I am white, but I to can understand where he is coming from-with the caveat that I don’t think anyone is suggesting that segregation is worth the economic support that a “black” economy gave the minority community. Yes, it is an advantage to have their own set of doctors, auto dealers, stores, etc. But with that came segregation and no one can say the tradeoff was worth it. MLK may have regretted losing the economic independence but never hesitated to make the trade. And I strongly suspect Urbanredneck would agree.
Were kids actually less supervised back then? I mean, I grew up in the 80s, and I was still walking to school by myself, and then walking back home and latchkeying myself in, in fourth grade. And while there weren’t any guns in my house, my sister and I both learned how to use power tools when we were even younger than that.
Or is this supposed constant supervision more recent than that?
Are you suggesting parents in the 50’s were helicopter parents?
Black urban communities also had a lot of poverty too. More undignified poverty than what we have now. Bare-feet-cuz-we-can’t-afford-shoes kind of poverty. We-have-to-piss-in-a-pot-cuz-we-can’t-afford-plumbing-in-our-tarpaper-shack kind of poverty.
Black urban communities have their own doctors, lawyers, etc. now. There are more black professionals now than we could ever dream of “back in the day”. Yes, it was nice that working class families could live alongside middle-class and upper-middle class families…but only if you were the working class family. If you were an upper middle-class black person, you would often have to ship your kids to a far away private school to get an “elite” education, since black kids in your community were all thrown together in overcrowded classrooms with outdated hand-me-down books and broken equipment and horrible facilities. Why would any socially mobile, ambitious black person want this for their children?
Why would this be better than what we have now?
And although they may have been safety within the confines of the all-black neighborhood, black people did have to leave that safety quite often. Like every time they went to work or ran errands. I don’t know about you, but I would rather have constant safety than the sporadic safety that black people “back in the day” had.
The problem is that with those advantages came with some serious disadvantages. No one is saying that the “back in the day” was 24/7 hell for black people. But it was not a better time for black people than now. Hell, if a black person wants to live around successful, highly educated professional black people, there are thousands of cities and neighborhoods across the country they could choose from. “Back in the day” there weren’t that many places like that because the vast majority of black people were NOT professionals. They were scrubbing toilets and shining shoes for a living, regardless of the “good educations” provided to them by segregated educated facilities.
(Not all all-black schools were staffed by loving black teachers, by the way. A lot of them were staffed by racist “honkeys”.)
I’m a scientist now because I was able to leave my community without any fear and explore and do things that black women just aren’t “supposed” to do. If I had kept to my community, whether out of fear of the “honkeys” or because I was forced to by laws and regulation, my trajectory in life would have been severely limited. I don’t know if I would have been a toilet-scrubber if I had been born in the Jim Crow South. But I probably would not be a scientist. And just thinking about that makes me sad.
I said the opposite - that the 1950s were more free-range but today’s parents are helicopters.
TL;DR It’s the difference between “ghetto” in the European sense of an enforced ethnic neighborhood, and “ghetto” in the U.S. sense of “the worst part of town.”
I took a course called “Urban Sociology” back in the 1970s. In at least one of the several books I had to read, the authors said that segregation pushed all of a minority group into a microcommunity, with lower and upper class forced to be together, whereas in a desegregated society, the upper class minority tended to move into more affluent neighborhoods that had previously been denied them.
I’m not agreeing with that POV, but it’s at least a rational POV.
my apologies. I read it wrong.
I remember my 3rd grade teacher asking to borrow my scout knife to open a box. My prized possession. I made a foot long knife in shop class in high school and carried it around as a bookmark during the time I was making it.
Yes. I’m basically saying the idea of everything “black” in the past always being bad is wrong.
I don’t think you could be more wrong. It was common to know ALL of your neighbors on your block and to interact with them. That’s not a function of childhood views. That’s an adult observation of what it use to be like.
It was common for young kids to walk or bike to school on their own. All the schools had massive bike racks for the students.
The single income nuclear family provided a full time teaching environment. the skill-sets of my mother and the mothers of that generation were substantial.
Back in the 1950’s it was legal for a man to beat his wife and children. She asked for it; they deserved it. The concept of marital rape did not exist. He wants sex, it’s legal.
Rape was rarely reported to the police and NOT talked about in the news. Most newspapers had a policy not to print stories on the subject. Any women who was raped was seen as “asking for it.”
I heard the same - black people couldn’t move out of their neighborhoods, and therefore had much more of a vested interest in making their neighborhoods livable. And unwed parenting was much lower, so there were adult male role models around.
Segregation was still bad and unjust.
Regards,
Shodan
These professionals had to deal with a galling amount of racism every time they dared to step outside of their bubble, though. So “living peacefully” is disingenuous; they could only live peacefully if they stayed confined to the box racial oppression put them in.
In my understanding from conversations with older black Americans, one of the most important, by far, changes since the times of segregation is the lesser amount of fear – in the past, the slightest mistake by a black person was even more likely to result in a brutal response from white-controlled society than today. There’s still some of that fear today, quite obviously, but it was much greater in the times of Jim Crow and segregation. There was no recourse back then – no cameras and very little friendly media or friendly authorities – if a black person was raped or beaten by a cop, or by a prominent white person, or even a group of white youths, etc. Emmit Till was perhaps the most prominent example, but there are countless other victims (most are probably unknown beyond surviving friends and family) of white supremacism that literally had no recourse for justice. Now, at least, there’s at least a bare chance of justice (even if there’s still a ton of progress that needs to be made on this). Imagine the psychological damage if you understood from childhood that others in society could brutalize, rape and even kill you with very little likelihood of consequences for the perpetrators. If kids believe this, then ISTM that they have a pretty damn reasonable expectation that society’s traditional routes of success aren’t really designed or even available for them.
Not living with ‘miserably unhappy’ parents is unlikely to explain the huge shift. Obviously people with kids get divorced (or never marry) because they the adults choose to, and their right to choose that. It doesn’t mean it’s best for children in a majority of cases, even if the adults claim to believe so or even really do.
And, besides the fact that the OP said 1950’s not 1850’s, it would be difficult to find a past time for say African Americans where 2/3’s of kids were growing up in single parent households, like now, due to parents dying. That’s seriously worse than the 50’s IMO, and of course has become a lot more true in non-black US households more recently also.
It’s also not refuted IMO in case of blacks by arguing that (current day) racism (as opposed to perhaps legacy of racism) was a much more powerful force in the 1950’s than now. Unless one argues that family breakdown was a necessary byproduct of fighting or reducing racism.
As far as arguing that way more kids growing up without full time fathers is offset to some degree by more personal freedom and fulfillment of adults, I’d accept that. I just don’t agree with the idea that the plus means the minus doesn’t exist, or might not be greater.
Breakdown of the family is a major way in which things are not as good now IMO. I don’t deny that materially the country is better off (particularly just the average level, less so if you focus on distribution but still so). I’m white straight Christian male and much prefer having been born in the late 50’s to being my age now in the 50’s. Still there are things that were better then and it doesn’t require some pernicious racial (or other ist/phobic) attitude to think that.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s in an abusive family. Had I been born in the 90s, my father would have been put in prison and the family protected from him. (Not just a personal opinion, my cousin used to work for CPS, making recommendation for abusers, including prison time.)
My mother reported the abuse to both doctors and the clergy but was ignored or the abuse was minimalized.
Although the system is not perfect now, it was absolutely horrific back then.
Not really, it was actually quite difficult after WWII to bring a war bride from Japan to the United States. There were less severe difficulties in bringing war brides to the United States from other Asian countries, but it was still not encouraged and there were a lot of hurtles.
Now who said that? Segregation was wrong. Jim Crow was wrong. Next you’re going to be telling us that the water from the black water fountain tasted better.
Symphony orchestras in concentration camps did not mitigate the evil of the camps.
This difficulty was a central plot issue in Sayonara - first a novel in 1954, then a movie in 1957.
I dont think that is true. Sure, in some states " that wives charging husbands with criminal assault and battery must suffer more injuries than commonly needed for charges of battery" so a few slaps wouldn’t bring the cops but if you sent your wife to the hospital you certainly could be arrested.