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[theinevitable]

I really liked the New Yorker cartoon, I don't know if it was actually in the magazine or just online, where the caption was "the day after America becomes post-racial"
the illustration is a guy in a KKK uniform, everyone turning away in disgust, and he's saying "too soon?"

[Ben-San]

Not really.

Well, okay. It's questionable as evidence that the media environment of the time was less racist, which probably isn't quite how you intended it. I've been involved in a lot of arguments about othering and race in the media lately, so it's on my mind.

[pmcd9]

In 1979 Klansmen etc...

I wasn't trying to imply that racism had gone away in the 70s.  I wasn't implying that by a long shot.  There were incidents I can remember from my childhood of pretty blatant racism especially against Hispanics by the Houston police that led to some very well publicized deaths.

There will always be extremist and extremism, but I'm talking about the common man, the normal people of the world and it seemed like for a time there the country was moving toward racial equality.  But something snapped and America's racist tendencies bubbled to the surface again.  And now 30 years later it's pretty clear we are nowhere near racial equality.

Just speaking of my own personal recollection and my rose colored view of that era which I understand is admittedly a very flawed view of things and is likely flavored by my own racist tendencies.  I hope I'm not alone in admitting that sometimes there is a discrepancy in how I feel and how I know I should feel.

[Ben-San]

I wasn't trying to imply that racism had gone away in the 70s.  I wasn't implying that by a long shot.  There were incidents I can remember from my childhood of pretty blatant racism especially against Hispanics by the Houston police that led to some very well publicized deaths.

There will always be extremist and extremism, but I'm talking about the common man, the normal people of the world and it seemed like for a time there the country was moving toward racial equality.  But something snapped and America's racist tendencies bubbled to the surface again.  And now 30 years later it's pretty clear we are nowhere near racial equality.

Just speaking of my own personal recollection and my rose colored view of that era which I understand is admittedly a very flawed view of things and is likely flavored by my own racist tendencies.  I hope I'm not alone in admitting that sometimes there is a discrepancy in how I feel and how I know I should feel.

Well.. this is kind of a bunch of interrelated issues. The thing is that the statement about the Dukes of Hazzard sort of embodies "invisible privilege". As white guys we don't really notice anything unusual when most of the shows on the TV are about white guys. But if the shows on TV are all about white guys, it doesn't mean that they aren't touched by race issues - it just means they aren't talking about them. (See fig. 1 above, "Kelly on Race Relations".) Yes, there was Roots and the Jeffersons, yes, progress was being made forwards - but there weren't fewer race-relation problems then for "the common man", certainly not for the black "common man", they just weren't being talked about. Now that we talk about it, it is indeed clear - there are problems.

Going on a bit of a tangent.. I had a conversation with my sister the other day about Silver Age Superman (because, y'know, I'm the kind of person who has conversations about specific ages of Superman, and so to a lesser degree is my sister.) An point that came out of this was that it was, rather than Superman lacking the ability to make moral judgments that aren't simple "good/bad", the writers had simply taken moral complexity out of his universe. Superman wasn't being an idiot - the judgments simply weren't there to be made. It's unrealistic, you say? Well, it's just a funnybook, don't get your trousers in a knot, and a generation of kids is taught that anyone who dissents with the police embraces every kind of evil. Most of them eventually have to confront the reality and learn that it doesn't work that way.

The Duke boys can ride around with a Confederate flag and put Dixie on their horn and say it's about Southern pride because there are no blacks in Hazzard County. What happened to them? Would Sheriff Coltrane awkwardly tell them that it ain't safe for their type to let the sun set on 'em around here? Relax, it's just a TV show. The kids are taught that the Confederate flag stands for rebel freedom and the South being awesome and has nothing to do with black people, and (here's the big difference) a lot of them never challenge that assumption or, worse yet, have it actively reinforced.

[pmcd9]

Ben, I think you've somehow missed my point entirely.  Look, I've taken great pains to point out that my perception of this issue is just that.  I've also acknowledged that there were problems.  But the time I'm speaking of is only a decade removed from niggers at the back of the bus when Blacks were becoming fully integrated into American society and the vast majority of rational white Americans felt this was the way it should be.  This is an era when many hardened racist changed their attitude.  They didn't all suddenly wake up one morning and decide that negros are awesome, but they began to realize that equal rights for all was the right idea.  It was a positive time and progress was being made and it could be felt.  At least that's the way I felt.  And it feels like it's going the other way now.

BTW, The Dukes of Hazard was never part of my example, that was mostly an 80's show and if it's racist (fine, I concede the point to you), then it's an example of the old underlying racism I spoke of in my original post bubbling back up to the surface.

[littlefallsmets]

I don't mean to imply genocide, I mean to say... America's original sin wasn't even slavery, it was the compromise of ideals to say "look, this independence from England thing is so important that we're going to have to compromise with people who think other human beings are property to get this done, we're going to have to sit down at a table and tell them that we can agree to disagree on something absolutely morally monstrous to get this done, I guess this independence this is that important."

And on down through time, this has been America's pattern, people of good conscience having to pretend that people with ridiculous or monstrous ideas have a point of view that has to be negotiated with instead of saying "look, what you're talking about is basically as evil as something can be in real life, fuck you".

The idea that there are people fundamentally tagged as the underclass, by race by gender by sexuality by creed by the economics of birth whatever, and should not be treated as full-humans and that (further) we have to treat these people like they have a point and need to be reasoned with, it just keeps coming up again and again like a bad fuckin' penny throughout American history by the ideological descendents of the people who argued for slavery and... they never fuckin' shut up, we're never rid of them, they just keep hurting people that they might maintain their priviledged status.

They argued that women shouldn't have rights because the Bible said so, that black folk shouldn't have rights because the Bible said so, that foreigners shouldn't have rights because they weren't "of" here, gay folks shouldn't be able to marry because the Bible says so, poor folks shouldn't have education or medicine because if they deserved it God would've made them rich, etc etc etc.

This same psychic disease, original sin, from the moment it was decided that accepting slavery was worth creating America, down through Reagan winking about "states rights" on southern campaign stops to crazy motherfuckers running around forging copies of the President's birth certificate and...

I look at history and wonder if we could've nipped that shit in the bud with a real commitment to Reconstruction, real generational enforcement until it was just reality to the next generation, maybe we wouldn't have that poison in our national veins.

You know, that our national right-wing would be run slightly-daft detached Ivy League inbreds arguing their points not out of hate and rage and exceptionalist entitlement but out of just being out-of-touch with reality and believing the books they read by rich idiots who didn't have any real notion of real life either.

I mean, you could argue it could've turned out like the Treaty of Versailles after World War One but you could also argue that such a thing would be different being enforced from within as opposed to without.

It's just that... I see this madness, you know.

[Ben-San]

Ben, I think you've somehow missed my point entirely.  Look, I've taken great pains to point out that my perception of this issue is just that.  I've also acknowledged that there were problems.  But the time I'm speaking of is only a decade removed from niggers at the back of the bus when Blacks were becoming fully integrated into American society and the vast majority of rational white Americans felt this was the way it should be.  This is an era when many hardened racist changed their attitude.  They didn't all suddenly wake up one morning and decide that negros are awesome, but they began to realize that equal rights for all was the right idea.  It was a positive time and progress was being made and it could be felt.  At least that's the way I felt.  And it feels like it's going the other way now.

BTW, The Dukes of Hazard was never part of my example, that was mostly an 80's show and if it's racist (fine, I concede the point to you), then it's an example of the old underlying racism I spoke of in my original post bubbling back up to the surface.

I'm sorry if it came off as me saying you were being racist or underestimating the scope of racism - part of that is probably posts being typed late while I've been soaking in jargon on the subject lately. To look at what I've been saying more positively, and possibly in a way that's more directly relevant to your concern, saying "it wasn't a less racist time then" also means "we aren't becoming more racist than we were then". The perception issue cuts both ways. If it looks like race relations are swinging the other way now, it's partly because the perception of the issue and the baseline has changed, and partly because the rate of change has slowed - we've gotten a lot of the initial flashy progress out of the way and now it's time to begin the unsexy work of digging at the entrenched, hardpacked unpleasantness which we don't like to look at and which those of us in the privileged class sometimes find hard to see because it's been there so long we don't notice it.

My point re: Dukes is less "Dukes of Hazzard is a racist show" and more sort of using it as an example of the entrenchment of racism within media in ways we crackers don't realize unless we make an effort. The show almost certainly wasn't intended to push a message favoring Southern racism, but the fact that aspects glorifying and reinforcing that tradition not only made it in but were unquestioned and embraced by fans who also had no such intention says something (at least it potentially does) about that entrenched, invisible-to-culturally-privileged-folks unpleasantness.

I'm not trying to come off as that freshman who just took a sociology class and is trying to show off the invisible things that he and only he can now see in the world around him, I've just been steeping in a lot of this kind of privilege conversation regarding areas of my interest lately so it's stewing in my mind. I'm really sorry if it comes out asshole-y.

[jaydub]

The idea that there are people fundamentally tagged as the underclass, by race by gender by sexuality by creed by the economics of birth whatever, and should not be treated as full-humans and that (further) we have to treat these people like they have a point and need to be reasoned with, it just keeps coming up again and again like a bad fuckin' penny throughout American history

America was founded at a time and by people who very recently had existed under a system of divinely ordained lords and peasants.  There were those who were meant to rule, and those who were destined to serve - the Revolution was the beginnings of the end of that philosophy, which occured between people of the same skin color and heritage.  Over time we've managed by inches, and with setbacks, to extend that revolution more generally to our fellow humans.  I don't think we should piss on the memories of our forefathers simply because they didn't immediately jump to Star Trek's Federation.

[littlefallsmets]

A solid point.

However, I will say, there's something to be said for the function of "how things should be" thinking. Not so much mine here, of course, unstructured stream-of-consciousness bleeding-heart rambling to ten or twenty other people when there's not talking cats and alive stuffed animals to talk about but I think there's maybe too much pragmatism in society right now. In mainstream public discourse, anyway.

"What can we do right now" is all well and good but "what can we do right now" is easily shouted down, easily shouted down, easily negotiated away.

"How things should be and then what can we do to work toward it" isn't so easily corrupted or shoved under a rug.

Handling the debate that way can lead toward people discovering ways that our old assumptions about how much we can change are actually wrong.

Despite the fact that I, myself, am most likely just pissing in the wind.

[dejavroom]

I'm not advocating blind pragmatism here (please remember this as you read the rest), but there's a reason they're called ideals, and not reals. By definition they're the things we must strive for, not necessarily reach. Of course, each case is a case, but if there's one thing that you can say about History is that it happened. This one did, not other, nicer ones, of which is nonsensical - or, really, an act of... fiction - to speak. That already should say something about the worth of daydreaming about what could have been. It's idle, accomplishes nothing.

It seems you have a problem with the fact that, inevitably, if this mode of living is to be maintained, with all its luxuries and comforts, the world must be designed to function around suffering. At this point I must ask: Are you sure you're not just trolling?

(Incidentally, there's a play you should check out, "Prometheus Bound", by Aeschylus. I think you'll find Prometheus interesting. It's short, and you can find it for free on the web.)

[Toaster]

Sometimes I almost forget that we're on a forum for discussing cartoon stuffed animals. Then I remember, and the tightness in my chest goes away.

[dejavroom]

"Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?"

[Carlos del Vaca]

Good lord but I love the new Superchunk EP.  How on earth is that band still making the same music they did when I was in college, and making it well?  (See also "Dinosaur Jr.")

[littlefallsmets]

While my personal amount of emphasis on it is somewhat unproductive, I don't know if you can exactly say that "what if" is a blind alley.

If we can deconstruct the past, what went wrong, what could've gone right, we have a lot to learn from it on how to change the future.

Maybe it's a little academic to ask "if we had treated the South differently after the war, would it have accelerated human rights in America?", for example sure, but if there are answers to be learned about how to act in the future, I don't know that its useless to think about, talk about, explore, etc.

My issue, of course, is seeing something and then endingly up feeling hopeless toward it and then just... jibbering about in on the computer.

[miles]

(See also "Dinosaur Jr.")

Yeah, doesn't the new album kick ass? They are playing in Salt Lake on Halloween, and I think this will be my first time seeing them.