Statues of Intolerance

[poorpete]

I'm hoping, in this current part of the civil rights movement, our culture can finally rid ourselves of the last of the overtly racist stuff we have lying around, as well as making progress on the more systemic issues.

Like most of the overtly racist stuff is gone, but there's still some of the weird stragglers, like the nickname of the Washington Football team, which makes recent news of their possible name-change very exciting. Aunt Jemima is being reconsidered, Gone With The Wind now comes with context, Splash Mountain will lose its Song of the South branding. All good.

I hope all overtly things will be swept away, but no doubt a few will stay around. What will stay, and what has been surprisingly been staying under-the-radar during these conversations?

My under-the-radar pick: The Fighting Irish and their mascot. It's way overdue for reconsideration, and it's gonna be weird that it's still around after these decisions subside.

[Kyle]

I read an article that talked about racist phrases we still use today- like Eeny Meeny Miney Moe.

But then it said the phrase "sold down the river" needs to go away because it originated in how slaves were taken down the Mississippi and sold off to plantations. Yowch.

There was also a lot of stuff about "Master Bedroom" becoming "Primary Bedroom" and code languages trying to get rid of master/slave references.

[poorpete]

Eep. Haven't really thought about the use of "master."

Listening to youtube nursery rhymes around our kids, we'd come across "1 little 2 little 3 little pigges" and my wife made a good point: why keep trying to change it? Just get rid of it. It was racist in two separate versions in history, and there's nothing special about the melody that it needs to be ingrained in future childhoods.

[akiva]

Is that the one that at one point was called Ten Little Indians? One of Agatha Christie's books had to change it's title at least twice because of that. Although the problematic words are still in the book itself, I think.

[Phoebe]

I think it's great that people are taking down all this racist and Confederate memorial stuff, or providing historical context where appropriate. I'm especially delighted that the effort includes the grotesque racism against Native Americans that often gets swept under the rug. Trump's speech celebrating Custer on the 4th of July at Rushmore, and his whining over changing the Redskins mascot, was obscene. I don't know if you can or should measure these things but I think he truly is bigoted against American Indians more than any other group of people. It's bizarre to see the very personally motivated ways this specific hatred manifests in him.

I do worry that too much focus on the symbolic realm suits Trump's interests as a grandstander and campaigner on petty grievances, when the more important thing is the generational wealth gap, the systemic police brutality, the education gap, the modern day version of debtors prison where people who can't pay fines are incarcerated, etc. I know that people can pay attention to multiple projects at once but I'm not sure the national media is capable of that, and I worry when the bigger story is about whether we should have a statue that we start to lose sight of other vitally important stuff and give Trump an opportunity to bloviate, whereas on the other issues or anything else of substance he and Republicans cannot point to a single good thing they've done or even plan to do.

Master slave stuff - there's no way to eradicate that outside the specific context of Confederate history in the US. The entire history of the world is imbued with it, so the stuff we should be worried about is not what we call a bedroom but how we are dealing with the specific legacy of slavery and its aftermath in this country.