that's just the way it is

 

In 1986, Bruce Hornsbury and his band, the Range, recorded the biggest hit he has had to date, "The Way It Is". It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1986.The song described aspects of homelessness, the American civil rights movement and institutional racism. It has since been sampled by at least six rap artists, including Tupac Shakur, E-40, and Mase.

For reasons I’ll never understand, it popped into my head today.

Although the song itself is more than 30 years old, it is extremely relevant to today’s society, since there is a great deal of controversy about something called “critical race theory”, which is a 40-year-old academic study that examines the effect that systematic racism has had on our society.

The civil rights era, arguably, started in 1948, when Harry Truman desegregated the military, but it was preceded by Jackie Robinson’s 1947 hiring by Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rosa Parks and Emmet Till followed in 1955, then the Greensboro sit-in in 1960, the 1961 Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King’s speech in 1963, and “bloody Sunday” in Selma in 1965.

Bruce Hornsby & The Range - The Way It Is (Official Video) - YouTube

Martin Luther King’s assassination led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed into law on July 2, 1964, roughly 3 months after MLK was assassinated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

After the March on Selma turned into “Bloody Sunday”, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 3, 1965.

 https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/35187

About 1:30 into the song, Hornsby sings, “hey little boy, you can’t go where the others go”. This is what he was talking about:

1)    It wasn’t until 1949, the African-Americans were allowed to use swimming pools and the Chicago lakeshore alongside white people. In the late 1940s there were major swimming pool riots in St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Whites threw nails at the bottom of pools in Cincinnati, poured bleach and acid in pools with black bathers in St. Augustine, Florida, and beat them up in Philadelphia. 

 https://www.chicagoreporter.com/the-forgotten-history-of-segregated-swimming-pools-and-amusement-parks/

 2)   Although the 1954 Supreme Court decision of 1954 officially desegregated schools, schools in the South were slow to comply. It took until 1957 before the Little Rock Nine could go into a white high school in Little Rock, with a little help from president Eisenhower. When Ruby Bridges entered an all-white school in New Orleans in 1960, she was escorted in by U.S. Marshalls.

3)   Even today, realtors in a variety of cities don’t show potential black buyers houses in the “white section” of some cities.

 If you still don’t think that systematic racism does not exist in this country, consider these facts:

·         A 2021 analysis of marijuana-related arrests in 2020 in New York City’s five boroughs reported that people of color comprised 94 percent of those arrested.

·         A 2021 analysis from the Milwaukee County, Wisconsin District Attorney’s Office reported that Black Wisconsinites were 4.3 times more likely than their white counterparts to be convicted for having marijuana. The worst disparities in Wisconsin are in Ozaukee County, where Black people are 34.9 times more likely to be arrested and Manitowoc County, where Black people are 29.9 times more likely to be arrested.”

·         A 2020 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, concluded, “Black people are 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, notwithstanding comparable usage rates.” Authors reported, “In every single state, Black people were more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, and in some states, Black people were up to six, eight, or almost ten times more likely to be arrested. In 31 states, racial disparities were actually larger in 2018 than they were in 2010.”

·          

https://norml.org/marijuana/fact-sheets/racial-disparity-in-marijuana-arrests/

 

More people died from police violence in 2017 than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action around the globe). More people died at the hands of police in 2017 than the number of black people who were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). Cops killed more Americans in 2017 than terrorists did (four). They killed more citizens than airplanes (13 deaths worldwide), mass shooters (428 deaths) and Chicago’s “top gang thugs” (675 Chicago homicides).

 Yet only 12 officers were charged with a crime related to a shooting death.

 https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/01/a-man-of-integrity.html

In 2021, State lawmakers have enacted nearly two dozen laws since the 2020 election that restrict ballot access, according to a new tally by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law.

These 22 laws in 14 states mark a new record for restrictive voting laws since 2011, when the Brennan Center recorded 19 laws enacted in 14 state legislatures.

Most of the new laws make it harder to vote absentee and by mail, after a record number of Americans voted by mail in November. The people who will now find it harder to vote are Hispanics, African-Americans, and native Americans.

 

https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics/voter-suppression-restrictive-voting-bills/index.html

 Hornsby also touched on homelessness, when he sang “get a job”

 The truth is that all of us are just a heartbeat away from being homeless, as explained in the link below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2020/09/

 As we get closer to the mid-terms, the most important issues aren’t critical race theory, inflation, the southern border, or voter fraud.

The only question that matters is whether candidates for public office agree with the Republican National Committee that the events of January 6 were “legitimate political discourse”. If they can’t answer this question correctly, then they are not qualified to hold public office.

That’s just the way it is.