I want to tell you why @GlennKesslerWP and @washingtonpost should apologize for what they have done today. They attempted to tell the story of a black man in the South by looking at public records. That’s relevant because at that time
“Separate but equal” was a legal standard. It was separate, but it was never equal. @GlennKesslerWP tries to tell the story of Scott’s family amassing land after the Civil War and can’t see the story of southern whites fighting back.
By the time @SenatorTimScott’s grandfather is born, black families are having to abandon schooling in the south because it isn’t good, it isn’t equal, and it is very separate. They’ve got to go save their land.
But @GlennKesslerWP and the Washington Post don’t attempt to tell the story of Tim Scott’s family as it was lived. They look at documents and make raw deductions devoid of the social context of the time.
This is actually what racism of white elite often looks like. They don’t look at the story as lived, but as told by banks and legal records written at a time white society behaved one way and recorded things a different way.
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