cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17967345
My grandfather started going on a anti-trump, anti-fascism rant and I saw him kind of pause to check if I was that trump cultist lol. It was very heartening
My other grandfather was a vocal racist, sexist, homophobe who died of covid because he believed Trump's lies. Rot in pieces
Trump literally killed off hundreds of thousands of bigots with his lies about covid. That was silver lining of his term
Are we counting the people that ignored reality as the group behind?
Yeah, there was certainly a third group who was willfully avoiding involvement.
There still is, but there was one back then too.
MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail is a good take on the white moderate in times of inequality. Order matters more to some than Justice or even the law itself. Their inaction is the apathy that the aggressors can pave over in an attempt to look like a larger group than they are.
I believe they’re represented in the photo by the man in a white shirt in the top right corner who isn’t paying attention to anything. Kind of on the nose, really.
(Which is a somewhat uncharitable interpretation, he could be looking away in disgust or just happen to glance away when the photo was taken)
Apathy is participation when the issue is bigotry.
I don't understand what the image is depicting exactly, there's one black person in the picture and she's sitting there while that guy is about to drip something on the head of the woman next to her?
Is it a picture of white people bullying a group for having a black friend?
This is from the Woolworth's sit-in, where people sat at the segregated lunch counter in protest.
Other people who did not like this verbally and physically abused them.
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-anne-moody-20150211-story.html
Also, the white guy covered in dessert is presumably an ally there to show solidarity and, judging by the size of him, also physically protect them if necessary.
I hope that wasn't their plan or they'd have found out very quickly that size is a great advantage 1 on 1 but a bigger advantage is being 2 on 1.
Fair enough, but telling the minority group they should try to outnumber the majority group is not exactly helpful
Lunch counters were segregated in the US. A fairly common protest was black folk sitting at lunch counters and trying to order lunch. This often causes uproar and unrest, riots. I believe the woman who's about to have water poured on her head is black, it's just that the picture makes her look white, or she's fairly passing.
Thanks for the clarification
They’re having salt dumped on them too, for the grave offense of sitting at a Whites-only lunch counter.
If this mob of hick bullies wasn’t there to torment them, well, black people might eat lunch there. Obviously that would be the end of the world, and all would be lost.
It’s a sit in, protesting laws that said establishments could refuse to serve black people (or serve them horribly,)
This was the form civil disobedience took, where they would go, make a scene, get arrested, and then argue in court that the law was unjust.
Because humans only produce like minded offspring, incapable of forming their own thoughts opinions and values. There has never been political tension between generations over schema shifts that also don't happen. E: big heckin /s in case that wasn't obvious
The point is that CRT is important because white people have often been fed a version of reality that has been heavily edited to make racism seem less impactful than it actually was/is at best.
If Grandma is telling you that people of color were lesser human beings back in the day or "uppity" and all that scholastic history teaches is "Racism was a thing, but then MLK and it all got better!" It devalues the entire lesson.
My grandma still jumps to the disgusting "immigrants bring diseases with them!" and then goes "oh my look at the time, I need to catch Mass."
...what the fuck grandma? Jesus means everything and nothing to you?
Hope you call her out on that.
^ A foolish response
I believe it was Albert Einstein who said: "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
bitch you're not your parents
It's remarkable. When the insult is removed from your argument, it somehow becomes even less intelligent.
Racism is highly heritable. This comports to the research, personal observation, and common sense.
The observation that it's not 100% heritable is obtuse. Height is only 60-80% heritable.
Many of these people are are still alive and voting. No one is saying generational trends can't be broken.
Unfortunately some folks identified with both.
Grandfather was a MoC, he still forbade my mom from dating black men because he thought they were all thugs.
That's not identifying with both that's just adhering to a slightly different cultural norm.
Yeah. Not that unusual for the time.
False dichotomy is false. People are complicated.
If your moral certitude is so easily triggered that this purity test gets a "hell yeah." Then can you please pause to reflect?
My parents were on both sides of this. I am a very long distance from where they were. They taught me one thing, thought another.
Which does that make them?
You can't use "certitude" and "triggered" in the same sentance, it makes you sound like you copy pasted random shit from a script online about how to counter argue anti racism.
Homie, take a deep breath. This is a picture of civil rights protesters being attacked by explicit white supremacists. There's no false dichotomy here. The moderate whites didn't show up to attack civil rights protesters, or kill them, or set up bombs to kill anyone of color in KKK terrorist attacks. They stayed home, and clicked their tongues, possibly wagged a finger. There's no nuance here, you showed up to protest for civil rights, or you showed up to support white supremacy, or you stayed home.
If you think that's ''moral certitude'' (seriously stop using words you don't understand, your embarrassing yourself) you're just a fucking idiot or a white supremacist.
I'm growing increasingly skeptical of "people are complicated" being anything more than a method of shaming people for discussing certain subjects.
We need to discuss groups of people and that inherently involves generalising their beliefs. Nobody is going to track down every single person in that photo and confirm the nuances of their racism just in case they thought it was the line for hot doughnuts, so the conversation people are having here becomes impossible.
Your mother's specific views on black people don't matter to any conversation people are having in academic or social media circles. We're all perfectly aware that individuals have more complex opinions but we're not talking about individuals.
But even more bizarrely, why do you think your mother's views are some kind of "gotcha"? She was racist when it came to you dating a black person, which she inherently attempted to hand down to you. For the purposes of this conversation, we absolutely know what group she belongs to. She's doesn't get a free pass just because she didn't have the whole set.
I am sorry, what’s your point? Can you elaborate?
I was encouraged to read biographies of important black figures in US history. About Abraham Lincoln. Various different things that very naturally led me to see blacks as peers.
Then i dated a black woman. Same person who was happy and strongly encouraged the books had strong negative reaction to dating.
Which is the parent. The post says to pick **one. **
It is not a nuanced or adult take on people. It is a reactionary purity test of an adolescent mind (regardless of OP's age).
The same parent was both. OP does not allow that. But my mom was not purely one. Years of encouragement of specific reading wasn't an accident.
Dichotomies. Brightnlines of either or... Are very often false choices that deceive the credulous or unskeptical.
And the fallacy your employing in the false equivalence. Just because your parents had the benevolence to allow different colored people into their public places and history lessons doesn't mean they see them as equals.
The definition of racism is the belief that one race is inherently better than another. Good enough to share spaces and history books but not to mix blood doesn't scream "we are all humans and equals".
So it's not a far leap to assume that your parent only accepts other races as far as their society of context has gone.
So it's not a huge leap to assume which side of the photo they would've been on if their society of context was the one from the photo.
Obviously your parent would've been sitting at the table in defiance of that society's cultural norms, defending their personal beliefs
...right?
This is the "great america" they are always referencing.
Some things were great. Some things were not.
Some things were great for a very specific group of people. Most things sucked for everyone else.
Less severe climate change, cleaner environment, no billionaires
I think those are pretty universal
Have you all ever seen the Monsoon Motor Lodge acid attack?
Facebook says this image is fine by them when Nazis post it, of course.
I regularly think about how many of our sweet loving grandmothers were the ones we see in the pictures hurling slurs at the tops of their lungs. How many grandfathers strung up the rope for the lynch mob.
These things all "ended" less than a century ago.
I'd like to know more about this Hot Donut Department
Well my grandparents wouldn't have been allowed in that shop, given there was an embargo in the us against people like my grandparents until 1943, though its not at all why my grandfather hated America and Americans for most of his life.
Your point is well taken about not being allowed in the country, but I have a feeling that this may have been later than 1943 based on the non violent reactions of the racists and that this looks like a sit in. Sit-ins were a key part of the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s but I don't know how prevelant they were before that.
Could be wrong. If someone knows for sure lmk
My mother used to refer to Indian owned motels as "Paki palace", used to tell me not to run away with a black man like the neighbour who was in a biracial relationship did, and I distinctly remember a family friend yelling "run you N word run" when an African guy was running an Olympic race on TV.
So that was all really fun.
HOT DONUT DEPARTMENT
For a second I thought they had their own police outpost.
Were any of these kids found and interviewed later on in life?
The kids getting abused, yeah.
https://www.crmvet.org/nars/greensit.htm
The kids doing the abusing - strangely, no. No one’s interviewed them so far as a quick search could tell.
Interestingly, the waitress not pictured here was interviewed for StoryCorps. https://storycorps.org/stories/woolworths-lunch-counter-waitress/
That was in Jackson, MS, as opposed to the Greensboro one.
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