If you have some free time, go to a library and pick up Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody, or really, any detailed nonfiction book about the Civil Rights movement.
We don't live in a void of history. Everything that exists around you, social, physical, or mental, exists because of what has happened throughout time. Forty years may seem like an eternity to you, but in terms of real social change, its quite short.
Forty years ago, the south was still full of Jim Crow laws that prevented blacks from voting, or owning land where they wanted to, or being able to sell their crops to improve their financial status. (Most states had federal restrtictions on how much of one crop could be exported from them. The state governments got to choose how much each farmer could sell, and they have white farmers the vast majority of it, despite there being about equal amounts of land owned by black and white farmers.) Similarly, if there was even a rumor that someone was a member of CORE or the NAACP in states like Mississippi or Alabama, they often "disappeared", were beaten, or had their families threatened.
That is without even mentioning individual incidents like what happened to
Emmit Till. Hint: Emmit Till whistled at a white woman. He was beaten, shot through the head, and had his throat slit by two men, who then tied an anchor around his neck with barbed wire and threw his body into a river. They were aquitted by an all white jury, who took 67 minutes to reach a verdict, only because they stopped to drink soda.
The Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1968 may have changed the governments enforcement of racism, but they did almost nothing to change the social and economic aspects of it. Blacks who were poor from decades of Jim Crow laws and rampant racism were still poor, and racism still exists today.
That is why affirmative action, minority scholarships, and other race-specific programs exist today. I believe those programs should continue until the proportion of blacks who go to college is the same as whites who go to college, at which point, history can become history, and not a current event.
As for Roger's comment. First of all, until we live under a world government, whites are not a minority. A law that someone makes in China or Ethiopia has no bearing on your life. Secondly, even if you look at the world as a whole, you need to count money, non population. Money is what creates power.
