The problem of White Supremacy - Spinoff from Buffalo Shooting thread

Good article

When someone grows up like this I do wonder what makes some reject it (like the author did) vs fully accepting and adopting the same views
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My father, a successful lawyer and former aerospace engineer with an Ivy League degree, was an ardent defender of slavery.

Throughout my childhood, at the dinner table and the park, and when driving past public housing, he held forth on the superiority of white people and, as he saw it, the inferiority of everyone else.

He idolized our ancestors, who enslaved Black people in Mississippi. He would routinely denounce abolition as the meddling of know-nothing northern “bleeding hearts”.

“Birds of a feather flock together” was his mantra. This zeal for segregation extended to storytelling, and banning images of integration – lest his daughter be tempted to consort with anyone who wasn’t white.

He used my mom’s nail polish to cover Black children in picture books, or cut their faces out altogether. When I was seven years old,he took out a brown-skinned toy on the side porch and hammered it until its head came off.

Then he threw it in the garbage, where he said it belonged. He forbade me to watch Sesame Street because Black and white children played together on the show.

His cruelty was pointed and multifaceted. Once, when he asked what I’d learned that day at my fundamentalist Christian school in Miami, I mentioned that when someone fled enslavement in the South and was captured, their enslaver cut off their toes. My father was so angry, he seemed to levitate.

He canceled my plans and his own, and spent the weekend sketching civil war battlegrounds, lecturing me about the benevolence of my ancestors and the importance of cotton.

Luckily, no one else I knew in South Florida in the 1970s and 1980s agreed that slavery was acceptable.

As a child, I believed the US had progressed not only past my father’s enthusiasm for slavery, but past the denialism of our set of mid-century World Book Encyclopedias, which depicted plantations as bastions of quaint antebellum customs rather than the sites of bondage they were.

But the past several years have underscored how much that impulse is still with us – and is growing. In June, a group of educators in Texas reportedly proposed to the State Board of Education that references to slavery in the social studies curriculum be replaced with the phrase “involuntary relocation”.

The suggestion followed a Texas law enacted last year that prohibits teaching of subjects that might make students (by which it really means white students) “uncomfortable”.

As the new school year begins, similar laws effectively recast all references to slavery and its legacy as “critical race theory” in states from Florida to New Hampshire to North Dakota. Florida’s counterpart, the “Stop WOKE Act,” also targets private employers.

I’m sure my father would approve……..


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...y-ancestors-wrongdoing?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other