Annoying modern trends...

[Angus Forbes]

At what percentage is concern about racism justified?

I didn't convey my point very well, in the interest of brevity. The question would be, instead, "At what percentage do the residents of such areas really know anything about race relations beyond what they see on nightly TV and in the movies?" The experience in small-town Maine and Cortland County, NY, is vastly different from the experience in St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, just as examples.

In the United States, racism is a second-order problem, and maybe not even that important. Every available date set clearly shows that the primary threat to Black people in the United States is other Black people, especially young Black men (as both victim and perp). This is a very serious problem, as witnessed by the rates of violent crimes in the aforementioned big cities. Another very serious problem in the inner-city Black community is adherence to a self-imposed, self-defeating, dysfunctional set of values and way of life. Disrespect for education, drug dealing and drug dependence, illegitimate children, absentee (often, even unknown) fathers, the list goes on. Quite unfortunately, these same problems are now beginning to insinuate themselves into the White community, in my opinion thanks to the systematic trashing of traditional American values by certain elements.

Speaking of annoying trends, we now have what is known as "virtue signaling." Handwringing over racism is a prime example of this, in my opinion, especially when the hands so wrung live in lily-white communities.

 

[vitanola]

Well, we native Clevelanders fail see the humor, for Chagrin Falls has always been nothing to us but a very pretty and rather expensive suburb. Chagrin Falls is centered on a waterfall on the Chagrin River, named after a Frenchman, de Seguin who ran a trading post on the river in the middle of the Eighteenth Century.

Not very funny at all.

I think that I vacationed at Abysmal Point one summer back in the 1980's. At least it seemed like it.

 

[AmateisGal]

Since the little pisher was mentioned above, here is a seasonal image from the dim mists of my distant past by the creator of the little fellow:

View attachment 68691

I was a year behind Watterson at school. He had a fully developed style even then.

Oh, in explanation, this was penned in Watterson's senior year, when he lived in the only high-rise dormitory on campus.

Calvin and Hobbes is one of the best comic strips out there. I wish he hadn't retired so soon. He was incredibly talented.

 

[vitanola]

I didn't convey my point very well, in the interest of brevity. The question would be, instead, "At what percentage do the residents of such areas really know anything about race relations beyond what they see on nightly TV and in the movies?" The experience in small-town Maine and Cortland County, NY, is vastly different from the experience in St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, just as examples.

In the United States, racism is a second-order problem, and maybe not even that important. Every available date set clearly shows that the primary threat to Black people in the United States is other Black people, especially young Black men (as both victim and perp). This is a very serious problem, as witnessed by the rates of violent crimes in the aforementioned big cities. Another very serious problem in the inner-city Black community is adherence to a self-imposed, self-defeating, dysfunctional set of values and way of life. Disrespect for education, drug dealing and drug dependence, illegitimate children, absentee (often, even unknown) fathers, the list goes on. Quite unfortunately, these same problems are now beginning to insinuate themselves into the White community, in my opinion thanks to the systematic trashing of traditional American values by certain elements.

Speaking of annoying trends, we now have what is known as "virtue signaling." Handwringing over racism is a prime example of this, in my opinion, especially when the hands so wrung live in lily-white communities.

"Another very serious problem in the inner-city Black community is adherence to a self-imposed, self-defeating, dysfunctional set of values and way of life. Disrespect for education, drug dealing and drug dependence, illegitimate children, absentee (often, even unknown) fathers, the list goes on. Quite unfortunately, these same problems are now beginning to insinuate themselves into the White community, in my opinion thanks to the systematic trashing of traditional American values by certain elements."

BEGINNING to insinuate???

My, you must live in a bubble. These problems have been endemic in many rural communities in the Midwest and in the South for at least one generation, now. Frankly I see more broken homes, drugs, and disrespect for education on the dirt roads in our district in Southern Michigan that I see in the East Cleveland ghetto.
Then there is the Virginia Piedmont , where I used to have a winter home. In the rural community between Charlottesville and Lynchburg,, and again near Appomattox, the colored folk generally lived far more stable lives than the poor whites, who were even twenty years ago heavily suffering from methamphetimine and opiate abuse.



This brings to mind an inner ring suburb with which i am intimately familiar. It was target for (immensely profitable) blockbusting by a group of real estate agents in the late 1950's and early 1960s. By 1965 it was a fully integrated middle class community. Then something funny happened. The HOLC stopped insuring mortgages in the city. When folks retired or passed on, or moved up to more expensive suburbs they found it difficult to sell their old houses, so the were largely forced to rent them. Of course a high percentage of rental properties bodes ill for a neighborhood. By the time that the FHA ended the practice of race-based redlining after 1977 the city was more than 50% rental housing, and so it quite rightly was too high a risk for any sane mortgage lender. And so a fine neighborhood became unstable, and the disinvestment continued. The quality of life in that suburb absolutely collapsed in the 1990's.

 

[Angus Forbes]

Yes, I lived through blockbusting as well, first hand. Not a pretty picture. I could talk about blockbusting at length, but I won't. (Reminds me of the remark "A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the accordion, but doesn't.")

About rural Blacks -- I agree with you, and specifically noted that my comment pertained to inner-city types, not to Blacks in general.

About my living in a bubble: Who knows? You may well be right about me. I hope so. I worked and studied diligently in order to make it into such a bubble and to keep my family in it for, I hope, a long time to come.

 

[vitanola]

You know, I lived in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston during the 1980's, the worst years of the crack cocaine epidemic in that area. I learned a great deal about tolerance, and learned to confront my own racism, for racism, or more accurately particualrism, is endemic to the human condition. I learned to be quite comfortable in the neighborhood, even when walking about at night. It helped that I was active in the local church scene and knew the grandparents of most of the local "toughs". In those days, the most hardened gang member could live in fear of his grandmother's disapproval. Unfortunately that inter-generational check on bad behavior disappeared in most cases sometime around the turn of the century...

 

[tonyb]

Yep, I live in the whitest state in the Union and the Kluxers are active here -- they've been distributing literature in my own county within the past month. Racism doesn't need a reason, all it needs is insecure, impotent fools who buy what it has to sell.

I don't personally believe in suppressing racists. As far as I'm concerned, let them proclaim their stupidity from the highest rooftops in the land, and let them shout into the wind, because doing so emboldens those "nice people" who may share their beliefs to come forward and publicly reveal the corruption in their own souls. I think it's better to know exactly who your enemies are. But I also take heart in knowing such people are fighting the tide of human evolution, and that wave is eventually going to sweep them right back into the purulent muck from which they emerged.

While these buffoons (KKK, neo-Nazis, et al) are hardly harmless, I am more concerned about racists who fail to recognize their own racism.

I acknowledge my own racist tendencies. I'm certainly not proud of it, and I wish it wasn't so. Still, it's better for me and those with whom I interact that I recognize all that has shaped me and to be on the lookout for how my biases affect others. Far better than digging in my heels and denying that any of that is real.

Put the shoe on the other foot. If I were routinely stopped-and-frisked, I would be one resentful fellow. If I were routinely looked upon suspiciously in retail stores, it would piss me off considerably. (It happened to me during the holiday season at the local Barnes & Noble. It angers me still.) The message is that people of certain categories are less welcome, less honest, less worthy.

 

[2jakes]

Who in heaven's name is that little pisher?

 

[vitanola]

 

[LizzieMaine]

My, you must live in a bubble. These problems have been endemic in many rural communities in the Midwest and in the South for at least one generation, now. Frankly I see more broken homes, drugs, and disrespect for education on the dirt roads in our district in Southern Michigan that I see in the East Cleveland ghetto.
Then there is the Virginia Piedmont , where I used to have a winter home. In the rural community between Charlottesville and Lynchburg,, and again near Appomattox, the colored folk generally lived far more stable lives than the poor whites, who were even twenty years ago heavily suffering from methamphetimine and opiate abuse.

Having lived two doors down from a meth lab in my Quaint Lily White Small Town and having had a next-door neighbor carried out of his home in a bag as a result of a heroin overdose, I think the occupants of said bubbles ought to pull their heads out of them and take a good stiff look around.

And the thing is, this is nothing particularly new. I grew up in a Quaint Lily White Small Town where all sorts of degradation and violence were as common as chemical wastes on the shore -- and to hear my mother tell it, it was even worse when she was growing up in that same town in the 1940s. All those "Traditional American Values" included alcoholism, physical brutality, poverty, incest, rape, child molestation, and abandonment, and that was in a town that was 100 percent white until the 1970s. So I don't think we have any justification for blaming Those Other People for any of this. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..."

 

[sheeplady]

I didn't convey my point very well, in the interest of brevity. The question would be, instead, "At what percentage do the residents of such areas really know anything about race relations beyond what they see on nightly TV and in the movies?" The experience in small-town Maine and Cortland County, NY, is vastly different from the experience in St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore, just as examples.

My husband is originally from one of them, he currently works in another, and I worked in yet another of those for a year (of your list of "real" racial experience places: St. Louis, Detroit, and Baltimore). I might be a country bumpkin, but I'm a relatively well shod one. I also work out of several cities currently.

ETA: Spit out a few more cities. My husband moved around a lot and I've had a lot of projects.

 

[Angus Forbes]

Having lived two doors down from a meth lab in my Quaint Lily White Small Town and having had a next-door neighbor carried out of his home in a bag as a result of a heroin overdose, I think the occupants of said bubbles ought to pull their heads out of them and take a good stiff look around.

And the thing is, this is nothing particularly new. I grew up in a Quaint Lily White Small Town where all sorts of degradation and violence were as common as chemical wastes on the shore -- and to hear my mother tell it, it was even worse when she was growing up in that same town in the 1940s. All those "Traditional American Values" included alcoholism, physical brutality, poverty, incest, rape, child molestation, and abandonment, and that was in a town that was 100 percent white until the 1970s. So I don't think we have any justification for blaming Those Other People for any of this. "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves..."

I agree with you -- Maine is one of the most dysfunctional states in the Union. Believe me, I know. But you ignore the point I was making: Your town provided no experience concerning race relations, irrespective of how degenerate (or not) its all-White residents may be. How could it, being an all-one-race community?

I'm sorry (honestly) that your community is so rotten, if indeed it really is. Mine isn't. Quite the opposite. To say that the characteristics of your community represent traditional American values, however, is absurd and offensive. These values built what is arguably the greatest country in the history of humanity. They are the values of eudaimonia. They abhor the behaviors that you recite -- that's their fundamental nature. Moreover, traditional American values are the values of every successful group in the country: High-WASPs (where P includes Papist as well as Protestant), Jewish, and Asian, to name three examples.

One ignores these values at one's own peril -- examples abound of the failure of those who do so. Perhaps if someone is, personally, a failure, said person has a natural reluctance to assume responsibility. Never in the history of humanity have so many people had it so good and yet been so ungrateful and unappreciative.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don't you have some sheets to fold?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, we native Clevelanders fail see the humor, for Chagrin Falls has always been nothing to us but a very pretty and rather expensive suburb. Chagrin Falls is centered on a waterfall on the Chagrin River, named after a Frenchman, de Seguin who ran a trading post on the river in the middle of the Eighteenth Century.

Not very funny at all.

I think that I vacationed at Abysmal Point one summer back in the 1980's. At least it seemed like it.

Abysmal Point was the kind of place where they had to close down the public library after somebody checked out the book and didn't bring it back. The Fourth of July celebration was two kids sitting on the curb banging caps with a rock. For the grand finale they'd bang a whole roll. You get the idea.

 

[2jakes]

Abysmal Point was the kind of place where they had to close down the public library after somebody checked out the book and didn't bring it back. The Fourth of July celebration was two kids sitting on the curb banging caps with a rock. For the grand finale they'd bang a whole roll. You get the idea.

Nah...We wait until dark for the grand finale.

 

[AmateisGal]

Frankly, I'm surprised this thread hasn't been shut down yet.

 

[vitanola]

I agree with you -- Maine is one of the most dysfunctional states in the Union. Believe me, I know. But you ignore the point I was making: Your town provided no experience concerning race relations, irrespective of how degenerate (or not) its all-White residents may be. How could it, being an all-one-race community?

I'm sorry (honestly) that your community is so rotten, if indeed it really is. Mine isn't. Quite the opposite. To say that the characteristics of your community represent traditional American values, however, is absurd and offensive. These values built what is arguably the greatest country in the history of humanity. They are the values of eudaimonia. They abhor the behaviors that you recite -- that's their fundamental nature. Moreover, traditional American values are the values of every successful group in the country: High-WASPs (where P includes Papist as well as Protestant), Jewish, and Asian, to name three examples.

One ignores these values at one's own peril -- examples abound of the failure of those who do so. Perhaps if someone is, personally, a failure, said person has a natural reluctance to assume responsibility. Never in the history of humanity have so many people had it so good and yet been so ungrateful and unappreciative.

You make some good points, but of course the imperatives of Late Consumer Capitalism run counter to these values, and so today these admirable values are common to a smaller and smaller portion of the population. Oddly enough they are not as common as one would hope among the devoutly religious (or at least not among the most visible of the devout, those who one might call "Fundamentalist" or "Holiness") as they are amongst even the unchurched of a certain social class.

Those values are important, but our history shows them to have oft been honored in the breach. I worry because such large segments of society no longer even pay lip service to them. Even so, noting in this world is guaranteed. There are some who, regardless of values, are fated to penury.

Let us consider one pair of my grandparents, who deeply honored those values, as did their eight children. These values did not prevent the Spanish Influenza from taking two of their sons. They did not prevent their only daughter from perishing at the age of nineteen in a freak drowning accident at a company picnic. They did not prevent the killing of their eldest son by a railroad "Bull". They did not prevent the Midland Bank from failing, taking their life's savings and then in liquidation from calling and foreclosing on a current, nearly paid off mortgage in 1932. They did not prevent two more sons from dying in the War, one in the European and the other in the Pacific Theater. They did not prevent another son from returning home from war a broken man who spent the rest of his life in the VA hospital. Those of us whom success has blessed must always remember that prosperity can be fleeting, and that nothing in life is certain. One should at least aspire to empathize with those of whose struggle one is not entirely aware.

 

[tonyb]

We are as we do, eh?

 

[vitanola]

Abysmal Point was the kind of place where they had to close down the public library after somebody checked out the book and didn't bring it back. The Fourth of July celebration was two kids sitting on the curb banging caps with a rock. For the grand finale they'd bang a whole roll. You get the idea.

Somehow I picture you as the lady in that old Helen Hokinson cartoon; "Watch, Everyone! This one cost FIFTY CENTS!"

 

[vitanola]

Frankly, I'm surprised this thread hasn't been shut down yet.

Well, we ARE all being polite, despite discussing relatively modern controversies. Why shut down a discussion which is not out of hand, for all of this really relates to the Era, or rather to our perceptions and misperceptions of it. We don't all have to agree as long as we play nice, don't you think?