewhere, but that wasn’t the main point by then. The goal was creating an underclass that was systematically excluded and subordinate. The relative social status mattered as much, if not more, than the labor itself. As LBJ put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Racial laws enforced both economic exploitation and a social hierarchy that made poor whites' own exploitation acceptable for them, since they could at least take comfort in knowing they're better than the blacks.
Plus, they still found ways to exploit black people to a greater degree than poor whites through disparities in sharecropping, tenant farming, and the legal loopholes that enabled forced labor via vagrancy laws and convict leasing. They got away with what they could, having just lost a war, after all.
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