America's Continuum of Racial Democracy and Injustice: From the Plantation to Urban Ghetto

In 2019, of the 252 Republican members of Congress, only 3 were African American. Lincoln's progressive Republicanism had been supplanted by the regressive 1950s Southern-styled Democratic Party ideology of white primacy. America's initial morally flawed constitution permitted slavery to persist, catalyzing and sustaining hostile unresolvable ideological warfare, driven by slavery issues, the Civil War, a failed post-war Reconstruction effort, and a brutal Jim Crow suppression. And since the 1980s, politically contrived Republican race-neutral legislation and policies have disproportionally targeted minorities, resulting in discriminatory housing, voting, policing, and criminal justice outcomes. Over the centuries, excessive white self-serving social and economic individualism of privilege, religious ethno-cultural racism, and a destructive anti-progressive, anti-intellectual, and anti-scientific mentality has been ingrained within the nation's DNA. This is America's continuum of racial democracy and injustice.

Thomas P. Wallace has served higher education for over three decades as a professor and academic administrator. His last position was President of Illinois State University.