26 ms·

Around 9% of our population were grown adults when segregation ended. Our history is nearer than we prefer to admit.

by michaelchisari 8y ago

projectileboy 8y ago
And it continued in so many ways! When MTV first aired in the early 80s, they would not play videos by black artists.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Citation? That's not my memory.
  - projectileboy 8y ago
    There are a lot of different tellings of this story; here’s one: https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-2834657 https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-...
  - purple-again 8y ago
    Here is the relevant excerpt from the link provided by another user. "Scant" is read by me to mean 'yes there were in fact videos, just not in the proportion to what should have been" in direct response to "they would not play videos" There is no room for 'sides to the story'. It was a statement made and countered by this source. We can take issue with the source if you like, but I looked them up and didn't see anything partisan about them. When MTV debuted on Aug. 1, 1981, at least one black face on the network was a mainstay. It belonged to J.J. Jackson, the sole African American on MTV's roster of video jockeys, or VJs as they became known. Despite Jackson’s presence on MTV through 1986, the network faced allegations of racism for giving scant airtime to videos featuring people of color. MTV executives have denied that racism was at the root of the network’s “blackout,” saying that black artists received little airplay because their music didn’t fit the channel’s rock-based format. “MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel,” said Buzz Brindle, MTV’s former director of music programming, to Jet magazine in 2006. “It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel’s format that leaned toward rock at the outset.” With so few black rockers, adding African Americans to MTV’s roster proved difficult, according to the network’s co-founder Les Garland, whom Jet also interviewed. “We had nothing to pick from,” Garland explained. “Fifty percent of my time was spent in the early days of MTV convincing artists to make music videos and convincing record labels to put up money to make those videos…”
    - forapurpose 8y ago
      That tells only MTV's side of the story, and IME everyone has an excuse for discrimination. It's not a signal of anything; it's just part of the process. Also, can you provide a link to the source? To quote, either start each paragraph with ">", or put asterisks (sans spaces) before and after the text.
      - laretluval 8y ago
        Who would have sufficient information to tell another side to this story?
        icebraining 8y ago
        Well, it seems interesting that when David Bowie asked the same question to one of MTV's veejays, his answer was more about the sensibilities of the viewers than the lack of supply: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by … a string of other black faces, or black music.” Which is more like saying, "we're not racists, we just have to appease racists to make our profits". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/01/11/how-david-bowie-confronted-mtv-for-ignoring-black-artists-in-the-early-1980s/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
  - mobilefriendly 8y ago
    Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge force in bringing MTV to mass audiences.
- gaadd33 8y ago
  Were there a lot of music videos made before MTV? Just curious about the progression of them and how they came to be distributed before there was a cable tv channel.
ams6110 8y ago
If there's one thing pretty constant in human history, it's that we do terrible things to each other. Always need to be on guard for this. But don't overlook the good we do. We (the United States) did end slavery, and then segregation, at a huge and bloody cost.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  I agree, and I'd also point to women becoming full members of society, as individuals, citizens, and workers, after thousands of years of human history (though with much work remaining). But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Generations of African-Americans lived and died under slavery and segregation; that it was stopped eventually did them no good, and more generations continue to face discrimination right now. It's similar to when a person is freed after decades of imprisonment for an unjust conviction: It's better than leaving them in prison, but a great evil was committed. MLK put it well:[0] I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." [0] Letter From a Birmingham Jail by MLK, the most valuable words you can read about the subject of oppression and the response to it: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
  - mncharity 8y ago
    > But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Tick, tick - 4 people were just born. 250 people will be born in the next minute. 360k people will be born today. And also tomorrow. 2.5M this week. 130M this year. In about 6 years, almost all of them will hit school. School. Schools that are pervasively wretched. Can you make them less wretched? You have six years to change the world. For each 4 years your improvements are delayed, your window misses half a billion people. Good luck. Tick, tock. One thing I took away from working on One Laptop Per Child, is that few appreciate the breathtakingly high cost of time.
DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
“We” being some white people, because needless to say, this isn’t news or hard to admit if you’re black in America. If someone wants to argue that racism is over, that it was “a long time ago” it’s not going to be someone still on the sharp end of the stick.
greglindahl 8y ago
I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation -- even though I started school 1 year after schools were integrated, there were a lot of remaining signs of the segregation era. The elementary school that I went to in 1st grade was torn down a year later because it was falling apart: that was OK for a black school during segregation, but having half the toilets and water fountains broken wasn't OK for an integrated school.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation To add to your point, they can see it now: Even though it's not the law, schools are highly segregated and, IIRC articles I read awhile go, funding to schools that are predominantly African-American is much lower.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation Remember? You can see it now. Not just in the South, but in every state. In fact, Oregon is probably the state where segregation and its effects are the most visible today.
rayiner 8y ago
It’s worse than that. It’s not like segregation ended when Brown v. Board was handed down in 1954. The President had to send the national guard to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963. Court supervised desegregation continues for decades after Brown. Key desegregation decisions were handed down from the Supreme Court in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. Of course there was lots of attempts to end-run around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that amounted to de jure segregation. I think a better benchmark is this: public opposition to interracial marriage flipped (from being the majority view to the minority view) between when Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and Google in 1998. Clinton was President, Seinfeld was on the air, and Quake was out.
- pizza 8y ago
  Many people assume (educational) segregation's gotten better, but there's reason to suspect it's gotten worse > CASHIN: In 1954, 0 percent of black children in this country attended a majority white school. By 1988, 43 percent of black kids did. So we were fulfilling the promise of Brown. We were increasing in integration every year from the mid-'60s to the late '80s. We were closing the achievement gap between black and white kids. > And then, in 1988, we begin to retreat. And in the '90s, the Supreme Court threw three opinions - signaled to lower courts that it was time for federal courts to get out of the business of policing schools' desegregation. And school segregation levels are about where they were in 1968. So we kind of lost 50 years of progress. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state-of-school-integration-64-years-after-brown-v-board-of-educat https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state...
  - Retric 8y ago
    The population is rather segregated, if a kid needs to be bussed an extra 30+ minutes each way it's not nessisarily worth it.
    - AaronFriel 8y ago
      You introduced a strawman. If self-sorting has introduced dramatically greater geographic segregation since 1988, the onus is on you to show it before claiming that. In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-ger...

Around 9% of our population were grown adults when segregation ended. Our history is nearer than we prefer to admit.

projectileboy 8y ago

And it continued in so many ways! When MTV first aired in the early 80s, they would not play videos by black artists.

ams6110 8y ago
Citation? That's not my memory.
- projectileboy 8y ago
  There are a lot of different tellings of this story; here’s one: https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-2834657 https://www.thoughtco.com/when-mtv-first-aired-black-videos-...
- purple-again 8y ago
  Here is the relevant excerpt from the link provided by another user. "Scant" is read by me to mean 'yes there were in fact videos, just not in the proportion to what should have been" in direct response to "they would not play videos" There is no room for 'sides to the story'. It was a statement made and countered by this source. We can take issue with the source if you like, but I looked them up and didn't see anything partisan about them. When MTV debuted on Aug. 1, 1981, at least one black face on the network was a mainstay. It belonged to J.J. Jackson, the sole African American on MTV's roster of video jockeys, or VJs as they became known. Despite Jackson’s presence on MTV through 1986, the network faced allegations of racism for giving scant airtime to videos featuring people of color. MTV executives have denied that racism was at the root of the network’s “blackout,” saying that black artists received little airplay because their music didn’t fit the channel’s rock-based format. “MTV was originally designed to be a rock music channel,” said Buzz Brindle, MTV’s former director of music programming, to Jet magazine in 2006. “It was difficult for MTV to find African American artists whose music fit the channel’s format that leaned toward rock at the outset.” With so few black rockers, adding African Americans to MTV’s roster proved difficult, according to the network’s co-founder Les Garland, whom Jet also interviewed. “We had nothing to pick from,” Garland explained. “Fifty percent of my time was spent in the early days of MTV convincing artists to make music videos and convincing record labels to put up money to make those videos…”
  - forapurpose 8y ago
    That tells only MTV's side of the story, and IME everyone has an excuse for discrimination. It's not a signal of anything; it's just part of the process. Also, can you provide a link to the source? To quote, either start each paragraph with ">", or put asterisks (sans spaces) before and after the text.
    - laretluval 8y ago
      Who would have sufficient information to tell another side to this story?
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Well, it seems interesting that when David Bowie asked the same question to one of MTV's veejays, his answer was more about the sensibilities of the viewers than the lack of supply: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or the Midwest. Pick some town in the Midwest which would be scared to death by … a string of other black faces, or black music.” Which is more like saying, "we're not racists, we just have to appease racists to make our profits". https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/01/11/how-david-bowie-confronted-mtv-for-ignoring-black-artists-in-the-early-1980s/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/w...
- mobilefriendly 8y ago
  Michael Jackson's Thriller video was a huge force in bringing MTV to mass audiences.
gaadd33 8y ago
Were there a lot of music videos made before MTV? Just curious about the progression of them and how they came to be distributed before there was a cable tv channel.

ams6110 8y ago

If there's one thing pretty constant in human history, it's that we do terrible things to each other. Always need to be on guard for this. But don't overlook the good we do. We (the United States) did end slavery, and then segregation, at a huge and bloody cost.

forapurpose 8y ago
I agree, and I'd also point to women becoming full members of society, as individuals, citizens, and workers, after thousands of years of human history (though with much work remaining). But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Generations of African-Americans lived and died under slavery and segregation; that it was stopped eventually did them no good, and more generations continue to face discrimination right now. It's similar to when a person is freed after decades of imprisonment for an unjust conviction: It's better than leaving them in prison, but a great evil was committed. MLK put it well:[0] I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." [0] Letter From a Birmingham Jail by MLK, the most valuable words you can read about the subject of oppression and the response to it: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
- mncharity 8y ago
  > But let's also remember that fixing an evil eventually means that we are committing an evil repeatedly in the interim. Tick, tick - 4 people were just born. 250 people will be born in the next minute. 360k people will be born today. And also tomorrow. 2.5M this week. 130M this year. In about 6 years, almost all of them will hit school. School. Schools that are pervasively wretched. Can you make them less wretched? You have six years to change the world. For each 4 years your improvements are delayed, your window misses half a billion people. Good luck. Tick, tock. One thing I took away from working on One Laptop Per Child, is that few appreciate the breathtakingly high cost of time.

DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago

“We” being some white people, because needless to say, this isn’t news or hard to admit if you’re black in America. If someone wants to argue that racism is over, that it was “a long time ago” it’s not going to be someone still on the sharp end of the stick.

greglindahl 8y ago

I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation -- even though I started school 1 year after schools were integrated, there were a lot of remaining signs of the segregation era. The elementary school that I went to in 1st grade was torn down a year later because it was falling apart: that was OK for a black school during segregation, but having half the toilets and water fountains broken wasn't OK for an integrated school.

forapurpose 8y ago
> I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation To add to your point, they can see it now: Even though it's not the law, schools are highly segregated and, IIRC articles I read awhile go, funding to schools that are predominantly African-American is much lower.
chimeracoder 8y ago
> I suspect that many schoolchildren in the South can also remember the echos of segregation Remember? You can see it now. Not just in the South, but in every state. In fact, Oregon is probably the state where segregation and its effects are the most visible today.

rayiner 8y ago

It’s worse than that. It’s not like segregation ended when Brown v. Board was handed down in 1954. The President had to send the national guard to desegregate the University of Alabama in 1963. Court supervised desegregation continues for decades after Brown. Key desegregation decisions were handed down from the Supreme Court in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s. Of course there was lots of attempts to end-run around the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that amounted to de jure segregation. I think a better benchmark is this: public opposition to interracial marriage flipped (from being the majority view to the minority view) between when Yahoo! was founded in 1994 and Google in 1998. Clinton was President, Seinfeld was on the air, and Quake was out.

pizza 8y ago
Many people assume (educational) segregation's gotten better, but there's reason to suspect it's gotten worse > CASHIN: In 1954, 0 percent of black children in this country attended a majority white school. By 1988, 43 percent of black kids did. So we were fulfilling the promise of Brown. We were increasing in integration every year from the mid-'60s to the late '80s. We were closing the achievement gap between black and white kids. > And then, in 1988, we begin to retreat. And in the '90s, the Supreme Court threw three opinions - signaled to lower courts that it was time for federal courts to get out of the business of policing schools' desegregation. And school segregation levels are about where they were in 1968. So we kind of lost 50 years of progress. https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state-of-school-integration-64-years-after-brown-v-board-of-educat https://www.npr.org/2018/03/28/597750714/a-look-at-the-state...
- Retric 8y ago
  The population is rather segregated, if a kid needs to be bussed an extra 30+ minutes each way it's not nessisarily worth it.
  - AaronFriel 8y ago
    You introduced a strawman. If self-sorting has introduced dramatically greater geographic segregation since 1988, the onus is on you to show it before claiming that. In practice, school district gerrymandering has effectively recreated "separate but equal". There is research (cited in the article linked below) that school districts are doing this. https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-gerrymander-map https://www.vox.com/2018/1/8/16822374/school-segregation-ger...