#systemicracism

History books claim the era is over, but the scars tell a different story. Uncover the invisible threads connecting a painful past to our fractured present—and why true healing requires facing the wounds that time has failed to close.

The courts didn't just permit this system — they codified and defended it at every turn. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) ruled that Black people were not citizens and had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect" — these are the actual words of the Supreme Court of the United States. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) enshrined "separate but equal" as constitutional law, giving legal cover to decades of apartheid on American soil. The GI Bill (1944) was administered in a way that deliberately excluded Black veterans from its wealth-building benefits — no mortgages, no college funding, no economic ladder. Korematsu v. United States (1944) upheld the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans based purely on race. Redlining — formally backed by the Federal Housing Administration — systematically denied Black families home loans in desirable neighborhoods from the 1930s through the 1970s, engineering the racial wealth gap that exists to this day. The War on Drugs, launched in 1971 and expanded through the 1980s and 90s, was later admitted by Nixon aide John Ehrlichman to have been deliberately designed to target Black communities and the anti-war left. This is not interpretation. This is not opinion. This is the documented, signed, stamped, and archived record of a nation that has never fully reckoned with what it built.

https://suanneschaferauthor.com/book-review-the-nickel-boys/