Every one of the men of the Tuskegee experiment was a victim of contempt, the ugliest possibility of the human mind. And certainly every person who endured slavery in America was. And yet, as everyone knows, there has been no official national apology for the horrors of slavery, those centuries of raw evil. What is at stake here is honesty about an injustice of far greater duration. It largely has to do with economics.
Contempt is present in the agony people feel about money and jobs.
There is contempt, for example, in a factory owner as he gives himself the right to keep as profit money he didn't work for, money earned through the hard labor of other people. Some months back, the owners of U.P.S. tried to get away with that, and they were met with a strike that had support across the country. That law will result and they know it in children suffering terrible hunger, and even becoming homeless because their parents, through no fault of their own, cannot find work in our failing economy. Rather than criticize the profit system itself, the poor of all races are being scapegoated. Contempt the feeling we have a right to be superior to other people is a national danger.