I’m going to offer for your consideration what Winston Churchill would have called a naughty question. Here’s my naughty question: Is Jim Snow worse than Jim Crow?

I need to define terms here. For 245 years this country of ours has lived more or less uncomfortably with the fact that a big minority of its population is black while the rest, the majority, isn’t. The size of the minority has dwindled some since Independence, when we were 16 percent black; today it’s 13 percent.

You can break that 245 years into three segments, marked off by two significant events: the end of the Civil War in 1865, and then the Civil Rights revolution, for which the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a convenient marker. That gives you 89 years of slavery, 99 years of Jim Crow, and 57 years of Jim Snow.

Those latter two segments are what I’m comparing: Jim Crow, when blacks were under legal disabilities in some states and social disabilities most everywhere, and Jim Snow, when blacks enjoy preferences and favoritism, “racism” is a sin of well-nigh religious gravity, and a white person who expresses negativity towards blacks is excluded from polite society and social media.

When asking “Is Jim Snow worse than Jim Crow?” I also need to define “worse.” Worse how? Worse for whom? I’ll answer both together with just: worse for our country. Is the U.S.A. more stable, more harmonious, more fair, safer, happier under Jim Snow than it was under Jim Crow?

Even with those definitions spelled out, I still don’t really have a question you can get to grips with. Those 99 years of Jim Crow covered a lot of social change. Jim Crow 1890, Jim Crow 1920, and Jim Crow 1950 were very different Americas. Take lynchings, for instance. The numbers for those three years were 96, 61—and two [Lynching Statistics by Year And Race, UMKC School of Law ].

It was the Jim Crow of the 1950s that the Civil Rights activists wanted to reform, though: a country pretty much like today’s, with widespread prosperity, a welfare state, modern media and communications, and so on; an all well within living memory.

So here’s my naughty question more precisely phrased: With the race issue in mind, is the Jim Snow America of 2021 more stable, more harmonious, more fair, safer, happier than the Jim Crow America of 1950?

I’m looking for a balance sheet of pros and cons. There is, for example, racial unfairness in both countries. Under 1950 Jim Crow a less capable white person might get hired over a more capable black because the boss didn’t want blacks around. Under 2021 Jim Snow a less capable black person might get hired over a more capable white because the company fears discrimination lawsuits if they don’t hire enough blacks.

Those are different unfairnesses, but they’re both unfair to the guy who didn’t get hired.