People have grandiose expectations of elementary or high school education. At best, you have time to cover topics at a very high level and I’ve never had a class that even made it to the twentieth century.
As important as this historical tidbit is, it’s not a condemnation of history education. More than likely, this would come about in a college level course that is more specific.
Stupid question, but I’ve been to NYC many times and I’ve always considered Central Park to be one of the only enjoyable parts of the city… am I allowed to enjoy it if it was taken this way?
It’s not a stupid question at all, it’s actually quite a complex one.
I suppose the real meat of the question is it morally wrong to derive pleasure from something where suffering is involved. You didn’t personally make the decision to harm people, so you have no responsibility there. You also did not consent to existing as a person, which means you largely have no say about where you find yourself as a human being, the circumstances of which led you to that park.
But conversely you’re now burdened with the knowledge, which understandably changes your outlook. By way of utilising the park, you’re implicitly condoning it’s creation, therefore the suffering. Before you were blameless, now it’s a little muddier. You still wouldn’t have condoned the actions taken though, which does count for something.
If we’re taking “allowed” as a social context, some may find it distasteful. It largely depends on who you talk to. I don’t think it should affect your own reasoning much though.
Ultimately what we’re left with is a physical space that has a somewhat difficult history. As it stands, no action you do can alter that fact, it will always be that thing, unfortunate as it may be.
Considering all that, on the range of all possible human activity, I think the enjoyment of a park is fairly reasonable behaviour. I don’t think you can unlearn the context though, so whether or not you can enjoy it largely depends on your own internal moral workings. In the end, I would recommend going with what your heart, gut, and mind tell you.
Yes. Or you couldn’t enjoy the majority of the US, which was taken from indigenous people.
Channel 5 has a video about the Dodgers stadium in LA that was built to push latinos out.
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Once i learned about what they did I can’t forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn’t stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.
There were also a number of similar incidents elsewhere.
I didn’t learn about the Tulsa Massacre until the first Trump term. I’m over 50 years old.
I watched the Watchmen TV series a couple years back (at age 40) and during the Tulsa massacre scene I was like “oh this takes place in an alternate history where the KKK won”
Then next year in college I took a course in American History… oof.
I’m not American, but I also learned about it watching the Watchmen series, then Wikipedia. Wasn’t that surprised, though. The only time I went to the USA some kids throw a heavy rock through our camping tent window while we, Mexican kids, were away. It didn’t strike me like some kids mischief even at that time.
There is an unfortunate anti-homeless sentiment in some parts of the US, where people will wreck camping tents on sight regardless of the occupants’ skin color. I’m sorry you had to deal with such hateful behavior.
It was at some Boy Scouts of America event.
Oh yeah, probably racism then. They have a history of it.
i found it pretty interesting that the slur ‘redneck’ originally referred to striking labourers who participated in the battle of blair mountain. I’m incredibly cynical mind you, but it revealed to me why the term is culturally contested even to this day.
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times
On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain’t teaching
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes
I don’t think it is being intentionally obscured, it’s just too specific for elementary or high school education. There’s a chance a teacher could use it as spotlight type thing, but overall, that level of education is too broad.
The US does teach about screwing over indigenous people and slavery… well maybe not in red states. And now the current administration is whitewashing history.
Also, it sounds like those two things are the same hand. What’s your country?
It’s very similar to how a lot of Americans didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
I learned about it because of the show.
But I’m also not from the US. Still felt weird that it wasn’t talked about more
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
This isn’t just this administration, not even close. My family is from Tulsa, had never even heard of the atrocities that have been done to the black communities there.
often wonder how streets, towns, counties were named/renamed. was there a contest along the way
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol’ boys in the 1960s.
“Nothing changes, even when it wants to” Hayes Carll
630?
they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
People will see your comment and think “hey that sounds like my city”, but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.
This is part of what’s called redlining.
To offer a refinement, if I can, redlining is adjacent to this highway abuse, so, easy to join them; same racially driven bastardry, different technique.
Redlining was a real estate / financial tool that kept certain homes on a map from having access to resources. Sort of like financial gerrymandering. It’s kinda cool, in a privileged way, to see a city’s ghetto map and a redlined map overlaid; there is little difference.
Anyway, I couldn’t find a term for this neighborhood wrecking highway practice, but did find this article that goes into detail and links the book Dividing by Design.
The Roads That Tear Communities Apart https://share.google/6G6B8K9VNck1Cb0ZW
One more: I thought redlining also conveyed purposeful impediments to black home ownership, like in the refusal of mortgage applications.
- There were communities in suburbs built and federal funded that included racial exclusion provisions.
Ayo Magwood has pulled together a great amount of information about the topic. Recently, she seems to have shifted to economic inequality driving many of the issues that were once, like all the years before the last 5 or so, primarily racial.
Structural Racism — Uprooting Inequity https://share.google/1A6sgjkI0UOwpFxeO
75\85?
…six seven?
Sweet Auburn!
275
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
Really? Even I as a random European know about it. I have never heard of the show though.
People outside the US know…kinda like how we’re the ones that know about a lot of atrocities the US committed
Funny about that.
Graduated from an Oklahoma high school, and it was never discussed.
Exactly when I saw that episode turn to my wife asked if true. She said same thing never heard about it.
They did update the standards to include it, and it is more common now for people to know about it now. There was a high school robotics team I remember that might have done something to help with some search for the mass graves, and I know a local university has done field trips to Greenwood.
Viola Fletcher passed away a few months ago. Never got any form of reparations.
Yeah they are doing search have been for few years now.
Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.
It happened quite frequently, for instance when constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. Somehow it’s always easiest to demolish vibrant black neighborhoods.
Somehow yeah
And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.
And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.
St. Louis arch
The Dunsmuir Viaduct in Vancouver, BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan's_Alley,_Vancouver
Halifax, Nova Scotia. Demolished a black community for a bridge.
Brooklyn neighborhood in Charlotte, NC, which is now mostly just parking lots
Ok, that’s it! I’m never enjoying architecture, engineering, landscaping, or roadways in North America again!
Joking aside, it IS really fucked up that all of that was allowed to not just be done, but then forgotten!
It’s not perfect, but Austin, TX did an almost okay-ish job protecting Blackland. It’s not great, but it’s a symbol of what the tiniest amount of progress can look like.
The neighborhood was originally known as Blackland and was settled by Swedish immigrants
Nashville’s i65 on the North West
I-10 in New Orleans
The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn’t go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.
There’s a really good Behind the Bastards about the guy who made those decisions. Can’t remember his name.
99 Percent Invisible also did a great mini series about the book The Power Broker, which is about the life of Robert Moses.
Robert Moses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
This dude?
Btw just discovered behind the bastards by delving into L Rom Hubbard. Hilarious.
No, Olmsted was a landscape architect (also did Biltmore in NC). The state or city parks commissioner who did it. Can’t remember his name. He also explicitly didn’t leave room for future light rail expansion when they build the LIE, or some other expressway. Been awhile since I lostened to that one.
Same in St. Louis, but they went also went right through the “not the right color of white” Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods.
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Lake Lanier in Georgia too, under that reservoir was Oscarville.
I375 in Detroit
From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would “not be forgotten”
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
Nah, time travel and transrace!
Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn’t include a continent name
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society
Calling them “white people” does lump them together. There’s a fascinating history about how different ethnic groups got absorbed and assimilated into whiteness. You aren’t supposed to look into your family’s roots in Europe. That’s woke nonsense! Just shut up, drink your beer, grill your steaks, watch football. You’re white now.
BTW, I have heard people referred to as European-American. If your ancestors came from, say, Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, you could call yourself an Irish-English-Spanish-Italian-American, but European-American is much easier to say.
I would assume most of the time “black” is used in this context same as “white”, as in to refer to a skin colour, not to a culture.
And can’t people just refer in general to culture of white people collectively and unspecifically, that would also be written as capitalized “White” but would also be strange imo
Then that assumption is outdated, which is fine as long as, now knowing that, it is appropriately adjusted.
You can sorta refer to white people in that way but it doesn’t really have the same effect because of things like power dynamics and the fact that we are able to know where we’re from quite easily. For Black people it’s a cultural identity they needed to build nearly from the ground up, for white people it really is just a way to talk about a group of people based on their skin colour and generalized stereotypes. No one is White because they have connections to their more specific history, but many people are Black precisely because they don’t.
I get making a separation between reference to skin colour or “race” and culture, but I just feel like it should be consistent. Out of curiosity I checked how Wikipedia handled it and it doesn’t seem like there’s one rule
Ethno-racial “color labels” may be given capitalized (Black and White) or lowercase (black and white); mixed use (Black, but white) is also acceptable if editors at a particular article find it appropriate.
A June–December 2020 proposal to capitalize “Black” (only) concluded against that idea, and also considered “Black and White”, and “black and white”, with no consensus to implement a rule requiring either or against mixed use where editors at a particular article believe it’s appropriate. The status quo practice had been that either style was permissible, and this proposal did not overturn that.
I wonder if it would be acceptable to do “White but black”, I feel like that would seem outright sketchy in a way the opposite doesn’t
White but black would just be choosing to capitalize White for all the reasons it’s less deserving of it yet admitting those things can be valid so yea, 100% sketchy.
I’m not against “Black and White” and “black” is still a valid thing(some guy from Zimbabwe moving elsewhere can be African-American or African-Canadian, for example) but I’m also pretty ok with “Black and white” as well, especially in places where even white immigrants are treated so differently to citizens of colour. Look at how Musk is, on paper, a prime example of an immigrant who really ought to be deported from the US but is, despite being 100% African, treated with all the privilege his skin colour affords him there.
I think his privilege is more his immense wealth than his skin colour
A bit of all of it, but yes that most certainly helps. He’s a good public example, but also look at the fact that ICE is not going after anyone who looks like some flavour of white unless that person specifically gets in their way, and neither of the two recent murders had anything to do with immigration.
I think their focus is America. America’s racial problems are quite unique to America, because slaves were just part of normal life in the US up until slavery was abolished. It was part of the fabric of society in ways that it just wasn’t elsewhere. Even in the UK, where many black people can trace their family trees to slaves in the West Indies, there were never slaves actually held on the island of Great Britain.
Things like segregated school systems are still very much in living memory in the US. So there are unique issues in America that Americans must heal from before they can really consider such problems in the past.
Someone did explain it to me further. But I still… Well I’m not American. I just feel like, better would be to be consistent
It’s also interesting when the New York Times writes an uppercase Black but a lowercase white in the same article.
because Black refers to a specific cultural group while white doesn’t (that’d be Irish-American or whatever)
Jeez. I’m sure it is something where their heart is in the right place but just comes off as sketchy to me
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
So?
So there would be no time for Americans to learn about other countries and the advantages of the metric system. Oh… wait… never mind.
Where are you from?
Oh look he needs help setting up his ad hominem attack.
Afraid to answer the question when it’s not an ad hominem. Go ahead and attack me. I don’t mind cowards.
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