There was an interesting post in the Business Insider blog:
LHoD’s response speaks for me as well. I’ll just leave it at that.
Jimmy Carter’s autobiography has some very interesting passages about growing up in the rural south and race relations. I’d post a few short quotes but I no longer have the book. One of his better stories was playing with black friends as a very young child. Some of the kids often beat him playing schoolyard games. At least until he got older and he started winning. One of his very best friends stopped coming by as often and avoided him at school. He finally confronted the kid and learned his parents had told him to be careful around whites. To watch his place. Don’t make them look bad by winning games. Which was sadly a common way blacks avoided trouble at that time in the divided South.
Carter goes on to describe his changing perceptions of his childhood. The injustice of the separate seating at the movie theatres. He began questioning the status quo of the divided South and his own feelings about it. I highly recommend the book for anyone interested in learning what it was like growing up in rural 1930’s and 40’s Georgia.
I wish Phil would have taken the time to think about his childhood and segregation before speaking. He did grow up twenty years later than Carter. But there were still remnants of the old South that he should have been aware of. I even remember old movie theaters with two entrances for blacks and whites. The black entance was locked and no longer had a sign. But it was purpose was obvious. I saw colored and whites only signs on old abandoned buildings in the late 60’s. It took a long time for the scars of Jim Crow to fully disappear.
My mother told me about seeing a gas station with three bathrooms - Men’s, Women’s and Colored - when she was first married and living in eastern North Carolina in 1966.
Lest anyone fall for the “I’m just po’ dum’ White trash” schtick.
CMC
Please reread my post I said experience - not opinion. There are illegitimate opinions in cultural context but no one’s experience is illegitimate and all deserve respect.
So did white southerners move to the north in percentages comparable to black southerners?
It was on the job. He was giving an interview to promote the show.
Also something to think about: Of both black and white southerners who moved north, who returned to the south in greater percentages? Apparently Gregory’s book Southern Diaspora says that white southerners returned in much higher percentages. Why would blacks and whites have a different pattern here if it is mostly driven by economics?
N.B. I have not personally read Gregory’s book.
What’s with the smilie face, carnivorousplant?
You have heard of Rosewood, right? And Tulsa? And DC riot of 1919?
I hope you have heard of these stories and that I am being severely whooshed.
You’re confusing the facts of American history with this:
At any rate, the need to deny the facts of history points to either an underlying shame, or massive ignorance.
I have no idea what the answers to your questions are. That being said, blacks and whites who did or didn’t move north may have been members of separate economic strata. I’m not sure that you can necessarily make very many inferences based on their respective migration patterns.
Cite?
What cite is needed? Why would GQ be interviewing the guy if he wasn’t a reality-show star? Does he seem like the typical subject covered by GQ? Maybe if the magazine were Guns & Ammo, or Duck Hunters Quarterly, I could see it, but not in the case of GQ.
Also, here’s the title and first paragraph/subhead:
“What the Duck?
How in the world did a family of squirrel-eating, Bible-thumping, catchphrase-spouting duck hunters become the biggest TV stars in America? And what will they do now that they have 14 million fervent disciples? Our Drew Magary toured the Louisiana backwater with Phil Robertson and the Duck Dynasty gang to find out.”
There are photos of “The Men of Duck Dynasty.” Clearly, the article is not about Duck Commander, the duck call that led to all of this.
Tolerance doesn’t apply to the intolerant, if we tolerate them then there simply wouldn’t be tolerance.
But you can’t help them change without tolerating them. Intolerance only breeds hatred and alienation.
Quite a dilemma.
You promote exclusivity while preaching inclusivity.
Want them to change? Tolerate them enough that they can learn from you, not hate you. That’s how to make changes palatable.
Or, um, silence them with new government rules. But that doesn’t change the thoughts behind the silence.
If we’re going to get into hypocrisy, I bet if I tried I could find some quotes from the same crowd now defending Phil who called for Martin Bashir to lose his job (and got their wish).
So if Mel Gibson or Michael Richards have found themselves becoming essentially blacklisted in Hollywood because of things they said “off the clock”, is that wrong IYO? That just doesn’t square, for me, with the way entertainment works. If people say things anywhere that get them a toxic image, image is a lot of what the entertainment industry sells, so they are perfectly within their rights to reevaluate how that fits in with their “brand”.
Right. And I actually find this more pernicious than when people say the N-word or hurl other crude insults. This is of a piece with what Trent Lott got in trouble for: going back and making an argument that the mid-twentieth-century achievements in civil rights were in fact a mistake, that the senators filibustering civil rights bills were right after all.
We saw the same kind of thing happen as regards the Civil War: revisionist historians made Radical Republicans like Thaddeus Stevens out to be out of control zealots, while the reason for Southern states’ secession was shifted from slavery, as it was clearly understood at the time, to “states’ rights” and undefined “economic factors”. Focus was shifted, as in GWTW, to the sad plight of white plantation owners who had their antebellum homes burned. This was so longstanding and successful an effort that I had to quit my College Bowl team because of bad blood that developed when I discovered that the entire rest of the team besides me firmly believed the lie that “the Civil War was not about slavery”.
So while crudely bigoted comments just serve to dig racists deeper into their own hole, assertions like Phil’s need to be fiercely combated because of the effect this can have as fewer and fewer people were around to witness the era before civil rights. (There is a similar danger, btw, surrounding women’s plight in the “Feminine Mystique” days.)
If you tolerate them all you are teaching them is that their views are acceptable.
Dafuq you talking about?
You didn’t say they interviewed him because he’s a star. You said the purpose of the interview was to promote the show. Cite?