White academia.
Thread:
There is very little difference between this shit and the justifications for plunder and genocide produced by the establishment white intelligentsia during the height of colonialism.
female-headedness
WTF?
The dreaded single mother as head of household. Quick, get me my smelling salts!
Thanks for sharing.
I think this is the withest text i’ve ever read.
“When I was 9,” Dad tells me, “we went to Denver. When he left in the morning to go on his business appointments, he said to me: Stay at the pool, charge your lunch to the room, and I’ll see you at dinnertime. Make sure you have your tie on.”
I’m coming in 8 months after @anon50609448 started this thread, so just read the summary (which has been very informative, so thank you for starting it, and sorry if I creeped any of you out by giving you dozens of likes on months-old posts).
That’s all, really. I started out thinking I had a question about American Dirt vs. The Help, but even just writing it helped me see the differences.
While I have to laugh at the reaction GIF, I can’t say that I’m … unfamiliar with such a situation. It goes to a whole other level of white culture and privilege.
I grew up working class, so it’s completely unfamiliar to me. But it sounds really really sad.
Same here; not to mention the law was different growing up in my state - leaving kids under a certain age alone at home (or alone in a hotel room) is considered neglect.
At 9 or 10 it was kind of an adventure. Dressing for dinner wasn’t something I liked (you had to do it at a lot of steakhouses), but otherwise it was an airplane trip to a new place with my dad where I was also given some independence and allowed to do and eat what I wanted. Heady stuff for a kid.
After 1980 or so, for sure, and in all states. Even before, though, being secure in the knowledge that your 9-year-old kid could safely wander around a hotel all day under the benevolent gaze of the staff was part of a whole other level of unexamined privilege. I highly doubt that would have happened if we were African-American or if my father wasn’t so used to hotels like the one we stayed at.
Of course, those situations would sometimes end very badly. It’s one of those “Mad Men”-era risky behaviours we’re scandalised by now, like letting a small kid ride in the front seat of a car with no seat belt.
I used to go out for groceries when I was like ten years old. I used to pop down to the corner grocery and get milk, eggs, cheese, whatever, and stand in line with the housewives and the middle managers coming home from work. The cashier would ring me up without batting an eye. It’s been decades since I’ve seen anyone younger than late teens getting groceries unattended. Nowadays they would probably get the DCFS called on themselves.
Also, in the state I was growing up in, nobody under the age of 21 was allowed in a restaurant where alcohol was being served.
Now that happened all the time when I was a kid; I even remember riding around in the back of my best friend’s dad’s pick up truck with no restraints at all, well into 1985 or so…
Yeah, I fondly recall my father letting me play Barry White on the 8-track while sitting on that big bench seat, totally unrestrained. I also remember riding on the back of a family friend’s Harley when I was about 7 or 8. It was a short ride around the block, and I don’t recall if I wore a helmet or not (which probably means “not”).
My mother and aunt did draw the line when my grandfather (who was kind of a mischievous gadget freak) attempted to give my cousin and me a miniature gas-powered motorcycle as a gift when we were 9. My cousin and I still laugh thinking about how horrified our mothers must have been when he unveiled it.
After my parents divorced, my sister and used to ride the public bus alone to and from elementary school. We crack up talking about all the things we were allowed to do that would be totally unacceptable in today’s society.
Me too! We’d pretend to be “surfing.” I can’t imagine now seeing a bunch of kids standing up like that in the back of a pick up.
I remember at least one of the handoffs of kids from one parent to the other where we rode in the back of an el Camino on the interstate for at least 2 hours.
No lying, I loved it, but thinking back makes me cringe.
Oh, the carbon footprint!
Tangential, but this reminds me of something related to this thread that came up for me more often in college.
Does white culture = the privilege of being able to be more vocally concerned about the environment?
I went to college in a pretty small but racially diverse school in KY, and I noticed that at most of our demonstrations (I was mostly focused on environmental stuff, but it ran the gamut from WTO to racial justice) the folks from our school taking part skewed heavily to the white end of the spectrum.
Everyone had to be income eligible to attend that college (read, relatively poor) so there was kind of a leveling of the field in that way. Still, I remember thinking that I was lucky to have the energy to put towards that stuff, and not having to simply justify my existence or presence.
I always thought of it on the hierarchy of needs spectrum, probably because I also learned about that it college.
Most definitely. Think about the majority POC towns that wound up having trash and waste dumped in or near their towns with absolutely no say-so in the matter.
Yeah this is white, and is definitely a level of privilege I never came close to at that age.
Same goes for this.
One of the moms in my carpool group when I was in elementary school drove us in a Corvette. It was super low to the ground, went way too fast, and smelled of exhaust. I loved it. And we weren’t wearing seatbelts either.
EtA:
I would also take the train into Chicago, unaccompanied, when I was in elementary school. All the sooper dooper concerned white people who know exactly how many murders there are in Chicago on any given day are reading this and wondering what the statute of limitations is on calling DCFS on my parents 
