What has changed in the 21st century is that what we think of as class privilege can go a long way in blunting the color phobia - Nell Irvin Painter

Before desegregation, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, all those laws, exclusionary laws, were meant to keep Negroes out.

I live in Newark, which was heavily - actually bulldozed in the 1960s in urban renewal. And we think of urban renewal as harming black people, which of course it did, but it also hit some other vulnerable people, and Italian-American neighborhoods also got it.

The census keeps counting us by race for purposes of undoing racial harm in the past.