I don’t know if it does or not. I certainly have never said any of that about you, and in case you haven’t noticed, have been defending you on this subject for a couple of days now. Not only do we all get Zoe’s point, I think we all get yours as well. And, now, I think everyone gets my point, so I think I’m done here.
Now don’t run off thinking I’ve misconstrued you, Sarahfeena! 
I appreciate what you’ve said in this thread. I was just using your comment as a springboard, not implying that you thought I was evil twinnish.
NP, you! I just can’t stand all this misconstruin’! Makes the baby Jesus cry to see all the Dopers fighting.
But I like making the baby Jesus cry!
Perhaps I’m my own evil twin. Better than being my own grandpa at any rate.
I think both happened, probably simultaneously. Human beings are masters at cognitive dissonance. When the desire for power and wealth is involved, and the only thing standing in the way between that power and wealth is another group people, we’ll find of way to make the arbitrary differences between us matter in consequence-bearing ways. So I agree with you that power is at the root of things like codified racism, just as it is with all codified “isms”.
Yes. We are in agreement here, too.
O.K., FinnAgain, here’s where I could bring up my twenty years in the retired teachers’ home where I toiled with saintly kindness to bring comfort and joy to my charges, feeding them and bathing them and letting them win at checkers and I did it all for free and it rained the whole time and HOW DARE YOU suggest that someone with my background could be wrong in my treatment of a retired teacher and besides you’re deliberately twisting my meaning because my post was really just an illustration to OTHERS of how wrong that interpretation of history is and…
But if I did that Zoe might sue me for copyright infringement, so I won’t.
Nonetheless, you’re scolding me and I respect you, so I’ll explain myself a little. Up to a point, my participation in this thread was all about the couple of sentences in Zoe’s post that raised the hullaballoo. I explained why I thought her statements were wrong and kind of offensive (I never thought they were especially hateful, just ignorant), and tried, very politely I thought, to jog her along to an interpretation/explanation that was not offensive, nonsensical, or an obvious lie. I was nice, I was gentle, I got bitten anyway. I hate being called a liar. So I decided to be mean.
Being me, I decided to be mean by making fun of her. An obvious target, from the posts I had seen, were her tendencies to immediately bring up her past as a justification for current bad behavior, and her depiction of the civil rights struggle as being mostly about her. In a first-person narrative, that’s inevitable to some degree, but her version of the sixties seemed Zoe-centric to a point I found comical. She referred to the Jim Crow era as a time when she couldn’t go into the “colored only” bus station, for pity’s sake. And speaking of someone’s making it into Harvard being her achievement, rather than the student’s or the family’s or the school’s, struck me as especially patronizing and offensive coming from a white teacher about a black student.
So yes, I was mean. But the post did not make fun of the fight for civil rights, which was noble and dangerous (I counted – she almost bought the farm six times in your post alone) and important. It made fun of the idea that having done something for civil rights means now you can say any fool thing you want about race and people have to lump it, it made fun of the notion that it was all about the fight of a few brave whites to give civil rights to black people whether they wanted them or not, and it made fun of Zoe for being the kind of person who, having lived through a time when people were killed because of their race, babbles weepily about discrimination against southern white people when people on a message board are impolite to her when she says stupid things.
Let’s be clear on this, if nothing else. Right now, so far as we know, Zoe is in no danger. Right now, she’s saying things which are stupid and offensive. And right now is when I’m calling her on it.
Maybe you’re me and monstro’s long lost triplet!
It is, however, an interesting rabbit hole.
Talk about your crazy phenotypes!
I remember reading somewhere that jsgoddess has curly hair.
Just sayin’.
Fair enough Soup. I got my hackles up more about the “southern authority figure blacks so desperately needed” and “It is not recorded whether the black students involved had any brains, courage or resources of their own, but presumably they helped Zoe all they could.”
I teach.
And I can honestly say that I have neither the dedication nor the guts to teach in a low SES, violence prone school. I don’t have the stuff it takes to work for crap pay in a building where I have to walk through metal detectors. I just don’t. And I have immense respect for the fact that Zoe brought the gifts of education to students in a situation that was undoubtedly very difficult for her.
I also know that I have felt immense pride when any of my students mastered a lesson or, with my help, reached (or even exceeded) what I knew their potential was. Likewise I don’t begrudge Zoe the ability to be proud of making a difference in the lives of children. I don’t see it as patronizing at all, to be honest. I see it as all the more reason to be proud if you’re a teacher who makes the difference in the life of a student who’s got the cards stacked against them.
And I sure as heck know that I would be sorely tested not to run for cover in a situation where I was likely to get death threats of bombs. That was the time period, after all, where Freedom Riders were firebombed, arrested and/or beaten. The National Guard was called out at Central High School and mob violence (with or without lynchings) looked likely. Cross burnings and worse were a very real threat from the KKK during that period. So although I used it six times, the fact that it was a possibly lethal choice to place yourself on the side of discriminated against children, and against the Klan, really does give me a reason for admiration. I honestly don’t know that I’d have the strength of will to stick with it if I knew that a Klanner might toss a molotov cocktail through my classroom window some day. I respect that someone kept up the important job of teaching students even under such conditions.
I probably reacted more harshly to you than I would have otherwise, but I don’t think you’re being quite fair to Zoe in a some respects.
With all that being said, I understand why you’re upset. For what it’s worth, I think that Zoe isn’t quite explaining herself as well as she might (partially because she’s upset about the issue), some people aren’t quite understanding her as well as they might (partially because they’re annoyed by the structure of the debate), etc… But all in all, I don’t think you were either lying or trolling. I do think you didn’t quite get what Zoe was saying, and she got more upset at you than was warranted.
Ah well. I don’t really have much else to say, and I don’t think I can have much of an impact on the thread at this point anyway. I certainly don’t have the energy to stay in the middle of a brawl that seems to have taken on a life of its own.
I think it would be fascinating to discuss the historical-usage of the ideology behind the “one drop” rule and “black blood”, and to look at when being black was constructed solely as a matter of ancestry with physical/mental/social traits associated with that ancestry, solely as a matter of physical/mental/social traits that “implied” a certain ancestry, and when it was a mix of the two. But this thread probably isn’t going to be the place to do it.
Can we have a good triplet an evil triplet and a confused triplet? We can take turns, though I think I was BORN to play the role of confused triplet.
I think I agree with every word in this post. It looks to me as though there are a lot of folks interested in winning, who are incorrectly convinced that they’ve really tried to understand the other person’s point, and who absolutely won’t take a deep breath, count to ten, and try once more to figure out what’s going on. As long as they’re set on locking horns, there ain’t much to do except to walk away.
Daniel
::kicks dirt::
I never get to be the evil twin.
:: pouts::
(edited - damn smilie)
Hell, I posted that by accident under my evil twin–er, wife’s–account. Sorry about that!
Daniel
Yes, black girl, you can be the confused triplet.
And am I interpreting this right? wring and LHoD are married?!
This thread is like a surreal soap opera, set in the South. Pat Conroy stuff. Prince of Tides.
Well, for that, you’d need more sex. And Catholic guilt. And food.
Since it was the post under burundi that was signed “Daniel”, I’m guessing that he’s married to burundi rather than to wring.
I just hope this doesn’t start another round of flirtin’ in the Pit. That stuff is just wrong.
I’m confident that we’re not married to each other, at least. Don’t ask me for a ‘cite’, though. 
Good observation, that.
But I didn’t know burundi and LHoD were married, either.
What’s weird is that now, whenever I see wring’s name, I’m going to think of LHoD. It’s going to be a while before I stop making this association in my mind.