“Black People Were Just Less Smart Back Then” -Grandma
“Black People Were Just Less Smart Back Then” -Grandma
Bernie Sanders disagrees with your 2 Groups hypothesis
It says they would identify with one of these two groups, as in racists and anti-racists. Bernie Sanders would fit in one of those two groups. Your interpretation does speak volumes, however.
Yeah, my grandparents grew up in the Deep South, white as hell, and marched with MLK when he started happening.
People are good or bad on an individual level. Always.
So does Jim Brown and the Weather Underground.
My Grandma was running away from the Marcos regime in the Philippines as a political refugee. Many Chinese Americans's parents were running away from Red China.
There's more than two stories in America.
Btw: Asians are racist as fuck to each other. Just in slightly different ways. It's hard to describe.
Even if we settle on White America vs Black America specifically, Abraham Lincoln probably was a anti-slavery but pro-segregation kind of person. Racism itself has weird fractal-like split of nuance.
Case in point: Malcom X believed in Back to Africa and was anti-integration. Malcom X believed in building a new country (kind of like Israel) except for African Americans. What side do you put Malcom X here?
Even the people in the USA at the time generally just read about this in the news without getting involved. The fraction of the population that was either protesting or attacking the protesters was small.
Consider something like the controversy around gay marriage, which more people here might remember. Most people might have picked a side the way that they would support one sports team over another, but they didn't have strong feelings about the issue and they didn't actually take any action.
That was pre hajj Malcolm X, post hajj Malcolm X believed in integration but advocated for African Americans to invest in their own communities
...have tried to hand down their values.
My grandparents came here from Norway and Sweden. Despite having viking ancestry, they were the sweetest, most caring left wing people on earth... My mother's side was from Texas. I don't communicate with them at all since I was a teenager and a cousin tried to seduce me. I'll take the Vikings over the cousin fuckers. One side has distant slavery over 1000 years ago, and were violent raiders for several hundred years. The other side is currently racists and historically recent slave owners, and incestuous assholes that back a fascist. I will side with the Vikings all day, every day over that.
My grandparents on one side were absolutely destitute native Americans living on the reservation, so poor that one of their 10 children rolled off the bed and froze to death, and on the other side my grandparents were the child of one of the co-founders of AIG and lived on millionaires row in New York and a psychopathic Alabamaian girl who fired a shotgun at her own father because he wouldn't take her into town to get her ice cream and after she missed when he grabbed her and said, "Do you know what they would have done to you if you would have killed me?" she responded with, "They would have taken me into town and gotten me some ice cream because my dad had just died."
Which sounds funny in retrospect, and it kind of is, but then imagine being the child of a woman raised by this woman.
A lesson? Take all the time I need?
Please don't condescend. This is not news to me. Many of the yts that I grew up around were openly racist AF.