It's weird how it seemed to work here, k.
Ever since I can remember, here in the US the educational establishment,
which was better aware of the rough time slaves and freed slaves had
almost everywhere in the US up until the 50s, and certainly officially
ending during LBJ's administration and policies, these educators were
advocates for black people. So starting in grade school in the 1950s, in
rural California, I can distinctly recall some of my teachers openly
expressing sympathy for black folks, and generosity towards them.
And of course at that time teachers were held in high esteem, not like
now, and we, the kids, adopted this underlying sympathy and the parents
basically thought "Well, the teachers are educated, so what they say
must be right."
But when you think about it, the whole attitude was patronizing as hell.
Essentially, it came at the problem from the POV of generous,
enlightened and sympathetic white people helping to pull the benighted
black people--who were decent and honest to a man, and uniformly
wronged--out of darkness, and who could never improve themselves except
by white help.
This whole line of thought gradually slid upwards into the college level
(prior to that there were HUGE debates within many colleges whether it
was appropriate for profs to express *any* such opinions beyond the
scope of their specialty), and so people my age, during the Vietnam
War,and therefore were disproportionately democrats (as were most blacks
already), heard profs who were anti-war link anti-war sentiments to
groups like the Black Panthers, NAACP, CORE, etc. And anyone who has in
RST knows that the enemy of your enemy is your best friend. So all
blacks, with whom we were already sympathetic, became our allies against
The Man, who wanted to ship us to Vietnam.
Later (80s-890s) there were a lot of college-level history classes
exploring black history in which whites of all kinds were shown in the
role of exploiters of blacks. This was largely true up to a point, but
the corner had been turned years before: those negative white behaviors
were in the small minority by about 1970--and what's more were
illegal--and so the portrayal of the White Devil Slave Master was far
out of date.
But humans being they way they are, the blacks felt personally shamed by
what their ancestors in the US went thru, were unable to resist the
tendency to blame/hate contemporary whites simply because they are are
white, and whites in the past had indeed been cruel and insensitive to
blacks.
So at the time that most whites were sucking up, or were at least
sympathetic to most blacks, many educated blacks began to profess open
hatred and criticism of all whites. These same whites, feeling that they
did not want to go back on their publicly stated sympathy towards
blacks, basically let them get away with it, emboldening them to be even
more critical and hateful toward whites, whom they now also disrespected
as pussies.
This was then supercharged by Martin in 2012, Micheal Brown in 2014, and
Floyd in 2020. Having the then-pres, Obama, weighing in on the first two
incidents gave a sort of official blessing to demand more and more of
whites, and this split off those whites with insufficient self-worth to
join them in condemning themselves. They are the guilt-ridden ones you
often see/hear.
--
--Sawfish
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"If there's one thing I can't stand, it's intolerance."
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