We had some fairly disturbing revelations in Rochester last week:
[A Rochester couple] are accused of hosting a theme party at their 9,000-square-foot mansion on July 7 that brazenly ridiculed Juneteenth, the holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the United States, by perpetuating racist stereotypes of Black people. The menu consisted of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hennessy cognac.The party was also said to feature a woman dressed as County Legislator Rachel Barnhart dancing in a mocking and sexual manner for attendees, and images of the heads of local Democratic political figures on stakes, including members of the Police Accountability Board and City Councilmember Mitch Gruber.
The allegations were leveled by Jerrod Jones, a 14-year veteran of the Rochester Fire Department, who said he was brought to the party while on duty by his captain, Jeff Krywy. In a notice of claim against the city and the department, Jones contended that some Rochester police officers that he did not name also attended the party.
These aren’t your run-of-the-mill racists (or perhaps they are). The husband in this power couple, Nicolas Nicosia, served on the board of a local hospital, and he was the team dentist for a couple of local sports teams. His wife Mary also served on a historical preservation board. All of those organizations cut ties with the pair after the firefighter, who is black, filed his lawsuit [pdf] on Thursday. The couple issued a non-denial not-really apology.
The reporter who wrote the story quoted above, Gino Fanelli, got a tip that Mary also had a racist Twitter account that was apparently obsessed with fried chicken stereotypes, but he didn’t include that in the report because he couldn’t completely confirm it. Sounds bad, though.
Anyway, here’s a pair of seemingly normal rich white folks who serve on charitable boards and make all the right noises in public, while being gross racists and sexists in private. The only reason they were found out is that a fire captain was stupid enough to drag his on-duty crew, which included at least one black and one hispanic firefighter, to the party.
Baud
So what you’re saying is, is that cancel culture has gone too far.
MattF
“I’m just saying out loud what everybody thinks.”
RedDirtGirl
I’m curious why the on duty fire department was brought over…
Kent
The only remotely unusual thing about this whole episode is that it happened in Rochester and not some bumfuck small city in Texas
And the reason they dragged the firefighters there is probably because these shit stains wanted a BIG party and were scraping the bottom of the barrel of their list of acquaintances to invite and so started inviting (ordering) city employees to show up.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
Q – “What do you call a grouping of well-off white women over 35 years old?”
A – “A privilege”
coozledad
Do they serve on any boards at Duke?
insert clever nickname here mistermix
@RedDirtGirl: There’s a small fire station a couple of blocks from the mansion where the party was held. They often travel to public (not private) events when they’re on duty to have a FD presence at those events for goodwill, showing the flag, etc. reasons. The Captain, who btw is now called “Ku Klux Krywy” in the FD, decided it was a good idea to go. That’s all I know.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@RedDirtGirl: Interesting question; ether the Captain is white and dumb enough too think he could get away with it and pown the minorities on this staff.
or
The Captain was digested by the racism but too chickenshit to speak out himself and instead drug in members of his staff he knew would make a fuss.
Penn
@RedDirtGirl: When you convince yourself that your views are held by everyone and they are just too scared to state them aloud, you try sharing them with people in what you think are safe spaces.
Most people believe that they are good, and therefore that the things they do are good, and therefore that other good people will agree with them if they can just explain right. People who disagree with them are therefore bad people.
I am, of course, no exception.
Baud
I wonder if people started having Jim Brown slave revolt theme parties, the usual suspects would be so blasé.
scav
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Does look like door number one (or at least elements thereof): the party goers allegedly being worried when the fire dept members showed up and then relaxing when they saw the Captain. Captain also got a partybag.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I think it’s the first.
Read the story about the VERY well compensated former President of the University of Louisville and his sombrero party.
They thought it was a safe space.
Kent
There is some truth to that. I’m a very white middle aged guy and we lived in Texas for over a decade. My wife is a physician so we got invited to a LOT of local country-club type events for various reasons and in that milieu I was ALWAYS mistaken for a Republican. People (almost always men) would just spout off all manner of egregious bullshit on the assumption that I was a part of their club. Back then it was mostly anti-Obama shit. It is just openly casual like talking about the Dallas Cowboys and automatically assuming I was a fan too.
NotMax
(Repeated.) Slightly reticent about asking because of rhymes-with-shmovid, so consider this a tentative feeler as to whether or not folks may be interested in a B-J meet-up.
Planning to be in NYC area August 24th through September 8th. Most popular days in the past have been on weekends, so that would mean a choice of
Friday, August 26
Saturday, August 27
Sunday, August 28
Friday, September 2
Saturday, September 3
Sunday, September 4Monday, September 5 (Labor Day)
.
Preference as to a date? Also too, afternoon or evening? Any strike-throughs are dates someone already has mentioned as not being amenable to their schedule.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
White people. I expect so little and yet am still consistently disappointed.
(To be clear, I am a white people. But even so.)
CaseyL
@Penn: I think it depends on who your role models are. I do a fair number of internal dialogs with mine – who range from friends to historical/fictional characters – it’s kept me from doing a number of (small scale) questionable-to-bad things.
Mind you, most of these dirtbags will tell you their main role model is Jesus.
Baud
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
You don’t disappoint me.
Kent
Ahh….the actual truth comes out in the comments to the article in the Rochester News. This was also a Trump-related MAGA event of course
patrick II
@Baud
I saw awhile back that you received 3 months of apple tv with your new television (me too) and were asking for recommendations. I don’t remember “Pachinko” being recommended, so I will do it now. It is the story of four generations of a Korean family living through the Japanese occupation and beyond during the 20th century. The lead character from child to young mother to grandmother is “Sunja”, played as a young adult by Minha Kim. She is brilliant. Great acting, often understated but powerful, small things make such a difference. Also stunning and subtle cinematography, and the opening credits are unique and worth seeing by themselves.
If it matters to you, 97% on Tomatometer.
Regards
Baud
@patrick II:
Thanks!
Scout211
@patrick II: Love the book. Highly recommend that as well.
Baud
@Kent:
White Dems need to indicate their decency to others in some way. Maybe a blue cap.
Roger Moore
@RedDirtGirl:
Just at a guess, the captain was invited to the party but was on duty at the time. He figured if he brought his whole team with their engine, it would be OK, since they could leave directly from the party if there were a call. I think you see other first responders who spend most of their time on call do similar things, though usually with grabbing food from a local restaurant or something rather than attending parties.
Starfish
@Kent:
Let me stop you there. There is no accountability for genteel New England racism because Southern racism is more openly hostile. Those of us who grew up in the South find the dishonest New England racism to be much worse. Can you imagine working with or for someone, only to learn many months later that they are racist as hell?
patrick II
@Scout211:
The book was on President Obama’s recommended list. He praised the book as “a powerful story about resilience and compassion.”
South Korea has become remarkably successful at movies, music, books, and social influence generally.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Baud: That’s good to know. Do I get a Cabinet position in your administration??
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Kent: well, knock me over with a feather
Another Scott
@Kent: Talk about burying the lede… :-/
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
bbleh
@Kent: Lol I get that all the time, because I totally look the part. And then it’s always a question of how to deal with it — ignore it, roll eyes and ignore it, coolly ask a few questions that cut through the BS, coolly call out the BS as BS, or tell them to STFU.
Haven’t yet figured out a silver bullet …
Kent
@Starfish: I’m not saying there isn’t racism in the north. Of course there is. Northern cities are dripping with it. I see it all over the Portland metro where I live.
My point was about the racist-themed party. That sort of thing seems to be more of a southern affection. Around here our racists shop at REI and drive Priuses and wouldn’t do something so gauche as host that sort of party. They just manipulate historic preservation laws and zoning to prevent non-white people from ever affording a home in their neighborhood and children’s school.
bbleh
@Baud: I wore a “safety pin” for a while, when that was a thing in the UK. And some people noticed.
But mostly I’ve got beyond passive displays. I routinely flip off Trump flags and bumper-stickers, and I am only very rarely chill enough to completely ignore some moron MAGAt that starts ranting at me.
UncleEbeneezer
The amount of racism in America and especially White People really can’t be overstated. If you read our history or follow anyone who covers these sorts of stories every day, it’s impossible to deny that Racism effects everything in America and that it is the default setting for much of the fabric of our society.
delphinium
@Kent:
I live in the Central region of NY and it doesn’t really surprise me. My county is pretty much rural and always see ‘Fk Biden’ and ‘Trump 2024 flags flying while driving around, not to mention the occasional car/truck with the huge Trump Flags. The only thing I don’t see around here is confederate flags (but plenty of those stupid blue line flags). At the small company I worked at, was the only liberal (and wore my ‘east coast elitist’ banner with pride). Racism and thus disgusting events like this are everywhere and thanks to Trump, are much more in the open now.
UncleEbeneezer
@Baud: A “Black Lives Matter” bracelet is a pretty simple statement that no MAGAt would ever want to make publicly. I also have a “Protect Transgender Kids” tee shirt but it’s dark purple and often too hot to wear, so I may try and find a bracelet or something. In both cases, they are principles I truly believe in and try to actively support and work for.
Kent
You gotta learn to be a master concern-troll. That is where the fun comes from.
“You know I’ve always been willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, but treason/insurrection/extortion/fraud [insert latest scandal of the week] is just a step too far.”
“I’m just becoming afraid that Trump is becoming too much of a dead weight on the party and maybe it is time to start looking for a less compromised figurehead?
“He lost me when he started sucking up to the damn Muslims”
That sort of thing.
artem1s
I noticed back during W’s administration GOPers were getting more blatant about their behavior when attending fundraising events. The assumption was they could pawn (force) the liberal staffers of the non profit into participating in an event they would never choose to participate in as an individual. Fundraisers are typically upper middle class white women who are taught to grin and bare all sorts of demeaning treatment from rich people they were trying to get money from. There is a certain set of GQPers who believe charitable giving is a liberal tax evasion con anyway and views charitable events as transactional. Once the televangelists entered the field, it was a race straight to the bottom. United Way events were considered the worst of the worst because they typically combined the creepy country club set and the creepy religious grifter set. One golf outing in NE OH was famous for having ‘hostesses’ from a notorious local strip club hang out at the greens where they gave the “donors” extra promos. There is a local yacht club that is pretty famous for the members hosting all kinds of creepy donor events. And it was largely because of the Geauga County Republican party that the COVID debate (that the president of Notre Dame turned down) ended up on on the Cleveland Clinic campus. Then Case Western Reserve University President Snyder’s last act before she fled town was to approve the university hosting the event in the Health Sciences auditorium located on the Clinic grounds. The whole thing was forced on the community because the Clinic and University was afraid to say no to certain big donors from both the conservative religious community (DeWine) and chamber of commerce types (Gibbons).
Urban Suburbanite
I don’t find it surprising at all. Here, a lot of the people with those “In this house we believe…..” signs placed outside are the same ones demanding that every homeless person in the state be thrown into gulags. For reals, they love the idea of forced labor camps.
oatler
Watching the ABC’s George S. substitute do a complete fluff job on GOP Hogan and then TRY to get Jean-Pierre in the ropes (“just how desiccated IS Pres. Biden’s corpse?”).
bbleh
@Kent: awww, but mocking the innocence of a child is a sin …
Another Scott
@bbleh: A remember seeing a guy on a bus in Chicago in the early ’80s wearing a safety pin that was about 3″ long as an earring. It’s a good symbol and distinctive (and memorable).
Cheers,
Scott.
HinTN
@NotMax: I’m with you in spirit but am unable to load up and fly to the Big Apple for your shindig. Have fun and send pictures.
raven
A man fatally shot himself outside the U.S. Capitol early Sunday after crashing his car into a barricade and opening fire as his car caught fire, police said.
The unidentified man escaped his burning vehicle and fired several shots into the air just after 4 a.m. as officers hurried to the scene on the east side of the Capitol, U.S. Capitol Police said in a statement.
Brachiator
Well, yeah. A lot of normal white folks are normally racist. Mo big surprise here.
These people think they are funny, that their racism is just a joke, and they can’t understand that anyone could really take offense.
patrick II
@Starfish:
I am the opposite. I lived in the South for a couple of years and could not stand the constant, overt racism. It just got so wearing.
Kent
The fun is in getting them to defend the indefensible. You won’t ever change any minds. John Cole notwithstanding, middle aged butthurt white men aren’t going to change their spots. So might as well fuck with them and perhaps get them a little more demoralized and less rabidly political so they can go back to their previous lives of wearing cammo and shooting stuff (what most of my rural Oregon HS classmates were doing pre-MAGA.)
raven
@patrick II: Prffft. there’s nowhere more racist than Chicago.
Kent
@raven: What is going on with all this? Are the MAGAts taking themselves out one by one by trying to attack the FBI and Federal government?
patrick II
@Baud:
My brother has an American flag flying in the back of his pickup truck. He also has a large Biden/Harris campaign poster in his back window. It causes confusion and some yelling, which he enjoys.
It bothers me that the Republicans have preempted the American flag and his combination of the flag and Biden is so jarring to people.
Another Scott
@raven:
Thanks for the pointer.
WTOP:
Given the time of day, the fact that Congress was out of town, etc., it sounds like a troubled person potentially doing a “suicide by cop” thing. But it’s early and the story is likely to change.
It doesn’t sound like the mental health provisions of the new federal gun law helped (but of course it takes time to ramp up new programs and the money may not have even gone out yet):
Guns are the problem.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
PAM Dirac
@oatler: I guess Hogan is desperately trying seem relevant and the village idiots are happy to oblige.
HinTN
@raven: You got that right! I was privileged to hear Jesse Jackson preach at an Operation Breadbasket event on a summer Sunday on the south side in 1969. This white teenager from the south was treated well there but I learned that the rest of Chicago wasn’t mutch tolerant of black folks getting out of line. Even my relatively liberal Polish friend in Maywood had some of that mindset.
Brachiator
@Baud:
Perhaps you mean John Brown, unless a football is also involved.
patrick II
@raven:
I was at my nephew’s wedding in a white suburb near Atlanta. My nephew is half Chinese and was marrying a beautiful blonde southern princess. At the dinner the night before the wedding one of her brothers got up to give a toast and said at least she wasn’t marrying one of the mud people.
I have heard plenty of racist talk in Chicago, but I have never heard anything that blatant and personally offensive in Chicago.
zhena gogolia
@raven: Boston?
Emmyelle
I’m always shocked, when I get sucked into a racist rabbit hole on Facebook by following a comment that one of my friends makes, how completely normal some of these motherfucking crazy nut bags look. They look like my neighbors, people I work with, people I see at Whole Foods. It’s scary as hell.
HinTN
@zhena gogolia: They’ve got it, too.
Baud
@Brachiator:
It could be a fusion thing.
Baud
@patrick II:
Partly our fault, no?
patrick II
@Baud:
I think so, but don’t know how. Have not enough people done what my brother does?
MazeDancer
While I know I shouldn’t be surprised, I am.
This idiot was a hospital board member. He knows the difficulty of fund-raising. And that you just don’t do this stuff.
For me, at least, this is shockingly repulsive. May they be shunned forever.
JAFD
@NotMax: Hello again,
Up for any of those dates. My building’s being renovated, so gotta pack and move out of my pad for week, mid-Sept, so may look flustered.
I think you have my email, but Ms. WaterGirl is authorized to pass it on to you if you don’t
Starfish
@patrick II: I think people just get accustomed to what they grew up with. My husband grew up in PA, and I am listening to his parents talk about their friends’ racist bullshit. Please send help.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent:
I have a friend: grew up in small-town Texas, Army vet (can’t talk about what he did, but he did kill people), big (I mean *big*), white, pretty formidable. Oh, and he’s Jewish, but doesn’t look it. So, y’know, wypipo will say the darndest things around him. He tells me it’s pretty amusing, when it isn’t disgusting.
ETA: Oh, and aside from being Jewish, he looks “white”.
germy shoemangler
It should be more like 50 million dollars.
raven
@HinTN: The whole west side, Cicero, Maywood, Bellwood. . .I’m from the other side of the tollway in Villa Park and the people I went to hight school with are dyed in the wool racists. For and eyeopener about the Chicago Irish read Conroy’s “The Defat of Santini” about his dad’s brother (and priest) The there are the Italians. . .
raven
@zhena gogolia: Neck and neck. MLK once said “people from Mississippi needed to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
ian
@Kent:
Not at all. I have family in the Rochester area and some of them are racist as all get out. The city went through the whole post-industrial phase (Kodak being the key business there). Whites fled to the exurbs, African Americans remained concentrated in the inner city. This led to poverty, dependency, and crime, which the exurban whites blame entirely on the inner city minorities. This is common in a lot of rust belt northern cities.
CaseyL
@patrick II: No, they haven’t.
Partially because liberals tend not to be flag-wavers: we just aren’t. Some/most of us might have put flags up for Flag Day, because that was a normal thing to do.
Partially also because the GOP made public flag displays their thing as far back as – gods, I don’t know: Mondale? – whenever they started fetishing flag lapel pins.
So the GOP co-opted the flag pretty early on, weaponizing it as they have so many other things. We should have struck back immediately then, but … public displays of patriotism, particularly ostentatious public displays of patriotism, simply have never been a liberal thing.
NeenerNeener
@Kent: I live in a Rochester ‘burb and at least two of the houses on my street had a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag and a “Trump 2024” flag on their lawn for awhile. One of my immediate neighbors had a “Trump 2020” flag that he flew into the first half of 2021. I take my Obama Family calendar off my kitchen wall when I’m expecting contractors and other service people, just to be on the safe side.
NotMax
@JAFD
Howdy.
If/when arrangements are made, might people be up for some a la carte picnicking?
Interesting (free!) events on each of the suggested Friday evenings at Bryant Park. #1 — #2
arrieve
@NotMax: Sorry for the belated reply–I would definitely do a meetup. I have a Zoom on Friday the 26th, but the other dates are fine.
dnfree
@UncleEbeneezer: exactly. The amount of racism really can’t be overstated, and yet any mention of it is verboten.
I came of age during the Civil Rights era of the later 1950s and 1960s, and that permanently opened my eyes. I know that to this day there is much more going on than I am aware of in my daily life as a white person.
dnfree
Are real estate agents disproportionately represented in these stories of racist incidents where people should known better? Or do I just notice them more?
brendancalling
@raven: People like that are dangerous. He can’t threaten anyone else anymore.
UncleEbeneezer
@dnfree: I’m a bit younger (born in ’73) so let me ask: how does the current environment compare to the 50’s/60’s as far as overt and covert racist displays? All I can go by are documentaries from the Civil Rights period which of course show the most blatant examples of open racism (white crowds surrounding Black school kids, cross burnings etc.) but I’ve heard from elders that a lot of it was still kept behind closed doors and white people in every day life mostly tried to present as not-racist, the same we do today.
Cameron
Obsessed with fried chicken? She better watch out for who she runs her shit by. https://food52.com/blog/27569-danny-trejos-cooking-tips-quesadilla
Old Dan and Little Ann
The trolls harassing Rachel Barnhart over all het tweets regarding this story are disturbing.
stinger
@Baud:
Or black: https://shop.onwardtogether.org/products/protect-choice-everywhere-hat
or: https://store.blacklivesmatter.com/product/5QCHBL014/good-vibes-snapback-hat?cp=
or navy or white: https://store.democrats.org/collections/hats-scarves
Mike E
If you haven’t already, digby’s latest is worth a look.
Lyrebird
@Baud: Luckily I was not drinking coffee or cola when I read your comment.
Good point.
RevRick
Let’s not forget that the worst racists of all were the wealthy white slave owners of the South. By many accounts, pre Civil War, Mississippi was the wealthiest state in the Union. White supremacy is built after all on the presumption of hierarchy.
WaterGirl
@germy shoemangler: Slap on the wrist.
trollhattan
@UncleEbeneezer:
George Wallace (“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.“) won FIVE states in the 1968 presidential election. The northiest of which was Arkansas.
Fake Irishman
@ian:
lived in Rochester for seven years. Your take is dead on.
Cameron
@germy shoemangler: Threats and harassment aren’t considered terroristic acts? This should have criminal, not civil, penalties.
dnfree
@UncleEbeneezer: you’re the age of my eldest daughter, who once said to me accusingly, “You told us all this stuff was being taken care of.” I think I did believe that in the 1970s when she was growing up. Then came Reagan.
I think racism generally was much more open in the 1950s and 1960s in the south, but also in northern places where there was direct conflict, like around busing. But there was so much unseen, like who could join unions (and make better money). I grew up in a small town with not many black families, and I never thought much about how their lives might differ from mine. One of my classmates, from South America, has told me since about the prejudice her father, with darker skin than hers, faced in employment, and that her sister with darker skin was switched to a Catholic school because of racial taunts. I didn’t see any of that, but it was there.
I didn’t learn about the killing of Emmett Till until I was in college, from black students who lived off-campus with me. And yet you know every black child at the time had seen the photos and knew what they represented. That’s when I truly realized I lived in a different country.
sdhays
@Kent: A relevant anecdote – One of the HR director at my old company had a daughter working for Microsoft in Seattle. They are African American and were from Atlanta. She said that her daughter had never felt as uncomfortable anywhere in southern cities as she had in Seattle.
Tony G
@Kent: Northwestern New York State. The northern part of Alabama. There are plenty of white racists in New York City, obviously, but in my experience once you get just a few miles outside of New York City (in New York State or in New Jersey) the racism is pretty open, as long as there are none of “those people” to see and listen.
lowtechcyclist
@UncleEbeneezer:
I’ve ordered a “Dark Brandon Rising” t-shirt, which I’m looking forward to wearing here in my Trump-leaning exurb.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
OT:
Rand Paul just called for the repeal of the Epsionage Act
trollhattan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): “Let the free markets settle what is and is not espionage.”
Got it, Randy.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I wonder if he voted for the bill to increase penalties for mishandling classified documents in 2018, which Trump signed.
satby
@Baud: I use my “I support Trans visibility” sign. BLM sign too.
James E Powell
@UncleEbeneezer:
And it is stunning at times how much work our institutions & media put into obscuring & denying this.
scav
@trollhattan: Making Selling Out America Great Again!
lowtechcyclist
@PAM Dirac:
He’s term-limited out of the governor’s mansion, he won’t have any luck running against Cardin or Van Hollen for their Senate seats and is probably smart enough not to try, and of course he’s insufficiently radical for the GOP Presidential nomination but he’ll probably run anyway.
But the media folks love him because they so desperately need someone like him so that they can pretend the GQP’s not horrible. So he’ll get a lot of TV time over the next year and a half, then he’ll get about 0.02% of the vote in the early GQP primaries, and then he’ll disappear.
UncleEbeneezer
@dnfree: And sadly, I don’t think this Two Americas truth has changed a whole lot. When I visit my sister in Highlands Ranch, CO or my buddy back in W. Newbury, MA, I see that they and their children still live in incredibly white bubbles with very little knowledge or interest in the America that Black/Brown people navigate. And these are solid Democrat-voting people who would swear on a stack of bibles that they don’t have a racist bone in their bodies. I think pop culture hits like The Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, Get Out, Atlanta, and numerous books/podcasts are helping to give people a much easier way to learn, but our society is still deeply racially segregated and most white people prefer to stay in their bubbles.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): LOLOLOL of course he did. Because that’s not suspicious in the least.
Can we do a new Balloon Juice thermometer to raise funds to pay his neighbor to beat him up again?
Martin
@Baud: Texas school districts won’t even use the term ‘slavery’. The usual suspects are far more easily triggered than that.
dnfree
@UncleEbeneezer: I’ve recommended this article to people who don’t get the difference, but I don’t know that it has converted anyone. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/what-i-learned-about-stop-and-frisk-from-watching-my-black-son/359962/
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Kent: Yeah, same situation here in the Bay Area, for the most part. Although sometimes they get very loud and proud about it. A few years ago, in the city I was living in at the time (about 40 miles north of San Francisco), some chucklefucks showed up to the Veterans’ Day parade carrying confederate flags. Everyone from the mayor on down denounced it, but it was a good reminder that these assholes are literally everywhere.
Tom Q.
@CaseyL: It goes back further, to the Nixon era, when he and his crew (esp. Haldeman) came up with the idea of associating waving/wearing the flag with support for Nixon’s Vietnam policy. Most on the left took that bait (and, of course, a few at the fringe had been burning flags), and for quite some time it became an easy way to stigmatize liberals as being anti-flag, thus anti-American.
I actually don’t think the divide is so pronounced in recent years. Especially after 9/11, I started seeing a lot more liberals displaying the flag. Clinton and Obama had flag pins at least part of the time, didn’t they? Hell, my father wears one whenever he’s in a suit jacket, and he DVRs Rachel Maddow.
dnfree
@UncleEbeneezer: once back in the 1980s I had a co-worker who used the “n” word and realized later that a black co-worker he liked and respected had been within earshot. He felt bad. I told him, “If you never say it, you never have to be sorry.”
When I was very young, I came home from playing with friends reciting the version of “Eenie, Meenie, Miney Moe” that contained the “n” word. My mom stopped me in my tracks and said fiercely, “Never say that word again. It’s very hurtful to some people.” She was so emphatic that I really can’t say it. She told me I could say “Catch a tiger by the toe” instead. This was probably around 1950. So she didn’t explain what was wrong with the word, but I never heard a racist statement from either of my parents. I was lucky in that regard.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
He didn’t. There was a LOT of different stuff in this bill, which passed the Senate 65-34 with 22 Dem votes. (The House was similarly split.)
I have no recollection of this particular bill, and my guess is that the proponents of this particular measure slipped it in quietly, and few noticed at the time. They were probably saving the victory parties for when Hillary got indicted.
WaterGirl
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: I’ll get right on that!
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Thanks for looking it up. Kind of dumb of them because you can’t make penalties retroactive.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lowtechcyclist:
Interestingly, many Dem senators voted nay, including Harris, Warren, Gillibrand, Durbin Sanders, etc
Feathers
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: One issue with this sort of shit is that white people who want to be contrarian learn pretty quickly that saying something racist can be a pretty good way to get a lot of attention fast. I grew up in an integrated environment and have been interested in the dynamics of white racism ever since. There is just so much performative garbage in spaces where there are no Black people that dealing with it as “racism” becomes futile. I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t call out racism as racism. I point out the rudeness or the ignorance, and the say “and kinda racist on top of that.” It is very interesting to see people who would just reply with an FU to being called racist, not know how to handle being called rude.
Some people just want to be awful in ways that aren’t tolerated, so they do awful plus racist, and just ignore being called racist. In fact, they kinda get a kick out of it. And they find each other online.
SFAW
@dnfree:
The first and only version I heard as a child was “tiger.” Fortunately, I did not hear the other version until my 20s, I think.
SFAW
@NotMax:
The Mets are having their Old-Timers Day/Game on 8/27, so that seems like a fit for you.
You planning to be in GN at all? Or are you outta there for good? There’s a small possibility I will be heading down there that weekend.
Dorothy A. Winsor
It’s not optimum, but there can be value in people censoring themselves to hide their racism. They learn it’s not acceptable. They may even develop a bit of shame. Letting it fly tells the rest of us who they are, but they fall deeper into the pit too.
Jeffery
Looking at their photo in the newspaper article, https://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/rochester-society-shuns-alleged-juneteenth-parody-hosts-nicholas-mary-nicosia/Content?oid=14983666, they look like they are heavily into plastic surgery as well.
Nicosia is either a Sicilian or Cypriot family name that would have put them into the not white people class in the 1950’s in this country.
Mike in NC
I attended high school and college in Boston in the 1970s when people were losing their minds over school buses. Holy shit that was nuts and a very scary time to live through. As we share these stories, keep in mind that people have been leaving Rust Belt cities and making a beeline to places like Arizona and Florida for 50 years. That’s how we got a demagogue like Trump and mini-Trumps like Ron DeSantis are springing up like weeds. White grievance is the most powerful force in our current politics.
NotMax
@SFAW
Yes. That’s where Mom lives.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
@Jeffery: Yeah, that woman’s forehead is definitely a Botox-friendly zone.
Soprano2
@Kent: This happens to my husband too. Because he’s an older white man they think he agrees with their views about politics and TFG. They’re surprised when he doesn’t.
SFAW
@NotMax:
I’ll let you know if I’m going to be down there that weekend. Probably won’t know until a few days before.
Scout211
@Jeffery: From your link:
Hmm. They respond that they are being misjudged? Really?
Baud
@Scout211:
Heh. So what really happened?
raven
@patrick II: I suggest that is way too small of a sample size.
raven
@Soprano2: And if they knew more about him they’d assume even more!
CaseyL
White people are in a bubble of other white people; it takes effort to break out of that.
I’m 66, had a fair number of not-white friends when I was young. But race was something we rarely talked about, because it was too painful a subject to bring up except among one’s very closest friends (and I was not best-buddies with any of them).
I’ve had fewer and fewer friends as I’ve gotten older, much less friends of other races. Divulging one’s most painful thoughts and feelings has gotten harder as I’ve gotten older, not out of shyness or anything, but because after a while it’s just so tedious. “Here are my traumas, accumulated over a lifetime, blah blah blah.” I have no idea if that’s true for everyone, or if it is (like everything else white) a position of privilege to just not want to go there anymore because it’s boring.
I was involved in an anti-racist exercise at a college a few years ago, as an employee. I very much wanted to educate myself, and did get that. I now have a better, deeper understanding of how institutionalized racism is built into literally every single aspect of American life; I have a better understanding of the idea that everyone (including me) is a gatekeeper in some way. But nothing in the training helped me better know how to reach across that chasm in an ordinary, everyday, conversational, “hey, I’d like to get to know you better” way. I learned that everything is fraught, even casual conversation.
I don’t want not-white friends just so I can say I have not-white friends. I want actual friendships, built on mutual affection and respect, and mostly expressed in doing stuff together and talking about subjects of mutual interest.
Feathers
@Mike in NC: Also, when workplaces were white, older white people were being pushed out by younger white people. Now that the younger generation is more diverse, they interpret US capitalism’s longstanding ageism problem as racism.
Soprano2
@raven: He doesn’t wear veteran’s hats or T-shirts or anything about his service because he says people make assumptions about you, especially if you’re a Vietnam vet.
Marmot
@Kent:
The evidence is right before you that this is a national problem, a massive right wing backlash that’s worst in rural areas but prominent everywhere. But you still can’t understand it without localizing it to Texas.
Not that it’s the first such thing. Just what will it take to overcome that confirmation bias?
Martin
@Kent: Happens to me all the time. Usually contractors that the neighbors hire. They see ‘Hey, middle aged white guy! Someone I can do racism with!’ I started out being polite ages ago, now I tell them to fuck off as loudly as I can making sure the shit they wanted to talk about discreetly is broadcast about as loud as my voice can make it for the benefit of the Indian family, the Filipino family, the many Chinese families, the Latino family. Make sure the neighbors know to never hire this asshole. I’ve had to tell several contractors to get the fuck out of my house – two that the cable company sent.
Marmot
@Marmot: I see further down thread that you’re probably referring to your own experience and small town.
raven
@Soprano2: Yup. I wear mine hoping someone says something about my wearing a mask. Also, in my limited experience very few former officers wear any of that stuff.
CaseyL
I need to add something to my comment at No. 122, because it sounds like I only want friendships that are easy and never get below the surface.
No, not at all. What I’m trying to say is, let’s establish mutuality first, and then bring out the heavy artillery when we know each other well enough.
raven
@Martin: I had an African American HVAC guy tell me work was scarce because “ya’ll hire them mexicans”!
Suzanne
@CaseyL:
You put that extremely well. I feel much the same.
I have a really hard time with people who are not mostly positive and upbeat these days. Like, shit is just so dark, all the time, and I really don’t want to spend my very limited free time dissecting it all the time. I’m sure that’s privilege manifesting, but OTOH I see lots of people do that. I want to sit for an hour on my front porch and watch the birds and make jokes about how they look like little drug dealers.
Baud
@CaseyL:
I’m only interested in friends with benefits.
Suzanne
@Martin:
I have had this happen to me multiple times about weight. Like, I am of average build, by no means exceptionally thin. But I’ve had people making nasty comments about someone else’s weight to me, as if that’s an acceptable thing to do. Like…why do you think that’s cool?!
CaseyL
@Baud: Like, cat stories? I have lots of those!
@Suzanne: Thanks much – it’s good to know I’m not the only one!
Baud
@CaseyL:
That’s exactly what I meant.
Another Scott
@CaseyL: +1
My mom was a secretary/bookeeper/office-jill-of-all-trades for a small company in Atlanta for a while in the late ’60s. She often worked on Saturdays and would sometimes take me in with her when she couldn’t find a sitter. I’d work on model cars and read and do similar things while she worked. Occasionally I’d find a way to innocently walk by the conference room and look inside to glance at the framed Playboy centerfolds and racy calendars from suppliers on the wall…
:-/
Progress is slow, but it is happening. It’s a struggle to get people to change their views, fight tribalism, and learn to treat people as people, but we have to keep working on it every generation, every election, every interaction.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Betsy
@Kent: #comment-8590548:
Sometimes northerners who have never or rarely been to the South ask me what it’s like living in a racist place. Or, they’ll ask if it isn’t racist down there.
My stock answer: “Compared to *what*?”
Betsy
@delphinium: Before TFG, the last confederate flag I saw was flown over a little shack in the Rainbow Valley of south central New York State.
Timurid
As a mixed race person who can pass, I’ve encountered many white strangers who casually say racist things. What really weirded me out were the white acquaintances, who should have known better but at the sight of a light skin glitched out like the T Rex in Jurassic Park and did it anyway… (Fortunately that became much less common when I started working in academia.)
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: I lost a bunch of weight at one time, and I was shocked by all the bigoted remarks that were made to me (by men). “Your office must feel a lot bigger now!” (I wasn’t THAT fat.) It was disgusting. I don’t know why they thought it was pleasant for me to hear.
ETA: bigger, not smaller
dr. luba
That is the entire premise of the play “Good.” It was about Nazis. (There was a movie version, but it was so-so.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_(play)
delphinium
@Betsy: Yes, no doubt those flags are out there even in NY, just haven’t seen any flown here locally.
eversor
@Suzanne:
A lot of the weight stuff is because it’s “by choice” really. It’s not entirely about fat shaming. But there is a certain segment of (from my exprience) upper middle class educated types who shit all over people for diet choices and lack of exercise. It’s, to use an abused term, “virtue signaling” when I see it. “We” are the enlightened eaters of organic food, vegan nights, gyms, yoga, and marathons, “you” all are too stupid to do this, so we shall shit on you.
I see this in my social circles as well and there’s no fixing it. I’m in good shape and do the gym thing and run marathons and I know there are some people I can go out and get shit faced drunk and enjoy McDonalds fries at 3am with and others who will complain about the horrors of rail tequila and fast food.
Smoker shaming is a thing as well. I’ll have a smoke once a month when out with friends for a night out or a cigar at cards. Some people freak and it’s like “who the fuck pissed in your Cherrios this morning and take that stick out of your shit cutter”.
There’s of course a reverse to this as well. Trumps love of fast food and being a lard ass is openly celebrated as sticking it to the libs. Like it or not food choices and waste lines are now social signalling.
MagdaInBlack
@Another Scott: When I entered the body shop biz 20 years ago, as an office manager, those calendars were everywhere. Now they are not allowed, at least in my corp body shop world.
More interesting to me is that 20 years ago my porters were all Latino immigrants who were paid minimum wage.
20 years later we have Latino body-men, estimators, and managers and it makes me smile to see that progression. However, there are quite a few white middle aged body-men who are not at all happy at this transition. I have one in my shop now who is deeply troubled that our manager is Latino.
( I use Latino because that’s what my manager and coworkers use)
Eta: upper management is still lily white, but that too will change and I look forward to it.
Nelle
@delphinium: We saw Confederate flags, mostly on trucks, in New Zealand. Some seemed to think it was associated with country music (particularly popular in the south of the South Island, it seemed to me). But it is also adopted as a symbol of racism far beyond the borders of the States (can’t seem to make myself type United anymore).
Another Scott
@Starfish: It was eye-opening for J and me to take a trip to Europe that included Austria a few years ago. We were wandering around Vienna around noon and some 20-something guy saw that we were tourists and invited us into the restaurant where he worked. He asked where in the US we were from and we said Virginia and it’s like a switch flipped with him and he started waxing poetically about how great Robert E. Lee was, etc., etc. We were rather horrified and tried to remain non-committal and let him know that Obama won Virginia twice. We didn’t eat lunch there.
Racism is a human problem.
In college in Chicago one of my classes was on the neighborhoods there. I spent a Saturday near downtown walking west from the lake and it’s quite obvious how neighborhoods change on crossing certain viaducts or major roads. There’s very much a sense of “we belong here and you don’t” if you’re not from the neighborhood.
My step-mom lived in a 55% white/35% Black college town in Mississippi and on one visit she took us out to a federal wildlife refuge outside of town on a Sunday. We drove past a Black church out in the forest in the country that was just getting out at the time. We (3 very white people) got interested/curious looks from some of the youngsters – as if it was a rare occurrence to see people like us out there.
The manifestations of racism are different in different parts of the USA, some overt, some hidden a little below the surface. All of it makes progress difficult (by hurting people for no sensible reason, by slowing progress for all of us, by perpetuating harm and resentments for generations, etc.). The problem is everywhere, and it’s important to push for progress.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
geg6
@UncleEbeneezer:
I was born in 1958. My dad was a steelworker here in WPA. He had a Black friend from his second job at a local cemetery. My dad would insist that Rosie (Roosevelt) come to our house to visit. We lived in one of those post-WWII suburbs, all white, of course. But Rosie would only come on very rare occasions and insisted on coming to our back door and not the front. As a kid, I didn’t get it but as the late 60s and the pushback against civil rights and liberalism in general (damn those DFHs!/) got nasty, I started to get it. I know my parents took shit from some neighbors over Rosie, but they didn’t give a damn. For the time and place, it makes me proud of them.
BC in Illinois
I had the unpleasant surprise yesterday of seeing the Confederate Flag in a video of Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show.
1981. I assume it was put there to provide local color.
Mike in NC
@Another Scott: I relocated to work in the DC area in 1990 and was struck by all of the schools and streets named for Confederate generals and politicians in places like Arlington and Springfield. Of course that has largely changed in the past decade. It’ll be refreshing once those southern Army bases get renamed.
Suzanne
@eversor: I don’t run marathons, though I do the other stuff….but I have never discussed someone else’s weight with a stranger. I don’t even like discussing my own weight or dietary habits — not because I’m sensitive, but because it’s boring. That’s fucked up.
Broadly speaking, lots of people have crappy eating habits, but that’s not a specific statement about anyone’s body, I don’t know why anyone would find that acceptable. That’s sad.
Starfish
@Another Scott: I know someone who grew up in that part of Mississippi, and she has a pretty deep distrust of white folks.
PST
@dnfree:
I had a similar experience, except that my father was completely calm and matter-of-fact about his instruction to me. It still had teh desired effect. Looking back over the years, I am completely uncertain that I even knew the meaning of the word at age five or six. Our little Indiana town was so white that I simply do not remember the subject of race ever being discussed. I have no doubt there were racists all over, but in our isolation it was invisible and inaudible to children.
Madeleine
@NotMax: My spouse and I are interested and would be up for the Bryant Park picknicking. All dates are fine though earlier is slightly better. His classes start right after Labor Day.
Another Scott
@Mike in NC: Yup, names are still being changed. One of the really good things that Democrats were able to do when they controlled all the state government was to get rid of the public monuments, start changing road and school names, etc.
Appomattox is gone from Alexandria.
The Traitor Lee statue in Charlottesville will be melted down.
The Traitor Lee statue in Richmond’s fate is in the hands of a Black History Museum.
Change is slow, but it happens if good people push for it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@eversor:
You do understand, don’t you, that cigar/cigarette smoke is an actual health hazard to those in the vicinity of the smoker?
David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Economic anxiety
Geminid
@MagdaInBlack: A lot of people use “Latino” to describe this community, including Representatives Veronica Escobar (TX) and Ruben Gallego (AZ).
Professor Bigfoot
@Starfish: It was the election of Barack Obama that opened my eyes.
So many white men that I had liked and respected that just flat *lost their fucking minds* when a Black man was elected “over” them.
The very best part of retiring is that I never have to even be nice to those fuckers ever again.
Nelle
@geg6: My dad was born in what is now Ukraine (I got to visit his village in 2018). He was a union carpenter, working heavy construction. He invited his friend Chris (a laborer because Blacks weren’t allowed to be carpenters) and wife over one night. Wichita was incredibly segregated and it took me a while to understand how brave they were to come to our neighborhood. Before they came, Dad sat down with me to tell me he wasn’t brought up with this racist nonsense and he wasn’t going to have it in his house. This was in 1965.
By 1984, he had a Black African son-in-law. If he were alive today, he would see that three of his grandchildren and ten of his great grandchildren are mixed race.
Omnes Omnibus
@PST:
I learned it with tiger. Apparently, when my dad was still in school and was hanging out with me and some AA students, I needed to decide something and began “Ennie Meenie…” My dad said there was a sudden tenseness as I came to that line. I said tiger and everyone relaxed. My dad had passed a test. I heard the other version on the playground later but knew it was wrong because that’s not a word people use. It was different than swearing too. Swearing was something that adults could do on occasion and in certain circumstances.
MagdaInBlack
@Geminid: I did not want anyone to take offense, as sometimes does happen 😉
Ivan X
@NotMax: I’m interested. I’m here. I’m available for any of said dates.
Suzanne
I am legit shocked to learn in this thread today that the line was not always “catch a tiger by the toe”.
Damn.
Mel
@Suzanne: Thank you for this. Absolutely agree.
UncleEbeneezer
@CaseyL: I think a good way of looking at it is that the anti-racist work you do will make it more likely for you to have real friendships with non-white people. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to have deep conversations with them about systemic racism (because they probably don’t want to spend their time on that stuff, with you) but that if they do feel like it, that they will feel comfortable doing so knowing you’ll get it better than people who haven’t done that work.
On a similar note: yesterday my wife and I had lunch/beers with one of her longtime girlfriends (platonic) who I also really like. They proceeded to talk a bunch about the Museum world they both work(ed) in and about how dominated it is by White Men and how much misogyny is rampant. They were able to pull no punches about shitty white dudes because they know that I totally agree and don’t take offense and will even chime in about how awful we are, in general. They probably would not have had that same conversation in front of other men that we all know because those guys would have gotten defensive about it. So while anti-racism or feminism is no guarantee that you will suddenly have lots of Black/women friends, they at least make you capable of being a good friend if those friendships do happen.
But yeah, totally agree. Most of my friends nowadays are fellow organizers/activists, a guy I play tennis with or fellow/former musicians. We just don’t have that many friends or situations where we really want to be around other people (especially since Covid). So my friend circle is still predominantly white, because the environments where I made my friends years ago were also predominantly white. That said, I’ve definitely made stronger bonds with my mostly-virtual friends (ones I met in regular life but now mostly just see on FB) who are POC, LGBTQ and/or women because I’ve expended effort to cut a bunch of white dudes loose and have been more interested in interacting with a more diverse group.
Another Scott
TIL there is something called “gummy bear breast implants”. Seriously.
(Fortunately, though I had to do some searching to confirm, they’re not made with gummy bears.)
:-/
Cheers,
Scott.
zhena gogolia
@Suzanne: Ask somebody about brazil nuts.
Geminid
@MagdaInBlack: Yeah, I’ve noticed how strung out some Anglos get over the proper descriptor for people who happened to grow up with a gendered language.
NotMax
Thanks for the responses regarding a meet-up. Hoping a front pager (hint hint) will put up a post soliciting further interest now that the dates are drawing nigh.
UncleEbeneezer
Since it looks like we most likely will NOT be moving to NY in the Fall, we decided to book a couple nights at Convict Lake in the Eastern Sierra during the first week of October for some Fall Color. If things go South with my Mother-In-Law’s health, we can always cancel and get most of our $ refunded but fingers crossed that we won’t have to because we REALLY need a vacation.
NotMax
@zhena gogoia
Or about the mascot dog of the British WW2 dam busters.
dnfree
@PST: I didn’t know what the word meant either. It was just as meaningless as the “eenie meenie” part. I never heard it used to refer to other people, then or later, by anyone I knew well. This was semi-rural northern Illinois.
trollhattan
@UncleEbeneezer: The Sierra from US 395 are truly spectacular. I’ve never caught the mid-fall color but am sure it’s spectacular. Whatever time of year, the verticality of the range on that side is boggling.
See also, the Washington North Cascades larch in fall. A rare privilege to see them in full color.
dnfree
@Amir Khalid: where is it legal to still smoke inside in a bar or restaurant? Not most places I know.
Soprano2
@raven: That tracks, he was a captain when he was RIFed in 1972. I asked him how he made it out of the Army without any tattoos, and he said officers don’t have tattoos!
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: Yup. You’re referring to what my grandmother called them and what my parents would not allow me to call them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Soprano2:
I would not be surprised if that has changed as tattoos have become more common among the middle and upper-middle classes.
AM in NC
@coozledad: I wish to subscribe to your newsletter
Denali
Still bothers me that there is a resort in western Pennsylvania called Tara that is a restored mansion rebuilt to resemble Tara in Gone With the Wind complete with photographs of Confederate Generals and themed rooms and hostesses wearing low bodice gowns and hoop skirts, and that some of my friends who I have told about this place think it would be cool to spend time there.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@UncleEbeneezer: Convict Lake in early October is amazing, good fall color and great reflection
ETA: I will be going back this year.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I used this with a co-worker as an indicator of how open racism was not that long ago. I heard the “toe” rhyme with the “n” word when I was small, but I learned it as “monkey”, which to me as a kid was just an animal but that I now know has the same connotation as the “n” word in that context. This part of MO would have seceded if it could, so no surprise there. I don’t remember seeing a non-white person except on TV until I was in college, although I probably saw them at the mall when I was a teenager. None lived in my town, that’s for sure.
Soprano2
@Geminid: I don’t know why they don’t just say Latin, I think LatinX sounds stupid.
eversor
@Amir Khalid:
Which is why you have to do it in a cigar bar, outside, or in someones basement. You can’t legally smoke in clubs anymore either. If you’re going to a cigar bar and going to pitch a fit about the smoking you’re insane. If you don’t want to be around the people outside smoking at private party don’t go outside. Nobody is walking into the Sweet Green salad joint and lighting up.
If you openly declare “we are having guys night, there will be cigars, beer, scotch, video games, cards, wings, and darts, in so and so’s basement” you don’t have to go if you don’t like those things. Some of us do like fun. My group restores old arcade cabs with the original guts and we work on these as a group. It’s fanstastic fun. My friend hosts it and has an unfinished basement we have an entire arcade in we all contributed to along with a full bar, pool tables, darts, ping pong, pinball, and shuffleboard. Lecturing people in this situation about the sins of smoking is just bad taste.
Rolling coal this is not. It’s a bunch of old military buddies hanging out.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
I think some of this is an issue with people being overly aggressive about language policing. If you feel like you’re going to be criticized for using the wrong term, it can make you reluctant to talk about the issue. That’s especially true when the “right” term is something that’s still actively disputed, and using one term instead of another may be interpreted to have political overtones you didn’t intend.
Roger Moore
@Soprano2:
FWIW, “Latinx” was a term invented to be more inclusive of people with non-traditional gender identities. As I understand it, the creators wanted something that had what seemed like an inflected ending, but not for any of the standard genders. It was then picked up by non-Latinx people who didn’t understand the subtleties of the expression and just wanted a gender-neutral term without realizing what a minefield they were stepping into. As I understand it, it is still despised by many Latinos and Latinas who don’t like the way it plays with traditional Spanish gender and/or don’t want their ethnic identity getting wrapped up with the gender identity side of the term.
Marc
I’m black and grew up in the Boston area during the 60s and 70s. Up until age 6 we lived in a diverse neighborhood (now almost completely gentrified) on the north side of Cambridge with numerous relatives and friends close by. Both of my parents were the first in their families to graduate from college, father with a degree in electrical engineering, mother with a degree in applied mathematics. Cambridge public schools pretty much sucked back then, so they first sent me to an elite private elementary school (with exactly one other black student) then moved the entire family to a essentially all white upper class suburb of Boston, which likely had the best public schools in the country at that point (how they managed to buy a house there is a story in and of itself). Let’s just say that both my sister and I were completely traumatized by the experience. The worse time was the late 60s and early 70s, our house was right over the border from West Roxbury and a convenient target. Plus, my mother’s first job when she returned to work was as city coordinator for the METCO voluntary busing program, which a lot of our neighbors weren’t happy about. Not a good time, neither of us ended up doing well socially or in school, and we both fairly quickly dropped out of the (nearly all white) colleges we attended in the 70s (as did most of the few other black kids).
By the time we ended up having our own families, we both decided we needed to raise our kids in places where they would see other black people around on a day to day basis. It worked surprisingly well, my daughter and nieces are a lot better navigating both the white and black worlds than my sister and I ever managed.
By the way, the first time I ended up working on a project down south (South Carolina), I determined that the difference down there was that racist white folks would simply avoid interacting with me at all, any white person who was friendly likely meant it. In the Boston area, white people would smile and be friendly the whole time they were preparing to give you the shaft.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: I get that. But if “Latino” is good enough for Veronica Escobar and Ruben Gallego it’s good enough for me. They are both very intelligent and aware people who know people in their community better than I ever will.
zhena gogolia
@Marc: interesting perspective
eversor
@Roger Moore:
Living with a filipinA if I added an X to the end she’d go ballastic. It’s inserting upper class white nonsense into what is a part of her culture that she is very proud of and defensive of. The prior GF was Mexican and hated LatinX with a passion. Both of them are educated with masters degrees and hardcore on womens rights but they take pride in their culture and them being women. The SO takes pride in being bangers, dressing well, cooking, has trans friends, and is not conservative. But she does not take well to this sort of cultural policing and the notion that she and her sisters and their daughters are not very much women and sisters and trying to remote de-gender them. She’s also admimant that this is what white people do and it’s forcing an issue on her that frankly doesn’t exist in her culture. She gets hit by LatinX because you can’t tell if she’s Hispanic or Asian at first glance. So it’s not only “the fuck is this X shit, it’s I’m not a Latina, I’m a Filipina” all at the same time.
It’s ethnic entirely. She’s her own boss and her culture is hers and she loves it and trying to gender neutral it is not what they want remotely. It’s also comedic because her family is very much a matriarchy and it’s constantly a sisters thing with their daughters (five sisters, only one had a boy all the other kids are girls) constantly doing girls stuff so the sort of “women are victims, we fixed that for you LatinX” is met by a violent “I’m a Filipina, and I am a woman, who the fuck are you” reaction.
Defund the police is also up there with dumb ass tone deaf shit.
J R in WV
@patrick II:
While I was in the Navy thanks to the military draft, my ship was sent to the shipyards for a complete overhaul — mostly at the Ingalls Yards in Pascagoula, Mississippi, 1972-73. It was a time warp, the Navy was pretty integrated by then, but Mississippi was firmly stuck in 1950s, racially. Trigger warnings…
Wife went to the local liquor store, was shocked and appalled to find a large sign over the cash register that read:
Which was a not too clever way of avoiding any black people from coming into his store and buying anything from him. She found another store without that obscene requirement.
Later on she was at work at the local library when an elderly guy we worked with back in WV stopped by to see her while visiting his Mom who lived in Moss Point, the black city next to Pascagoula. She was very homesick being in Gawd-awful Mississippi and ran to Herb and hugged him — Herb was an EE engineer and worked at the newspaper in charge of the photo-engraving department, and was out parent’s age, white hair and all.
The head librarian wanted to fire her for “An unseemly display of affection for a Ni… Black Man!” but shortly understood that the Navy might disapprove of such a move against a Navy wife. We were both so relieved when I received my discharge not too long after that.
Mississippi was a chancre sore on the anus of the nation then, I’m pretty sure it still is from reading the news out of the Deep South!
J R in WV
@dnfree:
Me too.
My dad, a very white and Republican newspaper guy, joined the local NAACP and marched with them to support Rev King’s work. We got threats after that. I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone for quite a while! Years later I learned they threatened to throw acid on me. Mom was a nervous wreck for a while, and I didn’t walk to grade school any more either.
PaulB
And the people who work in the “cigar bar” who are endangered by your callous behavior? Fuck ’em?
eversor
@PaulB:
A cigar bar is just for smoking cigars. The people in them also smoke, including those who show you the menu and are there lighting up with you. You buy the cigars there or rent a locker! It’s a club for smoking.
Omnes Omnibus
@eversor: Everyone who works there is a cigar aficionado? Everyone? Because that’s why the ban on smoking in public places came about.
eversor
@Omnes Omnibus:
A cigar bar does nothing but cigars and booze. It’s very obvious because it has cigar on the name of it. It is specifically a place to sell, store, and smoke cigars. That’s all it does. It’s not a normal bar that allows you to smoke those do not exist really anymore. Their entire product line and marketing is “this is a place you can buy, store, and smoke cigars, that’s what we do”. It’s like a winery is to grapes and wine.
And yeah, the people who work there do because they have to be able to talk about the cigar. The blend, the wrapper, where it was made, you can’t do that if you don’t smoke. I go maybe 3x a year. Nobody would buy wine from someone who didn’t drink it so I don’t see what’s so hard.
J R in WV
@dnfree:
We were shocked to drive through Missouri not too long ago and find people lighting up their cancer sticks in the truck stop restaurant. The place was nearly empty, we sat down and ordered, and then this guy sat down right beside us and fired up his Lucky Strike or whatever. In an empty giant dining room, was obviously deliberate….
Was disgusting, we left MO as soon as possible after that. A health hazard the addicts think nothing of imposing on everyone around them. Fuckers!
Omnes Omnibus
@eversor: I know what a cigar bar is. I question whether the cleaning staff, etc., are hired for their cigar knowledge.
NotMax
@Omnes Omnibus
Last time I was in Lawnguyland (pre-COVID), hookah lounges/bars were almost as ubiquitous as Starbuckses.
eversor
@NotMax:
Those are a thing here in DC as well but you won’t get crap for going to one because it’s 1.) cultural and 2.) can’t cause cancer. Which is all bullshit but oh well. You also see more weed smoking which I agree should be legal but I’m not sure on the fact that you can do it where tobacco is not legal. Keep all smoking stuff in it’s designated places and let people know it’s not safe.
We go to my friends place for games night a few times a year because I cannot smoke here, but he can there. But I could blaze up all I wanted here and nobody can do shit about it and I can go to a hookah bar down the street at will. Also not sold on how vaping in your home is OK (there’s still stuff in it).
Then I also routinely use extremely combustable chemicals at home but that’s all above board for, I dunno. Or that I could get an AR-15 and there is zero check and I don’t have to notify the condo association but my sidearm is notfication level. Which as former military is comical.
UncleEbeneezer
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: We’ll be at CL 10/2-10/6. If that fits your window, we should meet up and grab beers or something!
UncleEbeneezer
@Roger Moore: Is it “despised” by Trans and Non-Binary members of that community? I don’t trust Cisgender members of any community to have opinions on this that aren’t deeply influenced by Transphobia (which as we can see is rampant in every culture). Letting the 99.9% of Cisgender people decide on this issue really is not how it should be done.
The Lodger
@Roger Moore: I saw someone use “Latine” once (the e was pronounced like a long a in English ) and it seemed like a better fit to Spanish tonality than “Latinx.” Have only encountered it once, what do other people think?
Nancy
City News is a real local newspaper that publishes real news.
Consider how rare that is.