cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17967345
My grandfather started going on a anti-trump, anti-fascism rant and I saw him kind of pause to check if I was that trump cultist lol. It was very heartening
My other grandfather was a vocal racist, sexist, homophobe who died of covid because he believed Trump’s lies. Rot in pieces
Trump literally killed off hundreds of thousands of bigots with his lies about covid. That was silver lining of his term
Are we counting the people that ignored reality as the group behind?
Yeah, there was certainly a third group who was willfully avoiding involvement.
There still is, but there was one back then too.
MLKs letter from a Birmingham jail is a good take on the white moderate in times of inequality. Order matters more to some than Justice or even the law itself. Their inaction is the apathy that the aggressors can pave over in an attempt to look like a larger group than they are.
I believe they’re represented in the photo by the man in a white shirt in the top right corner who isn’t paying attention to anything. Kind of on the nose, really.
(Which is a somewhat uncharitable interpretation, he could be looking away in disgust or just happen to glance away when the photo was taken)
I don’t understand what the image is depicting exactly, there’s one black person in the picture and she’s sitting there while that guy is about to drip something on the head of the woman next to her?
Is it a picture of white people bullying a group for having a black friend?
This is from the Woolworth’s sit-in, where people sat at the segregated lunch counter in protest.
Other people who did not like this verbally and physically abused them.
https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-anne-moody-20150211-story.html
Also, the white guy covered in dessert is presumably an ally there to show solidarity and, judging by the size of him, also physically protect them if necessary.
I hope that wasn’t their plan or they’d have found out very quickly that size is a great advantage 1 on 1 but a bigger advantage is being 2 on 1.
Lunch counters were segregated in the US. A fairly common protest was black folk sitting at lunch counters and trying to order lunch. This often causes uproar and unrest, riots. I believe the woman who’s about to have water poured on her head is black, it’s just that the picture makes her look white, or she’s fairly passing.
I think the woman with water poured on her is white and sitting with the black woman.
My understanding of the two sides were the white people attacking them and the white people sitting with a black person to protest segregation.
IMO that’s why it’s 3 sides.
The first side is the black people who want to be able to sit at the same counter as other people and order lunch.
The second side is the white people who want to keep the apartheid system in place.
The third side is the white people who were willing to take the abuse in order to be allies to the black people who were facing the discrimination.
To me, the allies are a different group. They are putting themselves in harm’s way for an abstract principle.
They’re having salt dumped on them too, for the grave offense of sitting at a Whites-only lunch counter.
If this mob of hick bullies wasn’t there to torment them, well, black people might eat lunch there. Obviously that would be the end of the world, and all would be lost.
Unfortunately some folks identified with both.
Grandfather was a MoC, he still forbade my mom from dating black men because he thought they were all thugs.
This is the “great america” they are always referencing.
Some things were great for a very specific group of people. Most things sucked for everyone else.
