Richard Jernigan -> RE: State of the USA (Jan. 27 2020 5:42:34)
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Maybe I should to try to clarify a little. In my reply to Ricardo's post I didn't mean to say racism wasn't a factor in Trump's election. Trump is clearly a racist, and solicits racist support. I think racism played a significant role in his election and continued support. My point, hastily made, was that I think people resenting condescension was also a significant factor, and I haven't seen any "resentment of condescension" political science pieces. My personal experience observing racism in the USA goes back more than 70 years. The personal horizons of few people here, if any, go back that far. I believe that the racism of 70 years ago in the South is just about unimaginable to most people alive today. I can't imagine what racism was like in the time of my slave owning Confederate great-grandfathers. I have read about it and tried to imagine that world from time to time. I have puzzled over the records in a family bible of marriages, births and deaths among enslaved people. Why are they in the family bible, and not just in the account books? Why are the records so few compared to the number of enslaved people? What was the reality behind all this? I imagine different things, but I realize I don't know what the reality was. I find the mental contortions of the "intellectual" supporters of slavery simply incomprehensible, while I find the indictment of the institution of slavery by slave owners like Jefferson to be vivid, thoughtful and cogent. Which view, if either, did my ancestors endorse? I don't know. But I do know that by 1865 my ancestors had lost their a$$es and all the fixtures. I also know that one of their sons, born after the Civil War, put a stop to a rebellious response to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision integrating public schools. He was Chairman of the school board in Vicksburg, Mississippi. The newspaper clipping says, "After some speeches strongly denouncing and advocating defiance of the Court decision Mr. Jernigan spoke last. He said, 'Father told us many stories of the War. As I recollect, we lost.' He then appointed committees to plan for the coming changes." Such a sentiment could have gotten him tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail in 1864. My first boss at Kwajalein was a black man. His grandparents were enslaved. He grew up on a tiny farm in Alabama, plowing behind a mule. He achieved an education, got an engineering degree, got a job with General Electric, rose through the ranks, and was given major responsibility. At Kwajalein he was one of the most respected members of the American community. He was elected Chief Justice of the Community Court, which heard and resolved disputes within the civilian community. I admire him, and consider myself fortunate to count him as a friend. That doesn't mean that nobody resented him, or that none of his employees held a racist grudge against him. But a personal history like his would have been utterly inconceivable in Alabama in 1950. I say the country has made progress in my lifetime because I have seen it. That progress does not excuse a single particle of the racism we now have. The only thing I have meant to say by citing progress is to encourage the hope of further progress, and to urge people not to lose hope due to the present setback. My response to Shroomy's brief remark about his peers at work was conditioned on my own experience living in south Louisiana in the second half of the 1970s. Last I knew, Shroomy lived in New Orleans. As recently as the 1990s New Orleans had a significant non-racist (anti-racist?) mixed race "Creole" population. I have read that hurricane Katrina and its aftermath drove out a large part of the black population. In 1970s Baton Rouge physically violent racism and utterly endemic political corruption turned my stomach and enraged me. I taught at Louisiana State University. Don't think the faculty weren't racist because they were educated. At least half of them were racist to the bone--maybe many more. But people didn't make racist remarks around me because they knew my position on the subject. It didn't take confrontation to let them know, and I never saw my position against racism affecting my job evaluation. Maybe this has no bearing on Shroomy's situation, but it's what my experience was. If I offended Shroomy, I apologize. I decided to get the hell out of that toxic part of Central America and move back to Austin. Back here in Austin where I retired after being away for 25 years, we pride ourselves on our liberal, Democrat-voting population. We delude ourselves by thinking there's hardly any racism here. When someone mentions there is a much lower percentage of black population in Austin than in other big Texas cities, we can't figure out why. RNJ
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