Right… so not that long ago at all, in the scheme of things. It’s living history for baby boomers.
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The fuck…
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yeah. just adding additional context.
those teen years shape a lot of who we are. people* like to pretend civil rights was a million years ago and that it couldn’t possibly affect today’s issues or our current policy makers when the opposite is actually true
- this is how i was raised. that civil rights was over and done with. mainly i think talking about race made my white parents and white teachers uncomfortable, and i don’t think i ever had a teacher who was black
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Indeed. True here, too. Same about teachers, too, at least until I got into college.
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in some ways i wonder if integration of teachers would have been easier and longer lasting. ( especially, of course, if that came with funding to actually raise majority black schools to par with majority white schools. )
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Damn, that’s crazy.
My first grade teacher at a private Christian school in Ohio was Black.
I never thought anything unusual of it.
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The student body at my school was pretty segregated during the whole time I went there. Like we had a handful of Black students for the entire time I was there. I think maybe there were a dozen or so Black kids in my HS (of about 1000 kids?). But then again, you would sometimes see the KKK hanging out at the sort of entrance to the little town I grew up in (until I was in HS, when we moved). The main HS in larger town nearby was divided into east and west schools up until the late 90s, and I’m fairly certain that was a legacy of Jim Crow. They are a single school now. The other schools in the county (including the one I went to) would have been white only until the 60s/70s.
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Damn.
And you’re younger than I am; it boggles the mind that such disparity is so recent, and yet simultaneously, it’s totally believable…
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yeah, went back a while back for a 4th of July event downtown (several years ago), and it felt far more integrated than it had in all the time I lived there.
I also remember going out one MLK day at work when one of the local churches held their march, with my co-worker Marvan, and thinking how tense it felt to have a few dozen Black people marching down the street in support of one of America’s greatest heroes. I mean, no one came out to celebrate him, other than the Black community, and only those church members, and me and Marvan (and maybe the lefty book store guy up the street). Depressing. It’s a lovely place to live, with a beautiful and revitalized down town, right at the base of the foothills, but damn this rot goes deep.
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I never really thought about this. My elementary drew kids from all over the city. All of the other kids in my neighborhood were Black, so having a Black teacher wasn’t something I really noticed, but there were kids in the school for whom teachers would have been the first Black person that they knew personally.
My favorite teacher in elementary school was gay and was the first person that I was aware of them being gay (he lived with a man my mom worked with). Later as a teenager, when sexuality became a bigger social issue, that my mental prototype of a gay man was primarily based on my favorite teacher certainly shaped my opinions. I would imagine similarly, for people growing up in segregated communities having teachers of another race/ethnicity as the foundation of their mental image likely does have long-lasting impacts
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I don’t know that this is the place for this, but mental health issues among black men are so frequently disregarded
https://sports.yahoo.com/skip-bayless-dak-prescott-mental-health-215536925.html
" Bayless criticized Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott for revealing on an upcoming episode of “In Depth with Graham Bensinger” that he dealt with depression and began experiencing anxiety in the early stages of the coronavirus shutdown. Then in mid-April his older brother, Jace, died by suicide, which brought a new wave of emotions. Bayless said that while he has sympathy for those with clinical depression, he has no sympathy for Prescott because as quarterback of “America’s team” he’s supposed to be a leader of men.
“I have deep compassion for clinical depression, but when it comes to the quarterback of an NFL team, you [Shannon Sharpe] know this better than I do, it’s the ultimate leadership position in sports, am I right about that?” Bayless said on “Undisputed”. “You are commanding an entire franchise… And they’re all looking to you to be their CEO, to be in charge of the football team.
“Because of all that, I don’t have sympathy for him going public with, ‘I got depressed,’ ‘I suffered depression early in COVID to the point that I couldn’t even go work out.’ Look, he’s the quarterback of America’s team …
“The sport that you play, it is dog eat dog. It is no compassion, no quarter given on the football field. If you reveal publicly any little weakness, it can affect your team’s ability to believe in you in the toughest spots and it can definitely encourage others on the other side to come after you.”
Do not listen to Skip Bayless."
The fact that he spouted this shit on National Suicide Prevention Day to a man whose brother recently died by suicide marks him as a subhuman asshole.
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Also…
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I’m sure this will be not come as shocking news to anyone here but we have yet more documented proof that the outrage over Colin Kaepernick and BLM had exactly fuck-all to do with “kneeling,” “respecting the flag” or “protesting peacefully.”
The outrage then and now has always been about black people publicly asserting their collective status as human beings whose lives have value.
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From the Twitter trends box this morning:
Now arrest the people who murdered her. It’s literally the least you could possibly do.
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More findings on this subject:
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More than 240 schools in US are named after a Confederate leader. About half serve majority Black or nonwhite students
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OFFS…
OK, let us assume for a moment that there is validity to the “Blacks are different” thought process. (
) This would have to be based on genetics, if there is any basis at all, correct? It has been repeatedly established that there are more genetic differences between people of different blood types, hell, different eye colors, than between different races, but lets just go with this thought experiment. OK, so something to do with African heritage affects renal function. Due to factors very familiar to the reader, there are few Black Americans who do not have some degree of White ancestry. If there is in fact an “African renal function gene” or some such, then the degree to which it interacts with, what, a “White renal function gene?” should be measurable, right? Therefore, how Black you are becomes an issue. But that is not addressed. Is this the “one drop” Blackness? Is it a minimal threshold? Or is it just utter, total, nonscientific bullshit? And as for the “doctors are not racist, so the results cannot be racist” argument… Is this even worth addressing? Even those of us not openly and proudly white nationalist, which I assume would be the standard for this argument, have grown up in a culture of systemic racism and carry that in our bones.
Long story short, since there is no objective standard for what is “Black” in science, using it as a data point in laboratory analysis or assessment algorithms is doomed to failure, unless the goal is to deny appropriate medical treatment to a historically oppressed group. But that would be racist. Circular logic is circular. Q.E.D.
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That’s part of what makes people nervous about developments like the one below. In the past, we’ve seen data and breakthroughs used more to benefit healthcare professionals or companies than to help the patients involved in the testing:
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No doubt. One of the reasons the Ashkenazim have become much more reluctant to be research subjects. So many patents and therapeutics arose from genetic research on them, to virtually no benefit for them. This is even before things like Tuskegee and experiments on inmates come up. Genetic research has the potential to open the gates to so much good, and also so much evil. By the time we know which wins, it will be to late to walk it back. Assuming our species is still around in a couple hundred years, these decades we are living in will be considered “the time when everything happened,” for better or for worse.
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