"Race and Freedom Were Born Together"

While its never pleasant to retrace the many shameful episodes of this country's carefully organized past, it is difficult to ignore the irony in this fact. At the same time this system of equality was introduced to justify freedom so was another system of inequality created to justify slavery. I doubt many people know this fact and doubt even more that I could find it in your standard middle school textbook. One pattern I always thought existed was the tendency for civilizations to focus on, or even create, new issues of separation or categorization once the previous issues had either been resolved or reached a climax. For example, in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, Britain operated under a class system. People were separated by wealth and status from birth. Colonists then migrated to the Americas to escape this socio-economic inequality in mother England but immediately introduced blacks as a race and put them to work in the fields. Post-Civil War US took over 100 years to finally grant citizen rights to minorities and another 40 or so years to even begin honoring these rights. At around the same time, the Women's Rights Movement rose up and also fought for equality. While certainly not resolved, these conflicts have ebbed down from their utmost intensities and seem to be slowly, steadily improving-though with notable setbacks. With that progression of race and gender inequality, discrimination against the LGBT community is a recent phenomenon. It's also interesting to note that homosexuality was actually a fairly common and (although hotly debated) acceptable practice among the Ancient Greeks, one of the more civilized societies from the ancient world. Admittedly, they did separate citizens from foreigners and women were also denied certain rights. India has a caste system. Apartheid recently ended in South Africa. And so on. It seems like some people need or just invent forms of inequality to either allow categorization or justify certain actions. I'm not exactly sure, but it's an idea worth exploring.