Rolling 2014 Thread on Race

i had zero exposure to the civil rights movement in school until the college level, but do have memories of my fifth grade teacher screening the entirety of "Gone With The Wind" in our history class and carefully informing us that the Civil War was not about slaves and that the Confederates didn't really lose. So yeah, that was the eighties in the rural south.

I remember learning about civil war/reconstruction/Jim Crow/civil rights from an early age but I'm not sure how much of that was down to exposure from my parents/books and what was from school

yeah me too
my parents probably talked about it a lot
i don't think i knew about "strange fruit" til college though

there were lots of civil right themed movies in my youth, but I can't remember learning about that stuff in school

I distinctly remember in elementary school being into this series of book bios that were all called "Meet [insert famous personage]", which were all about presidents except for the one that was about MLK.

In second grade, we had a unit on the Civil Rights movement that lasted several months. Learned more about it that year than in all the other years prior to high school combined.

damn forks, that is fucked
ftr didn't know about the song "Strange Fruit" until relatively recently either

High school was a long time ago, and I remember my history classes teaching the Reconstruction period in a general way, but my classes rarely made it past WWII

ditto

yeah that's about it for me. i learned most of what i know from reading baldwin in college.

though i do remember a teacher laying out the specific meanings and differences among the various key words: racism, bigotry, chauvinism, bias, prejudice, sexism, segregation, etc. homophobia wasn't on the list tho.

i remember watching a birth of a nation and talking about lynchings in middle school or high school. the real oversight imo was with '60s and '70s civil rights stuff, which i do not remember discussing in any class in any capacity

yeah our history classes didn't get to the 60s

I read Black Boy and Invisible Man and a bunch of other related stuff in hs English class. Autobio of Malcolm X, some other things I'm probably forgetting.

I honestly can't remember learning much about civil rights in K-12. I mean, I'm sure it was addressed at some point but by no means extensively. Most of my early education in that regard was in seeing the contrast between the fairly well-mixed schools I attended through junior high followed by my two practically all-white (like <1% PoC), rural high schools. Eye opening.

this is enlightening to me; I was in public school in the '90s-'00s and we talked about the civil rights era a ton. my high school textbooks even went through the Clinton presidency! we rushed through everything after the Vietnam War though. (and our science textbooks were published in the '80s iirc)

in the 80s no one wanted to talk about the 60s ime, it was morning in America etc.

morning in america was pretty dark

Ha, my eighth grade teacher went on a tirade about Ronald Reagan and how terrible things were going to be with him as President.

Went to school with steelworkers kids, it was a very liberal school, we learned civil rights history, labor history, social reform movements. Of course this was in Illinois, where we spent plenty of time on the evils of slavery.

Knew the song in high school from listening to it, but it wasn't really part of classroom civil rights discussion. Then at college, found out that the song's writer was also worthy of interest when his adopted granddaughter decided to talk about him (and her real grandparents) in a writing seminar.

I'd never heard the song or or the phrase until some time in the last year maybe? I'm kind of clueless though--but nonetheless it's probably not that surprising for someone not to know. It IS surprising that they didn't do any background on their own company name though?

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Monday, December 8, 2014 2:48 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OMG, look at what Alex Jones has been saying:

Alex Jones' wild new Ferguson theory - http://www.salon.com/2014/12/07/alex_jones_wild_new_ferguson_theory_partner/
http://www.salon.com/2014/12/07/alex_jones_wild_new_ferguson_theory_partner/

He says Obama is trying to start a race war.

At least maybe now some of his liberal followers will stop posting links to him and get wise about conspiracy theory and its ugly history in the US.

in high school I learned that Andrew Johnson was a blinkered and dim but pitiable figure, "Radical Republicans" went "too far" with Reconstruction, and Woodrow Wilson was a god.

Oh my. May I ask where this was? I went to grammar school in Illinois in the 1970's, where social studies could have been re-named: "Why the south is and was bad, bad, bad."

Anyway, article on white power and Klan music on Spotify, Amazon and iTunes:

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2014/12/04/as-apple-moves-to-remove-hate-music-from-itunes-other-retailers-remain/

I find it amazing that there was actually a band who called themselves The Klansmen and that they actually titled an album Fetch the Rope. That feels like a deleted scene from Spinal Tap or something equally ridiculous.

also they are brostep and wear cardigans

i find it pretty difficult to believe that anyone in this country literally gets no civil rights education in school. MLK just wasn't mentioned at all?

I went to grammar school in Illinois in the 1970's, where social studies could have been re-named: "Why the south is and was bad, bad, bad."

Given Illinois (and neighboring Indiana's) wondrous history of virulent racism this seems just a touch self-righteous

I remember my Participation in Government teacher telling us that MLK cheated on his wife and was a communist.

wow

i find it pretty difficult to believe that anyone in this country literally gets no civil rights education in school.

Your faith in American public education is touching.

I remember my Participation in Government teacher telling us that MLK cheated on his wife and was a communist.

He judged women not on the color of their skin but the content of their brassieres <spits tobacco>

All states have a history of virulent racism, some more than others, I'm afraid. It may be funny but considering steelworkers kids are being taught, and they hear the "n" word at the municipal parks, over correcting isn't so self-righteous. It may help them deal with the neighborhood bullies better. Better to spend most of the year on slavery and Jim Crow than stuff like "Martin Luther King was a communist."

Also not all of the kids at my school were white.

I went to grammar school in Illinois in the 1970's, where social studies could have been re-named: "Why the south is and was bad, bad, bad."

Given Illinois (and neighboring Indiana's) wondrous history of virulent racism this seems just a touch self-righteous

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, December 9, 2014 11:41 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is probably one of the stupidest comments ive ever seen. "Yeah, we have racism in our past. Hate to be hypocritical or 'self righteous'". So let's be honest with our kids and tell them that we really loved what the Confederacy stood for and wish that Jim Crow laws had been enforced in our states."

Okay, I don't want to have a fight, but did anyone have "the war of Northern aggression" in school? Just wondering.

In general, it's an interesting question. When I got to high school (Catholic), they didn't deal with the Civil Rights movement so much and I learned that my grammar school was exceptional in it's left-wing indoctrination.

Teachers could be cowardly in the old days, it's a shame, a lot of kids were robbed because the curriculum has been policed so much.

lol "past"

it's a shame, a lot of kids were robbed because the curriculum has been policed so much.

My biology teacher told us, "They're making me teach you about evolution but I don't believe in it." Sometimes policing the curriculum is justified.

Someone may tell you evolution is off-topic for this thread, but the more I read about the roots of theocratic propaganda, the less sure I am.

If you go back far enough, it's often the same people, the same funding sources and groups - anti-communism, creationism, abortion, opposition to civil rights legislation...

For non-US ilxors

http://qz.com/304296/rich-countries-and-the-minorities-they-discriminate-against-mapped/

http://i.imgur.com/TxuwTmL.png

I'm just going to go ahead and assume there wasn't room for Denmark, as it would have filled the whole image.

The Finnish map should've also included the Roma and Somalis.

Austrian list is also amusingly short.

surprised that usa didnt include middle eastern as well

Don't think it's meant to be all inclusive

yeah, the map def isnt, but im a little surprised that group wasn't included in the study

Yeah - afaict the OECD just compiled the result of smaller studies - for sure definitely surprising that nobody's done a study on Middle Eastern discrimination in the US yet

Also found the part about level of skill interesting

For example, the Swedish data focuses on young workers, and on a variety of medium- to low-skilled jobs. The Swiss data is for medium and low-skilled, foreign-born Albanian men in the German speaking part of the country. The Irish data focuses on medium-skilled jobs, like administration, accounting, and sales.

Discrimination rates generally tend to be higher in less-skilled professions. The experiments are designed and data collected in different ways. (There’s a full list of the studies the data came from in the OECD report that compiled them.)
That’s all to say that you shouldn’t generalize these results to a whole country or labor market, though some in-country comparison is reasonable.

But the ratios, which repeatedly approach 2, indicate discrimination. Having to get through a stack of applications doesn’t always encourage people to review their unconscious biases—they have to be reminded.

Here is an article about "Black Pete" by an American, it was a good read:

http://www.vqronline.org/who-zwarte-piet

Thanks for that! I read nearly everything on the subject but hadn't seen this yet. Apart from some small errors it is a great piece. Especially in describing the attitude a lot of Dutch people have: "Black Pete is racist?! It can't be, because we aren't racist!" You wouldn't believe how much ground that fallacy still has. Maddening.

http://www.newsweek.com/shopping-dining-using-credit-card-while-black-290570

^^
The bit about car doors being locked is OTM

my mom does the car door thing and after over two decades of reprimanding her and getting into arguments about it, I have finally given up there. it's maddening and predominantly classist on her part but I have to hope it's really #old more than anything else.

It's a complicated thing because everyone SHOULD lock their cars, but...

do I need to read these leaked Hollywood executive emails w/ Obama "jokes"?