This question is directed toward white parents because the rest of us have grown up with parents that started dropping hints as soon as we were old enough to talk. https://t.co/KTHj5yPLSv
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) November 4, 2021
Your children already know about racism. They need you to teach them that it’s wrong. https://t.co/83QT1Ao8xV
— Danger Bear (@RhinoReally) November 4, 2021
Mr. Charles P. Pierce, in his weekly newsletter:
… There is no more poisonous phenomenon in our politics than the continuing salience of the concept of “moving on.” Politicians love it because it’s an effective magic spell to keep them from confronting the serious problems and deadly events in our recent history—and their complicity in them. Our fellow citizens love it largely for the same reasons, but also because the truth often scares the horses.
Our greatest experiment in Moving On, of course, took place in 1876, when in the interest of settling a disputed presidential election, the country threw the rights of newly freed Black citizens to the four winds, and those citizens themselves to the wolves, for almost another century. Thus did we finally move on from the Civil War. And, of course, when the Civil Rights Movement at last regained some of the ground it had lost when the country abandoned the promises of Reconstruction, we were told that we should move on from the savagery of what was done to Black citizens in the interim. Which is why the “1619 Project” has caused so much agita within the comfortable political universe. To refuse to move on is to deny the fundamental myth that America is always moving forward. It is to cast doubt on Dr. King’s theory about the arc of the moral universe and its inexorable bend toward justice, which has been of so much comfort to complacent people dedicated to making sure that the arc of the moral universe never quite gets there…
When I was 7 some kids called me chinaman and I said I’m Korean not Chinese so they beat me up instead so perhaps start before first grade. https://t.co/Q3eXte2nys
— Paul Bae (@MrPaulBae) November 4, 2021
Professional reporter:
honestly one of the dumbest questions I have seen on this incredibly dumb website https://t.co/eO8xuxGfg4
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) November 5, 2021
“Take that, you … heat bat donkey!” Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine on being a biracial American in music. https://t.co/t9UPjRcfGX
— Carlos Tejada (@CRTejada) November 5, 2021
… The issue of race was omnipresent throughout my youth. My grounding in activism began not from reading Chomsky or Zinn but from mixing it up on the playground at age 5. In day care there was this much older kid who every day would attack me and call me all the names you might imagine one might call the only Black kid in town. So I’d go home looking sad, and one day, my mom asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Well, there’s this kid at day care N-wording me. Hits me a lot.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ll tell you what we are going to do. There’s this guy named Malcolm X, and he says whenever racism rears its head, you are the one who has to stop it.”
She took my little brown hand and curled it into a little brown fist and kind of swung it through the air like a punch. And repeated, “This is what you are going to do tomorrow.”
She then made me memorize some salty epithet as my battle cry. I didn’t know what any of the words meant. It was something like “deadbeat honkie.”
So the next day I went into day care and this huge kid is on me and is triple N-wording me and attacking me. But that day, for the first time, I started to fight back to the best of my ability, shouting, “Take that, you … heat bat donkey!”
I got pummeled. But it caused a big scrum in the day care and resulted in me standing by the side of the sink with smug satisfaction, watching the racist bully get his mouth washed out with soap…
Enhanced Voting Techniques
My 2c, the fact that Those People are howling about racism being brought up means the push back is working. I was just reading a twitter thread full of conservatives whining about how the Woke Left controls our entire society. Me thinks by the time this is done some form of a CRT is going to be taught at K-12.
NotMax
1950s (and into to 60s): During Easter week, nuns at the Catholic school which many students had to pass by on the way to the public school a couple of blocks further on would hand out gravel from little buckets for the Catholic kids to throw through the bars of the cast iron fence at any Jewish (or perceived Jewish) kids walking on the sidewalks.
HumboldtBlue
@NotMax:
Ahh yes, the stoning of the Jew. That came after the Psalmody and before vespers, I believe. Children who actually struck a Jew (or someone who might be a Jew or any person, really, who didn’t attend the church, but mostly Jews) would get the prize of polishing the chalice or starching the cassock or whatever it was called back then.
Leto
Heat Bat Donkey is my RAtM cover band name.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: what the fuck?
HumboldtBlue
@Leto:
I have someone close who is now stationed at RAF Mildenhall, what can I pass along about the region, what to see, to do, that sort of thing. Any insight would be welcome.
frosty
OT, sorry ’bout that, Chief.
AL: Did you pick this one up for the morning COVID roundup?
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1458642650823860233?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1458642650823860233%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.balloon-juice.com%2F2021%2F11%2F10%2Fits-hard-out-there%2F
I still don’t know how you’ve been doing this for almost two years. It’s my first stop of the day and I’m pleased that I don’t just go back to bed and crawl under the covers after reading it.
House Moderna booster tomorrow!
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
“Look, Sister Attila, I hit both twins!”
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major: My first girlfriend (born around 1960) told me about how when she was in elementary/middle school in New York, in Catholic school, the nurses would whack her (left) wrist with a ruler, if she tried to write with it. She was born left-handed, but as a result, was ambidextrous by the time we met.
I know there were other crazy things she told me, but I’ve forgotten the details.
eclare
@frosty: Yay! Got mine a week ago Sat. I did not have the sleepiness I had after shot #2, which was kind of a disappointment, but my arm was more sore.
The soreness went away after two days.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Oops, not “nurses”, but “nuns”.
Redshift
Desegregation hit when I was in fourth grade, and suddenly there were Black kids in my school. It would have been good to have learned something about race before that.
Northern Virginia was more Southern back then. There were inevitable clashes, and I remember some fights where there were kids who would chant “fight, fight, a n—–and a white!”, so some kids were clearly already learning about race by that age, just not, y’know, in a good way.
HumboldtBlue
@Redshift:
“fight, fight, a n—–and a white!”
“And if the white don’t win, we all join in!”
The 1970s were a helluva time.
e julius drivingstorm
I propose reparations in the form of paying 5 dollars per day, daily, every day to each African-American citizen alive today for the rest of their life and ten years beyond their death. What’s that = eighty-ninety billion per year!? Also pay the same to each African-American citizen born within the next 25 years. We’ll have infinite opportunities to explain why to the enraged white supremacists. Means test it? Sure. Adjust for cost of living? yep. Can’t afford it? make it 4 bucks, or 3. But pay them something every day. We owe them.
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
Everywhere.
Patricia Kayden
Patricia Kayden
Scamp Dog
@Redshift: I heard that in my Lutheran school in Michigan, so 1969-74 timeframe.
@HumboldtBlue: Fortunately, that one wasn’t in use. Thankful for small favors, I suppose.
Cermet
People simply have no idea at all – essentially zero – of the black experience after the 1860’s to today. That Southern and mid-western States reinstitutioned slavery via State run prisons that ‘sold’ prisoners’ to companies as forced (read torture as needed) labor (that makes todays prison’s look like four star vacation retreats.) This went on till the 1940’s and even 50’s. The local police and judges made a business of arresting massive numbers of Black teens/young men as fodder for this hideous system. This system, of course, utterly devastated Black family’s and prevented generational wealth to be created by developing a prison gulag for Black Amerikans. Of course we don’t teach this or how we created ghetto’s in major cities and regions of rural amerika nor the endless injustices Blacks have faced till just recently. That is the real Amerika of the Free (a phrase really for white men, mostly) that we are never taught.
raven
We had a couple of African-American kids in my high school of 3000 students. I didn’t really know much about York Center until years later when I reconnected with one of my schoolmates on, gasp, the evil Facebook.
My real introduction to the reality of race in America came in basic training, starting 55 years ago yesterday, at Ft Campbell and the subsequent three years in the Army.
NotMax
@raven
Any renovation news (or surprises)? Keeping the dual front doors?
Baud
@raven:
Happy 55th.
Frankensteinbeck
My father told me that no boomer (his generation) ever got over desegregation. They just were just bent by it in different directions.
raven
@NotMax: Yea, we’ll keep the double front doors. The only exterior work will be touching up the paint where the spray insulation leaked through to the outside. The short version is that we a SO fortunate to have a friend and his co-worker who are incredibly gifted, well connected to all the subs and hard working doing this project. We went up to the mountains to a sawmill he knew about and got two 8 ftx2 in slabs of white old for a counter top.
The kitchen cabinets come today so I’m fixing jambalaya for the guys because the delivery window is during lunch.They are completing the trim and next week the painters come in followed by the flooring and final plumbing hookups. In addition, we went with a local mortgage company and were able to pull enough money out to cover the entire project so we are feeling really good. It’s going to be a small but really nice little house for someone and we have a bunch of potential renters as our neighborhood is very sought after.
raven
@Baud: I was 72 yesterday.
Baud
@raven:
Belated happy birthday!!!
satby
@raven: belated Happy Birthday
Tony Jay
@raven:
Happy Post-Birthday Day!
satby
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m a Boomer, and I agree with your dad.
OT, I was retrieving my new favorite recipe for flan, and noticed that the previous entry in that blog was for nopales, and now I need to hit the Mexican grocery store later today. I love nopales.
NotMax
@raven
Have a happy!
Steeplejack (phone)
@raven:
???
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: My first-grade teacher was black, in a school that was nearly all-white at the time (western Fairfax County, about 1975). I learned pretty quickly that there were a lot of kids who hated her despite the fact that she was obviously one of the best and nicest teachers in the school.
And then, a couple of years later, I remember having this conversation with a Mormon kid on my school bus in which I realized that it wasn’t just personal animus but a whole organized belief system. Going on and on about how you only saw black people at “mob scenes”, they were nothing but trouble, etc. That was like one year before the church abruptly dropped their official anti-black racism.
Central Planning
@HumboldtBlue:
Today it’s called sexual abuse.
Steeplejack (phone)
Test . . .
Dorothy A. Winsor
“Moving on” reminds be of the “bygones” episode on (I think) Seifeld. You just say “bygones” and all is forgiven.
topclimber
@raven:
Keep on truckin’ Forty-Niner. Also, Happy Armistice Day.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, and the head of the LDS had vision in the 80s that God had dropped the whole Mark of Cain thing and was cool with black and the now the Mormons are retconing their stuff that they were always for the black man. So pressure works.
raven
@topclimber: Bingo!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That wasn’t just “Let’s Move On”, segregation was adopted as some wonderful idea and there was as a lot of crank science that supported racism.
Jerzy Russian
@raven:
There was that scene from Full Metal Jacket where the drill sergeant discussed how he does not discriminate against {insert various racial epithets here} and that all of the recruits were “equally worthless”. I have been told by people around my age (50s and 60s) who went through basic training that that movie had a pretty realistic depiction of it.
AxelFoley
@HumboldtBlue:
Heh, I was real young in the 70s (born in 1973), but the version of this I remember was:
“Fight, fight, a ni-CLANG and a white
The white can’t fight, but the ni-CLANG’s outta sight!”
J R in WV
@raven:
So, you’re a year and 7 weeks older than I…
I have a new chronic condition for which I have been prescribed compression stockings. They do help quite a bit, but are a real pain to put on and take off. couldn’t do it without Wife’s help!
Great hearing about your remodel, so glad you have such expert folks doing the work!
arrieve
I’m just remembering my dad taking me aside for a talk when I was quite young — he left when I was five, so I must have been not much younger than that — and telling me about the n-word. He said it was a very bad word, and I should never use it. I don’t know what prompted this; I had never said the word and didn’t remember ever hearing it. Maybe someone had said it in front of me and I hadn’t noticed.
My father was raised in Louisiana and Texas and was as right-wing as it is possible to get, but he was also a career Marine who fought in both Korea and Vietnam, and whatever his sins — and they were many — I don’t remember him ever saying anything racist, at least not in front of me. So even assholes can teach their children not to be racists.
Karen S.
My parents moved our family to a predominantly white Chicago suburb in December of 1966 for its convenient location to my dad’s job at the time and because its school district was one of the few in Illinois back then that offered special education before such education was federally mandated. My older brother has special needs. We were the second Black family to move to this suburb. I was nearly 3 when we moved in, so I only have a couple of hazy memories from then, but when I was older, my mother told me that she made and hung curtains in the windows as soon as she could because the white people who lived nearby would come to our house, come right up to the windows and watch us, as though we were on display. Later, when I started junior high, my mother told me that my white friends would “turn white,” as she put it, and I would need to be prepared for that. What she meant was that they would distance themselves from me or treat me differently once they understood and embraced racial, power dynamics. A few of them did “turn white.”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Except this isn’t what the Conservatards are crying about; they are accusing all kinds of institutions of being “Woke” and “CRT”, the MSM, Universities, Banks, Corporate America and so on. In other words, corporate America discovered during the 90s that black folks money is as green as any white guys, society has Moved On passed from these racists, the Lost Causers and other consciously racists types, and they being slowly squeezed out of society.
BellyCat
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: My 5 year old, who just started kindergarten, is totally into the VERY SERIOUS commitment by his school to CRT in all behavioral matters. Why? His daycare for the past three years had a VERY SERIOUS commitment to CRT. :-)
Chris Johnson
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: And so it absolutely should: the reason they’re so freaked out about CRT is that it works, and the reason they know that is because they themselves have always done things along those lines.
My understanding is that it’s about all the messages we send as a society. When you put up Confederate statues long after the war is lost you’re sending messages outside the letter of the law, on purpose.
Law follows society, inevitably. Critical theory is necessary, in race and otherwise. I admit that Adorno can be kind of full of himself and the trouble with wokeness is that it’s about being aspirational, not compelling people to be woke every second and constantly aware of the power structures of everything: that gets exhausting and isn’t practical.
Critical theory is something to fall back on when you take stock and reassess. It’s a good guideline for society and for law: if you’re off base, re-examining yourself in a critical theory lens is appropriate.
Re-examining yourself in a lens of Confederate generals getting statues to celebrate their cause is NOT appropriate, and is 100% the purpose of that exercise and why it’s worth dismantling that shit.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Chris Johnson: The issue with the Confederate Generals isn’t they are remembered as successful military leaders. It’s they are venerated as secular saints and paragons of American virtue. Up till now anytime their flaws were brought up by historians they were shouted down. I know Shelbe Foot is bad word here but he had stories about the kind of drama he would get for daring to bring up Lee was human. It wasn’t tell the 80s anyone was willing to mention that Lee gave Haige and Cadorna a run for the money on getting his troops killed on fuitle, doom to fail, front assaults against prepared positions.
The Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@raven: Happy Belated!
leeleeFL
@Jerzy Russian: Ermey was a drill sgt I believe, so he was just being himself. Awful person as I recall
leeleeFL
@arrieve: He did the best thing he was capable of, apparently. It helped make you who you are. Something to be glad for.