> America cannot address the inequality, poverty, inadequate education, the racially biased criminal justice system, and the limited life chances of black people that define contemporary society until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history. The obligations of the past weigh heavily upon the present.
Hardly a day goes by without me hearing of some injustice perpetrated against African-Americans, and a whole lot of US movies and videogames include these themes. Just how much more acknowledged can this history get?
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If you don't want to consume the media you don't have to. There are plenty of other genres out there.
I'm not trying to stir anything up, but just to throw this out there, the only people you really hear in Germany saying "Hey can we stop talking about what happened to the Jews, haven't they got enough attention?" are the Nazis.
I think there is a fundamental lack of acknowledgement of the scale and horror of core aspects of American history. This was a sustained holocaust. Yes it's in the past, but personally, I want to learn more about it. I feel that what they taught me in school was a vague, candy coated account that didn't get at the core of why this was wrong. As I got older and learned more on my own, I realized how much of a failure our schooling was in this aspect.
I also feel optimistic that now and going forward, as more African-American people come into wealth and leadership, we will finally see more programs and content that bring issues and information to light that was previously suppressed because of the lack of empathy of white leadership.
I think I was very clear - the article's phrasing of "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history" would have to be re-written as "until the nation examines this history in even greater detail". As it stands, it is at best highly misleading.
And I never said to stop talking about it - but you cannot simultaneously saturate the media with it, and claim it is unacknowledged. Do I really deserve to be compared to Nazis for noticing this?
For contrast, living in the EU, I hear far more about US slavery and the civil rights movement, than the Holodomor, with an estimated 4 million dead, that was much more recent and practically next-door. That held true even when Russia invaded Ukraine to take Crimea. To relate this to your Nazi comparison, imagine if Germany invaded Israel, and somehow the Holocaust wouldn't get mentioned.
Let me put it this way - which historical atrocities get more coverage than US mistreatment of blacks? How short would that list have to get, before you would take issue with "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history"?
The article's phrasing of "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history" is accurate.
I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Practically no one knows about these massacres. People think the sum total of racial violence after the war is what they've seen in the media: some civil rights protests, and a couple of lynchings by the KKK.
Acknowledging a thing, and then rejecting its significance is called lip-service. In America, we give a lot of lip-service to history, but we don't really accept it, or confront it.
> Just how much more acknowledged can this history get?
The massacres in Elaine, Greenwood, Slocum, Wrightsville, and other places are not acknowledged in primary or secondary school, and are not common knowledge. If we can all agree that the Boston Massacre, which claimed less than a dozen lives, is a historically relevant event, then these massacres which claimed hundreds should have a much greater share of the public consciousness.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadHardly a day goes by without me hearing of some injustice perpetrated against African-Americans, and a whole lot of US movies and videogames include these themes. Just how much more acknowledged can this history get?
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If you don't want to consume the media you don't have to. There are plenty of other genres out there.
I'm not trying to stir anything up, but just to throw this out there, the only people you really hear in Germany saying "Hey can we stop talking about what happened to the Jews, haven't they got enough attention?" are the Nazis.
I think there is a fundamental lack of acknowledgement of the scale and horror of core aspects of American history. This was a sustained holocaust. Yes it's in the past, but personally, I want to learn more about it. I feel that what they taught me in school was a vague, candy coated account that didn't get at the core of why this was wrong. As I got older and learned more on my own, I realized how much of a failure our schooling was in this aspect.
I also feel optimistic that now and going forward, as more African-American people come into wealth and leadership, we will finally see more programs and content that bring issues and information to light that was previously suppressed because of the lack of empathy of white leadership.
I think I was very clear - the article's phrasing of "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history" would have to be re-written as "until the nation examines this history in even greater detail". As it stands, it is at best highly misleading.
And I never said to stop talking about it - but you cannot simultaneously saturate the media with it, and claim it is unacknowledged. Do I really deserve to be compared to Nazis for noticing this?
For contrast, living in the EU, I hear far more about US slavery and the civil rights movement, than the Holodomor, with an estimated 4 million dead, that was much more recent and practically next-door. That held true even when Russia invaded Ukraine to take Crimea. To relate this to your Nazi comparison, imagine if Germany invaded Israel, and somehow the Holocaust wouldn't get mentioned.
Let me put it this way - which historical atrocities get more coverage than US mistreatment of blacks? How short would that list have to get, before you would take issue with "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this history"?
I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Practically no one knows about these massacres. People think the sum total of racial violence after the war is what they've seen in the media: some civil rights protests, and a couple of lynchings by the KKK.
Acknowledging a thing, and then rejecting its significance is called lip-service. In America, we give a lot of lip-service to history, but we don't really accept it, or confront it.
The massacres in Elaine, Greenwood, Slocum, Wrightsville, and other places are not acknowledged in primary or secondary school, and are not common knowledge. If we can all agree that the Boston Massacre, which claimed less than a dozen lives, is a historically relevant event, then these massacres which claimed hundreds should have a much greater share of the public consciousness.