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Split Thread Tearing Down Statues Associated With Racial Injustice

JoeMorgue said:
That's literally 90% of the "Whhhaaatttt? I'm just talking!" discourse.

Hey here's a radical idea. We can still discuss things after we fix them. No laws says we can't.

We can get rid of the racist traitor statues and the Pancake box "Mammy" images and all you delightful people can still talk about it "What... where on a message board that's the point... we're just talking is all" people can still just be talking.

But no.... we have to talk "first" for some reason.
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That's what the people yanking these things down are counting on, centrist lib paralysis.

The did nothing but talk and hand wring when people wanted the statues down. Now they can do nothing but talk and hand wring when people want the statues put back up.

Odds are good they don't take any meaningful action to counter the abrupt removal, so the statue yankers win. I think they're allergic to decisive action.

Damn shame. ;)
 
JoeMorgue said:
That's literally 90% of the "Whhhaaatttt? I'm just talking!" discourse.

Hey here's a radical idea. We can still discuss things after we fix them. No laws says we can't.

We can get rid of the racist traitor statues and the Pancake box "Mammy" images and all you delightful people can still talk about it "What... where on a message board that's the point... we're just talking is all" people can still just be talking.

But no.... we have to talk "first" for some reason.
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First compliance then discussion.
You would make a good cop.
 
Mike! said:
Am I the only one here who grew up regularly referring to good friends of my father, including his boss, as "Uncle"? My son* has called my two closest friends, "Uncle Steve" and "Uncle Wayne" for as long as he could call them by name. I always regarded it as a title of love and respect. How could I have been so wrong?
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I've seen a lot more "aunt" than "uncle". My wife is "auntie" to a couple of sets of friends, even though the children are now in their 30s.
 
JoeMorgue said:
That's literally 90% of the "Whhhaaatttt? I'm just talking!" discourse.

Hey here's a radical idea. We can still discuss things after we fix them. No laws says we can't.

We can get rid of the racist traitor statues and the Pancake box "Mammy" images and all you delightful people can still talk about it "What... where on a message board that's the point... we're just talking is all" people can still just be talking.

But no.... we have to talk "first" for some reason.
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Nope. We're talking "during" the changes. And from the sidelines
 
Parsman said:
You are aware of the book "Uncle Tom's Cabin" I assume? And you know that from that Uncle Tom did become a derogatory term. Now you may not like it, and you may be able to show usage of "uncle" which is using it as the normal family relationship descriptor. However calling anyone from the black community an "Uncle" whatever is clearly meant by many if not most who chose to use the term as derogatory and belittling.
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Oh? Clearly? Has anyone ever done that? I am familiar with the phrase "Uncle Tom", and I have heard it shortened to "Tom". I have never, once, heard it shortened to "Uncle".


I think this is a case where a fictitious back story has been invented. "Uncle Ben" sounds like "Uncle Tom", and then someone comes along and say, "Yes...white people used to do that because......"

Forget the "because" part. I don't think anyone ever did it. I think it's made up.

ETA: Likewise, "Aunt Jemima" is racist, and uncles are a lot like aunts, so "Uncle Ben" must be racist too. It's an invented back story.

"Aunt Jemima" actually is racist, at least in the sense of playing to a black stereotype. Uncle Ben? Not so much. He was meant to look like an American rice farmer.
 
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Meadmaker said:
Forget the "because" part. I don't think anyone ever did it. I think it's made up.
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Yeah well, hate to say this but you're wrong. Somehow you will have to learn to accept the fact that not being an expert on the historical nadir of race relations in the United States means there are probably some epithets with insulting or condescending connotations that exist despite you personally never having heard of them.
 
Mike! said:
Am I the only one here who grew up regularly referring to good friends of my father, including his boss, as "Uncle"? My son* has called my two closest friends, "Uncle Steve" and "Uncle Wayne" for as long as he could call them by name. I always regarded it as a title of love and respect. How could I have been so wrong?


*For anyone not aware, both my boys are on the autism spectrum, and my youngest is nearly nonverbal so he doesn't refer to anyone by name, but does know people by name, so if I say, "We're going to "Uncle" Wayne's house, he knows exactly where we're going.
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It's interesting that you mention this; because my family has never done it, and most of the media depictions of this practice I can remember seeing tend to be jokes (i.e., the person who is not related to a child but nevertheless wants or tells the child to call him "uncle" is usually a creepo). The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is the "Full House" TV show.
 
Meadmaker said:
He was meant to look like an American rice farmer.
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No, he wasn't. The original image was of a maitre de. It's part of a long advertising tradition of happily subservient black mascots, which largely went out of style around the time of the civil rights era.
 
Checkmite said:
Yeah well, hate to say this but you're wrong. Somehow you will have to learn to accept the fact that not being an expert on the historical nadir of race relations in the United States means there are probably some epithets with insulting or condescending connotations that exist despite you personally never having heard of them.
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Then examples can be forthcoming.

I know I'm not an expert in all things historical, nor all things cultural, and black.

If people did this, then Hollywood never picked up on it. I can remember people complaining about "boy", and I've seen it depicted in film.

"Uncle"? It's news to me.
 
I don't want to get caught up too deep in the rice thing. (I know, too late.) Was "Uncle Ben" a racist stereotype? I never noticed it. But then again, I have some Uncle Ben's rice in my cabinet right now, and when this subject came up, I had to look at it to see if there was a black man on the cover. I don't have any cream of wheat, so I had to rely on the internet to see that picture of a black man.

Aunt Jemima? Yeah, I knew about Aunt Jemima.

It isn't really about Uncle Ben. It's about what the next thing we do that we are informed is actually racist, even though we didn't know it.
 
Meadmaker said:
Then examples can be forthcoming.

I know I'm not an expert in all things historical, nor all things cultural, and black.

If people did this, then Hollywood never picked up on it. I can remember people complaining about "boy", and I've seen it depicted in film.

"Uncle"? It's news to me.
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We're really at the point where "I never saw it in a TV show/movie so it ain't real" is a valid position?
 
A 2007 article when they rebranded Uncle Ben as a company chairman, complete with a virtual office to explore.

Uncle Ben, Board Chairman

The actual biography of Uncle Ben is at variance with his fanciful new identity. According to Ms. Kern Foxworth’s book and other reference materials, there was a Ben — no surname survives — who was a Houston rice farmer renowned for the quality of his crops. During World War II, Gordon L. Harwell, a Texas food broker, supplied to the armed forces a special kind of white rice, cooked to preserve the nutrients, under the brand name Converted Rice.
In 1946, Mr. Harwell had dinner with a friend (or business partner) in Chicago (or Houston) and decided that a portrait of the maitre d’hotel of the restaurant, Frank Brown, could represent the brand, which was renamed Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice as it was being introduced to the consumer market.
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A black man who's rice wasn't even what was being sold.

Another black man looking "properly" waiterly.

As the face of a company filling the pockets of white owners.

We don't even know if he was an uncle. Should we just assume that his family tree was really an important triangulation? It was the 1940s. "Uncle/Aunt first name only" was a crafty bit of language reinforcing that a black person being hailed by an honorific was to be avoided.

P.S. maybe it's not that your black friends don't care. Maybe they just have learned not to bother "in certain company."

When we find out "quaint things we take for granted" were steeped in racism all along, they don't owe guidance through the 7 stages to us.
 
wareyin said:
We're really at the point where "I never saw it in a TV show/movie so it ain't real" is a valid position?
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Or anywhere else.

Did you call black people "uncle". Did you see it happen, anywhere? Every time I've seen it referenced it has been, "Other people used to do this."

Well? Did they? It has all the marks of being a made up story to me.
 
The speed at which people are running away from "Yes you don't see the problem because you aren't the disenfranchised group. That's THE POINT." is astoundashing, a mixture of astonishing and astounding that I've just created.

It's not even "Well as a white person I've never encountered anyone discriminating against me for being white, so racism doesn't exist" it's "Well as a white person I've never encounter anyone discriminating against me for being black, so racism doesn't exist."

The fact that you don't get/believe in/are bothered by caricatures of black people doesn't matter. Like... at all.
 
JoeMorgue said:
The speed at which people are running away from "Yes you don't see the problem because you aren't the disenfranchised group. That's THE POINT." is astoundashing, a mixture of astonishing and astounding that I've just created.

It's not even "Well as a white person I've never encountered anyone discriminating against me for being white, so racism doesn't exist" it's "Well as a white person I've never encounter anyone discriminating against me for being black, so racism doesn't exist."

The fact that you don't get/believe in/are bothered by caricatures of black people doesn't matter. Like... at all.
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We actually agree on something.

"Because black people don't like it" is a perfectly valid reason for changing something as trivial as the logo for a brand of rice.

However, it is not out of bounds to examine that dislike and its' origins either.
 
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