I know he's a pariah now due to the #MeToo stuff and his well-publicized sexual behaviors, but whenever anyone goes down that "that was so yesterday" route, I can't help but think of the bit by Louie CK where he says every few years or so white people add another hundred years onto how long its been since slavery existed in America. He says something like "Basically, it was 140 ago when you could own a person.
That's two 70 year old ladies living back to back!"
He may be a pervert, but he's right. We're quick to forget if it didn't affect us personally (i.e., if we're not black) so that it
seems like a long time ago, and of course Americans are famously stereotyped by Europeans and others as people who think 100 year old buildings, statutes, etc. are old (I think the joke is something like "Americans think 100 years was a long time ago, while Europeans think 100 miles is a long distance", referring to the occasional European tourist who assumes that they can land in NYC and visit San Francisco on the same day, because there are actually parts of Europe where you can visit multiple countries in one day). So 140 years seems like forever ago.
But then I remember how my grandfather was born on a farm in Illinois in 1911, the same year of
the lynching of mother and son Laura and J.D. Nelson in Oklahoma. Statistics collected on the phenomenon of lynching (which mostly, but not totally, affected black people; 70%+ of all lynching victims were black) by the Tuskegee Institute
end in 1968, indicating that the phenomenon went on -- however rarely -- until the late 1960s (though as you can read at the link, there are incidents even after that). 1968 was the year my own mother graduated from high school.
That was yesterday, for all intents and purposes.
None of this is to say that I agree with all the premises involved in modern 'woke' tribalism (I think I made that clear in my other post), but let's not pretend that this is ancient history and couldn't possibly affect people today. If you ever meet an Armenian person, chances are they have a very similar family story about a relative or maybe even multiple relatives lost during the genocides in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire (1915-1918), which were much more recent but also not within the lifetimes of probably about 99% of people living today (my grandfather is my oldest living relative, and he was born in 1921; the 1911 grandfather died years ago, when I was around 20). Yet I don't think anyone would deny that those genocides could and do have an effect on the modern Armenian community as a whole. So why should modern black Americans or others be any different? Sure it was a little bit longer ago, but not so much as to not have histories past down, and pain with them.
I suppose you could say "Well then why not let go of the pain so that you can move forward", but not being black myself I don't think it's my place to tell other people to do with their pain that I do not and cannot ever experience. It's pretty good just a general policy not to tell people how to live their lives and deal with their own emotions, right? I mean, isn't that what's so irritating about this 'white privilege' stuff -- that others are telling you you have this problem and this is what you need to do about it? The difference being, I suppose, that the fact that blacks suffered through slavery in the USA is not really debatable, while plenty of people will debate whether or not 'white privilege' really exists.
I dunno...the point is: just because it wasn't yesterday doesn't mean it was forever ago. You can disagree with some central 'social justice' tenets (though some people will hate you for it) and still acknowledge the reality of racial injustice in the US' history and the effects that this has on the present. If Flint, MI were full of Buffys and Beckys and Susans, does anyone really think their water crisis would've been ignored for so long, or the handling of it so horribly mismanaged? (NB: Flint is still over 40% white, so the point isn't that the government purposely did anything because they hate blacks and Flint is majority black, since it's not like they could direct the bad water to only go to black homes, but rather than the town as a whole is kind of a blight and Michigan already has so many problems and so little money, they didn't deal with it properly; if it was a place with a higher tax base/bracket, they probably would've jumped to it, because money talks, and white people
do tend to be more wealthy than black people in the USA. That's an economic fact, not a statement of personal or community worth.)
Or do you think black people just believe whatever 'the media' tells them, for whatever reason?
