Right?
And the fact that such a huge percentage of Americans do think of their country not just as benign, but more so as a force for good in the world, speaks volumes about what a propagandized/brainwashed population it has.
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I’m from here (Boston), and my people are here.
I never realized how racist Boston is until I went to Mississippi.
Wish they’d just gone with “End Racism”
I agree with that.
I have a baseline view of America being “good”, not that everything America does or is being done in America is
“good”.
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Yeah and part of the context is in the mind of the observer, so the banner can have a lot of different meanings.
Really? While I am not a world traveler, I have been to other countries, and I have met many people here from other countries. All of them seem to have favorable opinions and a love of their country. I’ve heard many speeches by recent politicians using positive language about their people and government moving forward to a bright future. Though, you know, grain of salt with that sort of thing.
Here in the US there are many immigrant communities where their original country is still held in high esteem, even if they loved their new country, preserving little nooks of its culture. My ex-mother in law is an extremely proud Pole, and of her father who fought both Nazis and Communists, and of the rich history of Democracy in Poland and the spirit of it, even when under the thumb of repressive regimes.
Surely this can be taken too far with Nationalism and the like. But love of country is hardly shared by just racists. And also note I am separating the COUNTRY from the Government. Even the Cubans I’ve met who escaped Castro love Cuba.
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There were originally about eight people involved who had this idea, and those eight people come from various organizing groups in the Boston area.
A prime example of what happens when you design your protest sign by committee.
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My first response to this banner was, “OK fine, now how racist is apple pie?”
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Different strokes…
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Oz has some good features (nifty scenery and a healthy degree of egalitarianism) plus some diabolical features (genocide, hypocrisy, xenophobia, short-sightedness).
Whenever a politician starts banging on about something being “unAustralian”, it is a safe bet that they are about to say something that is deeply stupid and/or bigoted.
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Cry freedom, for real.
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It’s a peripheral point, but the Red Sox were long known to be institutionally racist: They were the last team to integrate because of overt racism by owner Tom Yawkey, who passed on a chance in 1949 to have Ted Williams and Willie Mays play on the same team, with the only reason he gave being Mays’s race. Yawkey owned the team 1933-1976, and his racism has been so widely known that recently RS ownership said they would rename Yawkey Way, the street outside Fenway.
And one thing about Boston and white racism, btw; I come from the area, and people from elsewhere sometimes miss that longtime white populations of the city are kind of contiguous with the whiter suburbs around (in some instances because of long-ago “white flight”), and so there are plenty of the Aggrieved White People-type in the general area.
Though it is of course as mixed as anywhere: As someone here has said, folks from the area also showed up by the thousands to confront that grotesque “free speech” thing in Boston last month. March organizers had it start in Roxbury, btw, the predominantly black neighborhood of Boston, which felt like a step in the right direction, tbh.
And the story of that photo from 1976, btw:
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I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think they thought very hard about what they wrote. It’s as if they’re saying: baseball is X percent American, and racism is also X percent American; that is, racism and baseball are the same amount of “American”, regardless of the amount. If we (ignorantly and problematically) consider baseball to be an exclusively American phenomenon, i.e. 100% American, (which I think they may be assuming that), then the statement is claiming racism is also exclusively (100%) American. But that is clearly false. Racism is not exclusively American. And despite what many Americans believe, baseball is also not exclusively American. Of course, baseball and racism are certainly somewhat American, so the amount of American that each is must be greater than zero, but less than 100%. But are they the same amount? The statement claims that they are, but how probable is that? The chances that they are the exact same degree of American are astronomical.
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There’s a famous phrase “Banned in Boston” which referred to the tradition of censors in Boston to stop books and movies from being available to Bostonians on “moral grounds” – which invariably meant anything that questioned Christianity, the immorality of sex outside marriage, and heterosexuality as the only option.
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Seems pertinent:
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That image became even more powerful once I learned more about Peter Norman’s story
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Cleveland bears a lot of shame for that, but I also hold the league accountable for letting them keep it.
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Yup.
The USA is a beautiful place that contains many fantastic things and wonderful people.
But it is a society that is fundamentally based upon violence, white supremacy and the exploitation of poverty, and it has been since day one. Internationally, it is a serious contender for the most aggressive nation in the history of the planet. The USA has never had a decade without war, and American hegemonic power spans the globe.
There are many other nations with equally problematic cultures. There is no other nation with an equivalent potential for destruction.
It doesn’t have to be like this. But it is.
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