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It wasn't a conspiracy. In a country where laws against interracial marriage weren't struck down until 1967 (SCOTUS: Loving v. Virginia), there was no need to b
by alexqgb 11y ago
It wasn't a conspiracy. In a country where laws against interracial marriage weren't struck down until 1967 (SCOTUS: Loving v. Virginia), there was no need to be furtive about racism. Quite the contrary, segregation was a selling point.
- pekk 11y agoAmerican history (and the history of many other countries) has lots of open racism. But it doesn't follow that the building of the interstate system was essentially racist.
- jowiar 11y agoSaying "highways should exist" isn't racist. Saying "highways should exist, and we're going to bulldoze neighborhoods where mostly darker-skinned people live to build them and route them to connect mostly areas where lighter-skinned people live" is racist. And it's what we did.
- theVirginian 11y agoYou're right, the major selling points had nothing to do with ease of transportation
- alexqgb 11y agoI said a selling point, not the selling point. That's a distinction clearly made in the article as well.
- sologoub 11y agoThat may be true, in all honesty, I don't know enough, but am trying to learn as much of this history as time permits. Not originally from US... That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa 1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria. Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this... At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.
- smil 11y ago>At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end. You are clearly in denial to the point where you need to look at other nations 500 years ago and conjure things that never happened, to make yourself feel better about the U.S., a country that has never been democratic nor free. As for Ingria in Sweden, still exist, have their own language and the state/county is still named after them, Ångermanland.
- sologoub 11y agoHow can I be in denial if I said I'm just learning about the US history and details? I absolutely acknowledge that I have not read enough on the subject to have a proper informed perspective. As for Ingria, I think we are referring to different places. I'm referring to the area mostly in present day Leningradskaya Oblast in Russia. From the same wikipedia article: "According to the Soviet census of 1989, there were 829 Izhorians, 449 of them in Russia (including other parts of the country) and 228 in Estonia." Compared to: "By 1897 (year of the Russian Empire Census) the number of Ingrian Finns had grown to 130,413, and by 1917 it had exceeded 140,000 (45,000 in Northern Ingria, 52,000 in Central (Eastern) Ingria and 30,000 in Western Ingria, the rest in Petrograd)." So from 140k to maybe ~800? At least to me, that's pretty heinous... Edit: Note that events I'm talking about are less than 100 years old and, as a resident of the country doing it, I had no idea it even happened...