When Israeli archeologists think the Bible isn’t an accurate historic record it ain’t just a minor nitpick.
CMC fnord!
There are a lot of extremely subtle cultural factors that can greatly affect the qualify of performance for various tasks. One of the biggest is Stereotype Threat, here is a good article on it. You don’t even need to read the whole thing (it’s long), just maybe the first 5 pages will give you a gist. One choice section:
And lest you think this is some super-liberal apologist bullshit to cover for minorities and women, it also cites several studies that conclude stereotype threats affecting whites or men
These factors are subtle and can be incredible socially ingrained. Here’s an NPR article about one study done on academics in computer science and engineering.
In other words, perfectly competent people can looks like fools, idiots, or loons just because of subtle context cues. Through no explicit fault of any party involved. How do you fix this? Well, this is complex, the first article I linked gave some ideas of defeating it. I can see a temptation towards resignation to one’s fate here – “well, if I’m not even doing anything wrong what am I supposed to do about it?” It’s a fair point, it’s something culturally endemic. The mere existence of a stereotype can cause these effects, including being aware of criticisms of those stereotypes.
It’s a complex issue, but since these factors have mounds of evidence supporting them, it’s clear that even if the factors are so subtle they may be difficult edging on nigh impossible to combat in all cases, it’s also clear that it’s not biological or genetic.
In this case, our culture has a prevailing stereotype that black people are bad at academics, and unlikely to succeed in college or get well-paying jobs. This stereotype exists, and even black people with rich parents or raised by a white family or whatever else are aware of these stereotypes. This knowledge alone can explain, in whole or in part, the fact that even well-off black people underperform compared to white people. Not that they’re genetically or naturally inferior, not because they’re crying about grandpa, but because societal stereotypes have instilled anxiety and self-doubt about their performance.
Right, but then angels came down and threw frogs at their oppressors. Again, different circumstances.
Jewish people celebrate their overcoming over slavery every year, and no one says a negative thing about it.
If black people were to do the same thing, people would shout at us to “get over it!” Because “that was a long time ago!” and “you’re wallowing in something that wasn’t even THAT bad” and “RACIST!”
If Hebrew enslavement even happened in the first place, it was an ancient event. But the last surviving American slave died in the 1970s. Old people today have memories of grandparents and great-grandparents who were alive during those days (my grandmother is one of these people). Living in the capital of the Confederacy, I’m reminded of American slavery at every turn.
The story of Sylvester Magee is just that, a story, much like the frogs in Egypt. Same level of documentation, too.
Really? There are records of a slave owner owning frogs in Egypt in in February 1859?
From your cite:
Really. The longest living human on record died at age 122, and the oldest man died at age 116. Do you really believe that good old Sylvester lived until 130, as he claimed?
Illustrating what should have been the point of the op: how things are sometimes silly to compare.
I think that you do understand why the Pesach story is not threatening to the White Christian mainstream and even embraced by some as they perceive it as part of the Easter tradition. Jews being instructed to remember that they were slaves in Egypt as a core part of our mythology is not something that represents anything comparable to Blacks discussing the here and now consequences of American slavery … with its implications of obligations and responsibilities.
Moreover be careful with those broad brush strokes about what “people would” do. To state that “some” or “a few” people would do something is one thing; to imply that most would is another and much more debatable. After all there is Black History Month and, well, slavery is discussed then as a matter of course and much more broadly than the Pesach story is told without too many batting an eye.
You want to try for something more comparable then it would be Jewish commemoration of the Holocaust and indeed some people do respond negatively and do the “get over it” thing or even deny that it ever occurred. Not “people” but “some people.”
But the comparison still fails even there. The differences are still too great.
Your blues aint my blues and my kappore (Yiddish for catastrophe) aint yours. To set them up as some sort of competition is asinine. The history of Jewish persecution is long and deep. It is different and the current circumstances are different not because one was “worse” than the other but for multitude of specific differences. But culturally we share having been oppressed. The point of the Pesach injunction of “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt.” is to recognize that commonality we have with those who are current victims of oppression across the world. We remember for a reason.
The fact is that the point of “remember that we were slaves in Egypt” or “remember the Holocaust” is not “that’s why we have the excuse for underperforming”.
I can tolerate a little lecturing from you, DSeid, because I think you’re an okay fellow. But I don’t think anyone can reasonably infer from my phrasing that I think “most” or “all” people would do anything. It is indisputable that “people” would be yelling if there was a holiday commemorating black people overcoming slavery. This is precise enough for the point I was making.
I have no way of knowing whether that would be “most” or “some”. But I do know that most people tend to have sympathy for folks they perceive to be more like them, and they tend to ignore or have dismissive feelings towards those who they perceive as “different”. I think all of us are vulnerable to this. Not just “some” or a “few”. For me to assume this, I’d have to have an extremely charitable view of human nature.
Which, of course, is not what is happening.
Not ever to my ear. It is to be personally grateful and to realize that not everyone else is yet “free.” To segue into monstro’s comment, that many who do not look or perhaps even act like we do right now are not actually so different, for I was a slave in Egypt. The wording is very intentional in the Haggadah: I was a slave. Of course it is mythology and myths have purpose.
Slavery and Holocaust remembrance are not myths we tell ourselves: they are history. Their commemoration both evoke different sorts of reactions from some, different from the telling of myths and different from each other based on many aspects, including based on who is being asked to do the commemorating.
I apologize if I came off as lecturing. Still to my ear “people” does sound like an implication of most.
I do disagree with you in your compare contrast exercise. If Black Americans decided to celebrate a holiday as families in their homes with symbolic foods and rituals to remember that Black Americans had been slaves, to be grateful that they are no longer and to recognize that not all are yet free (the parallel to Pesach) I have a hard time imagining that even a large some would blink an eye. If they, within their own communities, celebrated a holiday devoted to “never again” - whether “never again” is aimed to their own historic oppression or to oppression in general (the parallel to Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day) I also doubt many would object.
But that is not the point I was really most trying to make (and engaging in debate over the compare contrast is very much against what I want to contribute) … the point is that that in general the compare contrast exercise as some sort of competition divides … emphasizes the mutual perception of difference, which is not what any of should be wanting to accomplish. The histories are different, the commonalities real, and compare contrast competition is stupid.
His claim of living until 130 has nothing to do with the discussion. There’s evidence that he was a slave in 1859, and there’s evidence that he died in 1971, and it’s a helluva lot stronger than the evidence for toad-flinging seraphim. That evidence is enough that you have no call to be contradicting monstro’s claim.
No, but “remember the Holocaust” was sure as hell used as a reason to support the founding of a Jewish state and to continue sending it aid in multiple forms many decades later. The United States has not traditionally responded to Jewish memories of the Holocaust, as it has to black memories of Jim Crow and slavery, by scoffing and telling them to get over it already. The war reparations paid to Israel by Germany have no equivalent in the US.
Things are different in this instance, too. Go figure!
“The United States”? Do you mean official governmental declarations? Do you mean government officials? (I can provide you some quotes of what government officials said about Jews during WW2 if you want.) A majority of people? A few people?
I’m sorry you seem to have no point except to work to try to divide.
OF COURSE many Americans respond differently to things out of their history that their parents and grandparents and greatgrandparents did than they respond to something that some evil other that their parents andgrandparents fought against did. Go figure!
Not trying to divide anyone at all, just countering Terr’s implication that the circumstances for Jews and black Americans were the same. Of course they’re different; their differences are multilayered. Did it really sound like I was trying to divide people?
Yes, I do have a call to question that. In a debate, the person making the statement has the burden of proof.
Where’s a citation for monstro’s statement that
Monstro didn’t even offer one.
You provided it. There’s documentation that that dude was a slave in 1859 and died in the 1970s.
Being a slave in Egypt back then was waaaaay better than being a slave in the US a couple hundred years ago. Right?
My point was that Jews never used their past multiple oppressions, over thousands of years, as an explanation/reason/excuse for any underperformance in the present. In fact, I can’t readily think, other than for blacks, for whom else such an argument is used.
Well, since the comparison is nonsense, that would be understandable.
Very few black people blame “slavery” for purported “underperformance.” On the other hand, a lot of people recognize that a series of systematic and systemic actions including slavery AND Jim Crow AND ghettoization AND lynchings AND actions by both the government and civilian populations to intimidate a people into very recent history–with some actions continuing today–just might have an effect on a people that is not comparable to a legendary event from 4,000 years ago.
Uh, yeah–God kept hurling amphibians at their enemies, don’t you remember?