Jim Crow 2.0: The Normalcy of Evil

There is something particularly dangerous about evil when it stops shocking us. Not when everybody agrees with it. Not when everybody participates in it. But when we become accustomed to it. When what once would have caused outrage becomes another headline. When injustice becomes routine. When cruelty becomes policy debate. When the rewriting of history becomes curriculum. When attacks on voting rights become political strategy. When removing books becomes normal. When division becomes profitable. When the unacceptable becomes ordinary.

That is what troubles me about America today.nJames Baldwin warned us that history is not something buried safely in the past. We carry it with us. And when America’s racial history is examined closely, a troubling pattern emerges: periods of extraordinary democratic progress have repeatedly been followed by periods of resistance, retrenchment and efforts to reclaim power.

I see three great periods in that struggle. And each one asks America essentially the same question: How much democracy are we really willing to share?

The First Reconstruction: Freedom — and the Backlash

The first Reconstruction began after the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, America adopted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments — abolishing slavery, establishing birthright citizenship and equal protection, and prohibiting denial of the vote on the basis of race. The National Archives has described this period as one of the most rapid expansions of civil and political rights in American history.

Formerly enslaved people built schools, churches, businesses and political institutions. Black Americans voted and held public office. Literacy expanded dramatically as freed people — sometimes grandparents sitting beside grandchildren — crowded into classrooms because they understood that education was one of the foundations of freedom. America appeared to be moving toward a broader democracy. Then came the backlash.

As Reconstruction collapsed, Southern states imposed poll taxes, literacy tests and other barriers designed to suppress Black political participation. Violence and intimidation accompanied those laws. And racial violence was not simply about hatred. It was often about power. Tulsa's Greenwood District — one of the nation's most prosperous Black communities — was devastated in 1921, with roughly 35 blocks of homes, churches and businesses destroyed. bBlack progress had become visible. So had the determination to contain it. That is the first pattern America must remember: Progress. Resistance. Retrenchment.

The Second Reconstruction: Civil Rights — and Another Resistance

Nearly a century after emancipation, America entered what historians often describe as a second Reconstruction: the modern civil rights era. Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Fair Housing Act of 1968. Black Americans fought to make America honor promises already written into its Constitution. But once again, legal equality did not automatically produce economic equality.

Federal housing policies and private discrimination helped create segregated neighborhoods and contributed to racial wealth disparities that remain with us. The National Archives notes that Black veterans frequently could not obtain mortgage financing in Black neighborhoods and encountered discrimination when attempting to purchase homes in white suburbs, limiting their ability to take full advantage of the GI Bill's historic expansion of homeownership.

Then came the highways. Interstate construction tore through Black communities across the country. North Nashville was divided by Interstate 40. Miami's Overtown lost homes and businesses to Interstate 95. Detroit's Paradise Valley and Hastings Street were devastated by freeway construction. Federal and National Park Service histories now document how highway planning frequently displaced Black neighborhoods and businesses. That matters because wealth is not simply money. Wealth is property. Businesses. Schools. Neighborhoods. Political power. Institutions. And whenever communities lose those things, generations can feel the consequences. Again, the pattern appeared: Progress. Resistance. Retrenchment.

The Third Reconstruction

Then came 2008. America elected Barack Obama as its first Black president. For some Americans, his election seemed to signal the arrival of a "post-racial" America. It did not.

The years that followed instead brought an extraordinary national argument over race, policing, voting, immigration, affirmative action, diversity programs and what American children should be taught about the nation's history. Technology changed the conversation as well. People who once depended upon newspapers and television networks to tell their stories suddenly had smartphones, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms. Gatekeepers could be bypassed. Stories could travel around the world before the evening news ever came on. But once again, racial progress and racial anxiety existed alongside one another. And that brings us to the present.

Jim Crow 2.0

I do not use the words Jim Crow 2.0 to suggest America has literally recreated every law of the segregation era. It has not. I use the phrase as a warning about something more subtle: Rights do not have to disappear overnight to become weaker.

Consider voting rights. In 2013, the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder decision invalidated the Voting Rights Act's coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions had to obtain federal approval before changing voting practices. The Justice Department notes that formerly covered jurisdictions consequently no longer automatically face that preclearance requirement. That does not mean every voter-roll cleanup or election-law change is discriminatory. Election officials legitimately remove people who have died, moved or become otherwise ineligible. But safeguards matter.

The Brennan Center reported that at least 17 million registrations were removed nationally between 2016 and 2018 and found higher purge rates in jurisdictions previously covered by federal preclearance. Importantly, the center itself cautioned that its figure included removals for legitimate reasons and did not mean 17 million eligible voters had been improperly removed. That distinction matters. Truth does not need exaggeration. Truth is powerful enough by itself.

And Then There Are the Books

Another battle is taking place in America's schools and libraries. PEN America documented 6,870 instances of school book bans during the 2024-25 school year across 23 states and 87 public school districts. Its 2026 analysis found that 44% of affected titles featured people or characters of color and that nonfiction titles — including history, biographies and informational books — increasingly were affected. Supporters of restrictions argue that parents and communities should have greater authority over sexually explicit or age-inappropriate material. Critics argue that some policies have moved far beyond protecting children and are restricting legitimate literature and historical material. That debate deserves accuracy rather than slogans. But I know this much: A nation should never become afraid of its own history.

You cannot heal what you refuse to examine. You cannot reconcile with what you refuse to acknowledge. And you cannot teach children to build a better country by pretending the old country never made mistakes.

The Current Political Battle

President Donald Trump's second administration has aggressively challenged federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, arguing that DEI can create unlawful preferences and undermine merit. The administration rescinded prior federal DEI initiatives beginning in January 2025 and has pursued additional restrictions since then. Supporters describe those policies as restoring equal treatment. Civil rights organizations and other opponents argue that they threaten programs designed to address longstanding discrimination.

Some of those policies remain tied up in litigation. As recently as September 2026, a federal judge struck down an Education Department anti-DEI grant policy, finding that the department's approach violated federal administrative law. Those facts deserve to be debated without pretending disagreement itself makes someone evil. But neither should political disagreement become an excuse to forget history. Because America has been here before. Not in exactly the same place. Not under exactly the same circumstances. But facing the same fundamental temptation: When democracy expands, will we protect that expansion — or search for new ways to narrow it?

The Normalcy of Evil

That may be the most frightening part. Evil rarely introduces itself by saying: "Hello. I am evil." It arrives dressed as necessity. Tradition. Security. Order. Economics. Religion. Politics. Sometimes even patriotism. And after enough repetition, people stop asking whether something is right. They start asking whether it is normal.

There is a difference. Slavery was once normal. Segregation was once normal. Lynching was once treated as public spectacle. Redlining was normal. Keeping Black citizens away from voting booths was normal. None of those things became righteous simply because millions of people accepted them. Normal does not mean moral. That may be the lesson America desperately needs to remember.

And the Church Must Look in the Mirror

As a preacher's kid, I cannot write about America's racial history without talking about Christianity. The church has stood on both sides of America's racial struggle. Christians fought slavery. And Christians defended slavery. Christians marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And Christians stood against integration. The same Bible was sometimes carried by the freedom marcher and quoted by the segregationist. So the question has never merely been whether America is religious. What does our religion produce? If our Christianity can accommodate hatred, cruelty and racial superiority, something has gone terribly wrong with our Christianity. Jesus never commanded us to protect a political party. He commanded us to love our neighbor.

Look in the Mirror, America

This column is not an argument that every white American thinks alike. History itself disproves that. White Americans marched, organized, taught freed people, challenged segregation and sometimes died alongside Black Americans in struggles for civil rights. Nor is America's racial history reducible to one political party, one president or one election. It is bigger than that.

This is about a recurring American temptation to confuse power with righteousness and comfort with justice. And history warns us that injustice eventually damages more than the people originally targeted. A society that becomes comfortable weakening one group's liberty creates tools that can eventually be turned against everybody. A society comfortable censoring one history may someday censor yours. A government given extraordinary power against people you dislike still possesses that power when somebody you distrust takes office. That is why constitutional rights matter even when protecting them is inconvenient.

And that is why democracy cannot simply mean: Freedom for people who look like me. Justice for people who agree with me. Liberty for people who worship like me. That isn't democracy. That's privilege. America has spent more than two centuries struggling over whether the magnificent words written in its founding documents would eventually belong to everybody.

We have moved forward. We have moved backward. We have expanded freedom. And we have sometimes watched fear pull it back. The question confronting us now is not simply whether history is repeating itself. The question is whether we have learned enough history to recognize the pattern before repetition becomes destiny. James Baldwin's warning still echoes. A country cannot forever hide from reality without eventually paying a price for the illusion.

So look in the mirror, America. Not Republican America. Not Democratic America. Not Black America. Not white America. America. Look long enough to see the brilliance and the brutality. The Constitution and the contradiction. The progress and the backlash. The dream and the denial. Because patriotism is not pretending your country has never been wrong. Sometimes the greatest act of patriotism is loving your country enough to tell it the truth.

And if we ever reach the point where injustice no longer bothers us because we have seen it too many times, heard it too many times or allowed politics to convince us that cruelty is acceptable when directed toward the "right" people, then Jim Crow will not need to return wearing a white hood. It will have accomplished something far more dangerous. It will have convinced us that what should shock our conscience is simply normal. And perhaps that is the greatest danger of all: Not merely the presence of evil — but the normalcy of it.