No, not back then, they couldn't. But now the balance of laws have shifted and people have to adapt to the changes.

Again, how do they 'create their own power structures'?

I think one of the biggest things holding African Americans and women back from really advancing professionally in executive offices and STEM is affirmative action. I see a lot of tokens and tools occupying spots in professional environments due to lowered standards, and the people that take those jobs are tools. What do people call them?

I was in a STEM job this Summer where there was an ongoing "diversity problem" according to the employee survey that was released in June. This was at a major national corporation. It was mostly white waspy people there. There was maybe one black person I saw on my floor. The women in my group had pretty low technical skills compared to the handful of (white) male tech leads who were the really competent people in the group. The women more or less did tech workplace housekeeping: configuration management, "logistics", acting like girl fridays for the male tech leads. These women also had, to go along with their weak technical skills and mainly supportive roles in the group, really great personalities. They told funny cat stories and gossiped. Any woman who acted out of order and spoke up at meetings and defended ideas -- guess who that was this Summer (ME) -- could get gossiped about and undermined by these women. They were tools, put there by an Affirmative Action diversity mandate, and since the place wasn't respectful of women to begin with, what women they did hire were those who would play supportive roles and be enforcers vs. other women who got too uppity. What would you call them? Female Uncle Toms?

But guess who really liked me? The male tech leads who were happy to get a competent, assertive and eager-to-get-hands-on-challenge woman on the team. At first they thought they were going to get stuck with another PTA-mom type low-skill troll, but then, toward the end, they really liked me whereas the people who brought me on who thought I'd play some kind of diversity tool role, hated me.

If it weren't for Affirmative Action, the only women in that place would be the women who loved the work as much as the males and who were technical, outspoken, putting out ideas and defending ideas, and respecting other women who rise up to challenge, too. They wouldn't have brought on all these technically weak women who had to turn into tools or political game playing trolls to survive.

I've also heard/seen this in academic workplaces, where only in certain fields of study is minority thinking and challenges to status quo are welcomed. In STEM and business, for example, a young tenure track professor arguing over discrimination in the department would get the shaft. This is more or less true among all academic/research work environments. Here's an article by one female scientist in the Washington Post today. The assertive ones get shafted and some tool eventually gets hired. If you really want to read up on minority faculty who speak up in STEM and non-liberal arts departments getting fired, read case law in Title IX and Title VII from academic workplaces. When Title VII (antidiscrimination in workplace law) was being debated in Congress, academics were a major group who testified about how difficult it was to have a career due to the many forms of discrimination that can arise in academia.

With Affirmative Action, rather than change the way the workplace runs and making it more equal and fair, standards are lowered and underqualified people, who are easy to control and who turn into tools, can be used to fill spots you don't make available to someone highly competitive and competent who will demand equal treatment and demand changes in the culture. These tools are the weak professionals who are taking the Affirmative Action spots and then failing to advance up to top management and failing to establish strong power networks.

The reason power networks among African Americans and women aren't occurring the way they do for Jewish-networked, Asian and other minorities, is that the professional workplaces are using Affirmative Action to fill jobs with less-competitive game players and tools who won't upset the apple cart, so that the real leadership and talent is diluted.

Affirmative Action has become a way of castrating minority presence in the workplace while giving the appearance of diversity, and that's why women and blacks are stuck out in the cold in STEM, business and non-liberal-arts professorships, whereas other kinds of minorities are able to establish power networks and authority.

The only way to stop the dilution of professional talent in Affirmative Action spots that weakens minority presence among the power brokers of business, academia and STEM, is to start making it a priority that the young people who go into the pipeline are extremely competitive, so that quotas are swamped with competitive talent. Then you will have those professionals forming leadership networks.

Because of the subversive effects of Affirmative Action, education and high performance has to become a priority so that the kids that go into the system can outperform, rather than underperform, when they get in. And those competitive, talented people will become the professionals who force change on the system.

And that takes me to the last component of ongoing black oppression: inadequate public education. Political movements have destroyed public education with teachers' unions and other changes. There's no other way to describe what has happened to public education except that it's been ruined for many minority and disadvantaged students.

Nothing is going to change, when it comes to power, leadership and insider networks until the public education problem is fixed. The thing about police profiling and excessive use of force is nowhere near close to fixing public education, when it comes to priorities of things to do to give blacks power in this country. And the power to fix public education is almost wholly in Democrats' hands as they control the education establishment, teachers unions and academia.

I'm not saying that you should stop arguing with police and decrying white power. But understand that continuing resentment only continues to divide people, and when groups are divided the groups at the bottom get screwed by the impasse more than the groups with power. And so long as you're speaking truth to power, why not also try slipping in some arguing with Democratic leadership about how long should it take them to figure out how to deliver solid K-12 education to minorities and disadvantaged students? The Democrats seem to imply that somehow Republicans are preventing them from fixing climate change. Who's holding Democrats back from fixing public education for minorities and disadvantaged kids in America, since they hold all the reins? Keeping selected groups of kids stupid is the biggest attack on those groups' power that can possibly exist.