TAPPED is dark today as we take a day to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Jamelle Bouie has a piece up on how King paved the way for other minority groups to demand equality:
[King's] legacy for other minority groups is less obvious. In public policy, we group racial and ethnic minorities together, even when their situations are very different. African Americans, with their legacy of slavery, apartheid, and institutionalized discrimination, face a vastly different set of circumstances than Latinos (who, until relatively recently, were classified as "white" in large parts of the country), Asians, Native Americans, and women.
That the federal government views these constituencies as a single group is a direct consequence of the civil-rights movement and King's successful push to fundamentally alter the federal government's relationship to African Americans. In the years following King's assassination, other movements -- for women's rights, for Latino rights, for Native American rights, for gay rights -- took advantage of these pathways in their struggle for rights and redress from the federal government.
Read the whole piece. We'll see you tomorrow.
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