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"I am Not Your Negro" is a fantastic documentary about Baldwin. In that documentary, filmed in 1960's, the same questions were asked that are often asked today
by throwaway010718 9y ago
"I am Not Your Negro" is a fantastic documentary about Baldwin.
In that documentary, filmed in 1960's, the same questions were asked that are often asked today. William Buckley asks Baldwin, "Why are negros so upset ? You are on TV commercials, movie leads, you hold positions in government. Isn't racism in the past."
That was before I was born. But in my lifetime the Tuskegee medical experiments were still being performed on black men. I witnessed a landlord ask my parents to pretend they were taking an apartment so that the blacks in the waiting area could be told it is no longer available. I had a young detective in Chicago privately disclose to me that as a cop he would just followed black people (if there were more than one in the car because the odds one of them might have a warrant would be higher) in his cop car until they committed a traffic violation. He used racial profiling so effectively that he became one of youngest detectives of all time.
In my college years the US government was selling highly addictive and destructive drugs in African American neighborhoods as a covert way to raise funds. But when that story broke it was pushed off the headlines because the Monica Lewinsky scandal was more important. The reporter who broke the story was so disheartened he killed himself.
And in just the past years we have seen too many snuff films and needless deaths.
Yet I still personally encounter people who claim African Americans haven't experienced racism in 100 years. And what are they complaining about, "they seem to be in most commercials these days and hold high positions in government, so racism must be in the past". Because why bother learning what the Black Lives Matter movement stood for when you can just snark "all lives matter". But if you were snark "Pro-life ? You mean you are a vegetarian ?", some of those same people would be so annoyed they would burn down an abortion clinic. But black people burning something, that anger they can't understand.
Will the U.S. ever come to terms with our racist past ? Will our future grandchildren be ruminating on these issues simply because many people keep casually dismissing the suffering of others.
As a side note, I am conflicted if general interest stories like this should be on HN as they are too emotionally charged.
- cinquemb 9y ago>Will the U.S. ever come to terms with our racist past ? Will our future grandchildren be ruminating on these issues simply because many people keep casually dismissing the suffering of others. The suffering of the marginalized members in a society seems like it remains pragmatic goal of the the powerful all over the world to maintain influence and control of their local ant hill… I've seen it in the US, and I see it here in Indonesia… there just seems like a never ending supply of people willing to yield to such thinking/ideas as solutions to their personal ails/insecurities/fears, so long as they can keep their relatively comfortable status quo. When that can be overcome, then I think we as people can do more than improving slowly over generations. >As a side note, I am conflicted if general interest stories like this should be on HN as they are too emotionally charged. I think this piece speaks to things than just being and emotionally charged interest story. "If Hoover’s intention had been to demoralize a “dangerous individual” with subversive potential, driving him by hook or by crook from the battleground, then he could claim to have had some success." "The consciousness of surveillance distorted the arc of their careers, those of Baldwin and Wright in particular. It tainted the atmosphere of everyday existence – nothing more, or less, than the intimate feeling of waking up in private each day as who you are, without interference." I mean, there must be something here of interest to HN technically about the dis/similarity just with the aspects (and forms) of surveillance then and today (and it's utility to those in power in the world), and how their influences may differ?
- raldi 9y ago> The reporter who broke the story was so disheartened he killed himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb
- giancarlostoro 9y agoNothing suspicious sounding about that.
- tboyd47 9y agoThere's something about the topic of institutional racism that cuts white people very deep. We simply aren't comfortable discussing it, even in a polite way. You're right that stories like this and comments like yours don't lead to enlightened discussion on HN, but they are necessary. Racism doesn't just hurt black people; it hurts white people, too - not in the sense that white people are targeted, but in the sense that it lulls us into a false sense of social stability and desensitizes us to the human cruelty embedded in that stability. It conditions us to accept that cruelty as just part of some natural equation of society. So IMO anything we can do to combat it is admirable, even just as small as just discussing it and therefore acknowledging that it's a problem.
- 9889095r3jh 9y ago> As a side note, I am conflicted if general interest stories like this should be on HN as they are too emotionally charged. Of course this is relevant. The issues James Baldwin wrote about are still issues today, and tech companies are not free from blame. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-discrimination-housing-race-sex-national-origin https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc... https://www.npr.org/2017/03/02/518087610/new-research-looks-at-ways-to-help-stop-airbnb-racial-discrimination https://www.npr.org/2017/03/02/518087610/new-research-looks-... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-finds-racial-discrimination-by-uber-and-lyft-drivers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-fin... HN needs stories like these, and comments like yours.