“Not reckoning with this shameful past.” How about accepting racism as your personal savior and moving on into the 21st century where every TV commercial features a black person (and they were on TV and in catalogs etc in the 60s too...) Every TV therapist is black and if you want to go to Harvard you can get in on lower test scores than…
“Not reckoning with this shameful past.” How about accepting racism as your personal savior and moving on into the 21st century where every TV commercial features a black person (and they were on TV and in catalogs etc in the 60s too...) Every TV therapist is black and if you want to go to Harvard you can get in on lower test scores than the rest of us who weren’t here during that shameful past that puffs your chest with moral certitude....
“It is July 19, 1935. They are all standing at the base of a tree in the pine woods of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Above them hangs the limp body of Rubin Stacy, his overalls torn and bloodied, riddled with bullets, his hands cuffed in front of him, head snapped from the lynching rope, killed for frightening a white woman. The girl in the front is looking up at the dead black man with wonderment rather than horror, a smile of excitement on her face as if show ponies had just galloped past her at the circus. The fascination on her young face set against the gruesome nature of the gathering was captured by a photographer and is among the most widely circulated of all lynching photographs of twentieth-century America. Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism. Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom. They made postcards out of the gelatin prints for people to send to their loved ones. People mailed postcards of the severed, half-burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo, Illinois, in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times. Some people framed the lynching photographs with locks of the victim’s hair under glass if they had been able to secure any. One spectator wrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas, in 1916: “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe.” This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. postmaster general banned the cards from the mails.” But the new edict did not stop Americans from sharing their lynching exploits. From then on, they merely put the postcards in an envelope” (Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent).
Do you think you are morally superior to these white people caught up in this sadistic culture? I recommend a book to you called Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It is chilling and should motivate ALL of us to learn from the past so we don’t become the monsters of the future.
“Not reckoning with this shameful past.” How about accepting racism as your personal savior and moving on into the 21st century where every TV commercial features a black person (and they were on TV and in catalogs etc in the 60s too...) Every TV therapist is black and if you want to go to Harvard you can get in on lower test scores than the rest of us who weren’t here during that shameful past that puffs your chest with moral certitude....
“It is July 19, 1935. They are all standing at the base of a tree in the pine woods of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Above them hangs the limp body of Rubin Stacy, his overalls torn and bloodied, riddled with bullets, his hands cuffed in front of him, head snapped from the lynching rope, killed for frightening a white woman. The girl in the front is looking up at the dead black man with wonderment rather than horror, a smile of excitement on her face as if show ponies had just galloped past her at the circus. The fascination on her young face set against the gruesome nature of the gathering was captured by a photographer and is among the most widely circulated of all lynching photographs of twentieth-century America. Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism. Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom. They made postcards out of the gelatin prints for people to send to their loved ones. People mailed postcards of the severed, half-burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo, Illinois, in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times. Some people framed the lynching photographs with locks of the victim’s hair under glass if they had been able to secure any. One spectator wrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas, in 1916: “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe.” This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. postmaster general banned the cards from the mails.” But the new edict did not stop Americans from sharing their lynching exploits. From then on, they merely put the postcards in an envelope” (Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent).
Do you think you are morally superior to these white people caught up in this sadistic culture? I recommend a book to you called Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning. It is chilling and should motivate ALL of us to learn from the past so we don’t become the monsters of the future.
I think no need for sarcasm, especially as we wish (I wish) to persuade Jeremy to consider a different perspective