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Originally Posted by Dutch
Same could be said for Hillary. I'm not a lawyer but is it systematic racism or is it money and power and some sort of VIP status?
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It's not an either/or thing. Money, power, and a famous last name help, but race is always (or at least for the foreseeable future) the elephant in that room.
See, here's the thing. Track Palin's mom went to college, got a degree (eventually) and parlayed a small-town political career into, eventually, a VP nomination, a TV show, and millions of dollars.
That Sarah was in that position is, at least in part, because she came of age at a time when it was possible to get a college degree without taking on thousands of dollars in debt. Her father was a science teacher, which suggests he had a college degree, also. Not necessarily one of any prestige, but he still had the opportunity to pursue higher education...and by the time you reach Chuck Heath's generation (Palin's father), you're talking about a point in time where black men were unable to attend white institutions, which limited their options/ability for post-secondary education. And once segregation enters the picture, racism is on the table, isn't it?
So there you have three generations of society and ability that shaped Track Palin's ability to skate on charges for which a black man would probably have been more heavily penalized.
And that's the thing. Track's family has money, which helps. They have a famous last name, which helps. But even if they had neither, being white still makes him on balance more likely to have had other systemic advantages which a black man of comparable circumstances would not enjoy.
That's the thing about racism. As boogeymen go, people who don't spend much time thinking about racism see it as white guys in Klan robes burning crosses and calling black people "boy" or "nigger." They then think to themselves "*I* don't behave that way, and I don't know anybody who does, so racism surely can't be a thing anymore; anybody who brings it up is just playing the race card for political advantage."
And what that ignores is that it's never nature versus nurture. Who you are isn't just an expression of your genes. It isn't just what you do, who you know. It's what your parents did, who they knew, what their parents did, and who THEY knew. Hard work and talent can overcome obstacles, yes, but you're talking about the exceptional having to be exceptional to be on the same footing as someone more "average," simply because of skin color, historical prejudices, and the generational legacies of those prejudices.
Call it "trickle down racism." What happens in one generation affects the next, and when that effect is financial, it compounds. That works both up and down the social ladder. When a college dropout like Bill Gates builds a fortune in the billions, he can give away 99% of it and his descendants are still going to be set for life.
When a man gets railroaded through the justice system to put him back into a position of involuntary servitude, or to provide a pretext to remove his right to vote (and thus, whatever political power he aspired to), the people who get elected aren't people who speak for him or his community. And if that treatment happens also to his son, and to his son's son, the people getting elected in the meantime STILL don't look like them, or necessarily have their best interests at heart. So maybe you get five generations down and that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, but five generations of somebody else behind the wheel still means that if a fifth generation black male goes before the justice system, he's more likely to have a bad time of it because the effects of everything that came before don't just go away overnight.