Important read about history and the Jacksonville killings

This thread from Michael Harriot goes back in time and creates context for 150 years of history that led us up to this point.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1696489770527207589.html

It is a weird feeling to be both shocked and unsurprised. Of course the killings are shocking. Even now, I have trouble wrapping my head around that level of hatred.

But then at the same time, I am completely unsurprised. In the larger sense, these things have happened all over the Country. But as a native Jacksonvillian, I am not in the least bit surprised. I could see this undercurrent of racial resentment my entire life. I left for college but I still go back to visit family. Parts of Jacksonville modernized but in many ways, it is a deep south culture with all of the history that goes with that.

I have personal connections to this tragedy because I was raised within a few miles of this shooting. Until the age of 13, I lived in one of those redlined neighborhoods even though I was a lower middle class white kid. I was a part integration because I was bussed across town to elementary school. I had no understanding of this at the time.

Of course none of this was taught to me in Florida schools. It is only now with time and the help of many of you at DU that I can reflect on my childhood with any sense of history.

I have learned more in the last decade than in the first 45 years of my life. Of course that is progress on one front. But it has come at the cost of a backlash where acknowledgement of history is seen as a greater problem than the history itself.

Three steps forward, two steps back. Onward still.