From the article:
Servers who either held prejudices toward African Americans, worked in a restaurant where racist remarks were frequently heard or both were significantly more likely to predict that the table with Black customers would not only tip them less but also display uncivil, demanding and dishonest behaviors. As a result, these servers also reported that they would give worse service to the Black table relative to the white one.
But, systemic racism isnāt a thing /s.
(this is the tiny icicle of the iceberg)
āUgh, I bet that black group is going to give me a shitty tip. Iām going to pay more attention to my other [white] customers.ā
[Fails to provide service worthy of a tip; gets a well-deserved low tip.]
āSee! What is up anyway with those cheapskate black people??ā
at least that one positive thing came out of that show.
i was deeply annoyed that racism was shown as something orchestrated by a small secret cabal of privileged white folks - rather than endemic and systemic.
not to mention that the cops in the show were somehow against the violence of the white supremacists rather than born from it, and that when the copās powers to commit violence was restrained trouble always followed.
ugh. hbo. 
Except, I think they were showing an alternate history where the US actually faced racism after civil rights to a greater degree, and then elected a president who pushed for reparations as part of his platform, and actually got them through. So, it seems like they were not trying to deny systemic racism (which is pretty well illustrated in the parts of the show that dealt with the life of Will Reeves during his time as Hooded Justice, but rather show an alternate timeline where the state does try to address systemic racism and to show the blowback that could causeā¦ much like the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s did shift public consciousness somewhat, to where being openly racist was less acceptable.
I thought the endemic and systemic racism was conveyed better with the memories of Hooded Justice in the sixth episode. Still, your points about the cabal and the actions of the cops were what gave me mixed feelings about the whole show, too.
Do you think that the fact it was an alternate history from Vietnam on makes any difference there?
The roots of the police go back so much further than that, though. Iāll have to rewatch, I think.
not addressed to me i know, but in reference to your other comment it fitsā¦
to me, the show didnāt read as an alternate timeline except where vietnam was shown. to me it read as a slightly future setting, continuing from our own. no more significant in itās changed history than something like a marvel movie. just some fictional world with superish powers.
totally. maybe because that was more of a side note? it had some plot ramifications but there wasnāt much resolution of those forces, except to maybe say āyeah, those were considerations of the past.ā
i guess whatever they were trying to convey about america having a different civil rights history just didnāt come through to me because they were mostly caught up in the dystopia of it all.
if anything id almost argue that it seemed to be saying - look how bad things would be if we were talking about things like reparations. ( same way as it presented, in the opening scenes, that restraining the ability of police to shoot first gets them killed. )
it didnāt seem to show any improvement in peopleās lives. cause no oneās life seemed that great in the show
But it is. It draws directly from the original source material of the comic, which was an alternate timelineā¦ For instance, Vietnam is the 51st state and that happened under an extended Nixon administration. So from the 70s on, itās a very different world.
True, in the north where Reeves ends up, itās dominated by post-famine Irish and Italians, which makes the connection with a KKK type organization a bit odd, given how much the KKK disliked Catholics.
But I was more addressing how he Watchmen universe has a different trajectory from Nixon on, as Nixon was president much longer and then Robert Redford has an extended Presidency and basically managed to get through a reparations plan. So itās more like there was actual work done in the wake of the civil rights to address systemic racism, unlike in our world, where the rot was just left to fester after the mid-60s legislation. I think the goal was to show what actually addressing racism at a systemic level could have looked like to some degree. And of course in Tulsa, they addressed the 1921 race riot directly, and had direct reparations to descendants of the massacreā¦ with videos of Henry Louis Gates Jr., who was secretary of the treasury.
I think they were trying to say that even if you had reparations, there would still be elements in society pushing against that, that racism is so interwove into our fabric, that any progress is going to get pushback, but that doesnāt make the progress pointless.
i appreciate the extra info and the different point of view. it didnāt come across that way to me, hopefully more people got what you did out of it than what i did.
i was floored to learn that the tulsa intro part is felt to be historically accurate. at the time, i was like surely this is a hollywood version of what happened. but apparently, no. it was not an exaggerated depiction of what happened that day. 
I first learned about the bombing of Black Wall Street as a senior in high school, in my home stateās ground-breaking first African American History class; thereās a lot of our history that has been erased or glossed over.
Thatās for sure! And other things get repeated over and over. I learned about Columbus ādiscoveringā America for 12 years in a row (1st grade through 12th), but didnāt learn about Black Wall Street until I was an adult.
in the part of texas i grew up in there had been a plantation the chief cash crop of which was slaves. when the civil war ended several escaped slaves from the area who had served in the union army came back to help organize and protect the freed slaves in the area. a kind of hostile pece developed between the whites and blacks in the county such that, so long as the freedmen didnāt get āuppityā they were left alone in their part of the county. 100 years later my school district integrated by incorporating the black school from that community plus a black school district that had grown up in the āflatā of the town. this resulted in my school district having roughly equal numbers of blacks and whites in each class plus a sprinkling of hispanics. it gave me a very different school experience from many of my generation in other small towns nearby who were isolated from people of color.
my mother, who acts as the historian and genealogist of my family, in the early 1950s had interviewed numerous elderly, both black and white, some of whom had memories that stretched back to the 1870s, and knew more about the origins of the large black population in the area than almost anyone else. she had copies of the local weekly newspapers from the teens and 20s which told of lynchings in lurid detail. issues which the newspaper itself did not have because they were all destroyed so no one would know how the city fathers had glorified in murder.
My sister and I both read Howard Zinn as required reading in high school. She got to it first, so by the time I read it, I already knew that stuff. Iām surprised at the people who didnāt have that experience, and just hope they can read Zinn without too much cognitive dissonance.
If kids are in a shit school district, their parents could give them this wonderful illustrated version:
Read that in a college course. Truly blew my mind.* Youāre lucky you got to it in Highschool!
*then passed it on to a parent while home on a break. When I checked later she said sheād stopped reading it pretty early on, she couldnāt handle it. I was pretty disappointed that sheād rather keep the blinders on, but that mindset seems unfortunately common.
NYPD spokesperson Detective Denise Moroney said in a statement that no arrests have been made in the ongoing investigation and that the Hate Crimes Task Force was notified. The gallery said police initially did not appear to believe the vandalism constituted hate speech.
āAs far as weāre concerned, smearing white paint on the word āblackā is deliberate and intentional and therefore constitutes hate speech. Weāre pushing for this to be documented as such,ā the galleryās Instagram post read. āAnd yet, the police did inform us that if a noose were hanging on our door, then theyād consider the incident hate speech.ā
Gee, thatās shocking, isnāt it?
