I remember when I was young, it was not uncommon for some people to say things that were racist, even out loud in public. The civil rights movement managed to make it unacceptable for people to be explicitly racist, but it didn’t get rid of racism itself. Those people just found more socially acceptable ways to be racist.
There are plenty of examples of this, including Nixon with his “Southern Strategy“, the “War on Drugs”, which targets drugs popular with Blacks. Heck, I’m strongly in favor of pushing power down from the federal level to the state level, but I can’t even use the phrase “states’ rights” because it has become a loaded term synonymous with opposing civil rights.
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I’d broaden the term “states’ rights” to include most anything that a right of right Publican thinks the Federal gubmint shouldn’t do. I’ve seen it applied to education, health care, transportation, gun control, voter registration – you name it. Now that I think about it, most issues can still be included in the concept of civil rights. Hmmmmm. Maybe I was being to limited in defining civil rights, IK. I’ll try and do better next time.