Tell me, do you think a Black person is safer living 100 years ago in the USA, than today’s USA?

Thanks to modern technological innovations, sure. Clean air/water, safer public transit, vaccines, etc go a long way towards improving quality of life for everyone, including the bottom of the social hierarchy. But has a black person in 2025 enjoyed the same degree of prosperity as a white peer over the intervening years? Absolutely not, and for the same reasons. They’re more predisposed to experience tainted air/water, they are comparatively less safe traveling, they have diminished access to modern medicine like vaccines and prenatal care, etc, etc.

And this is a deliberate function of public policy. The sky-high arrest rate of African Americans (particularly while traveling) is the result of a Nixon Era campaign to over-police black and brown neighborhoods that every subsequent executive and governor seems to have endorsed. The higher rates of cancer, the higher rates of obesity and malnutrition, the higher rates of disease transmission and mortality from preventable illness or injury all stem from eugenics policies pioneered in the OG Progressive Era. Even some of the pseudoscientific theories around mental, physical, and social aptitudes have endured.

it’s no where was common as before

The arrest rates of black men peaked in the 90s, during the height of the Reagan War on Crime. They’ve fallen off somewhat in comparison to arrests and harassment of hispanics and east asians, but are nowhere close to comparable to white peers. This is downwind of the reactionary media hijacking progressive language and ideology and weaponizing it against a population that its leadership believes is subhuman.

What we have in the modern era is rationalization of reactionary policy in progressive terms. The propaganda we experience is caped in progressive language. But the goals are the exact opposite.