People have grandiose expectations of elementary or high school education. At best, you have time to cover topics at a very high level and I’ve never had a class that even made it to the twentieth century.
As important as this historical tidbit is, it’s not a condemnation of history education. More than likely, this would come about in a college level course that is more specific.
Stupid question, but I’ve been to NYC many times and I’ve always considered Central Park to be one of the only enjoyable parts of the city… am I allowed to enjoy it if it was taken this way?
Nobody should allow you or disallow you. Whether you still can and want to is up to you.
Generally what I and other anarchists find is that none of us can live outside of exploitative structures right now, so it’s a matter of being kind and patient with each other and ourselves while weaning ourselves off things one at a time. Which is easier when you replace it with something better.
Eating vegan became a lot easier after helping out in a few community kitchens. Calling out unjust authority became a lot easier after organizing a soft coup of an anarchist book club lead by someone who didn’t act anarchist.
In the end, doing right by people only takes sacrifice if society is built wrong, and the best solution to that is to build society right instead. Maybe you can help make NYC a better place, maybe you’re glad to make it out of there needing less than a week’s rest. And while sacrifice can be worth it if the short term gains are big enough, nobody is going to be helped if you’re making yourself miserable.
(Concretely for NYC and every city in the US, a good start would be superblocks. Though Manhattan should probably go car-free and rely entirely on public transit. That way every street can be converted into greenery, and you don’t need to go to Central park to sit under a tree and enjoy the sounds of birds and of children playing. Restorative justice for Seneca village probably wouldn’t involve sweeping changes to Central Park - the descendants have built lives elsewhere - but that’s for the descendants, the people of New York, and for white and black USAmericans in general to reckon with).
Yes. Or you couldn’t enjoy the majority of the US, which was taken from indigenous people.
It’s very similar to how a lot of Americans didn’t know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
I learned about it because of the show.
But I’m also not from the US. Still felt weird that it wasn’t talked about more
It happened quite frequently, for instance when constructing the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. Somehow it’s always easiest to demolish vibrant black neighborhoods.
Somehow yeah
The reason traffic is so bad out to Jones Beach on Long Island is because they built the roads so buses couldn’t go. Black people rarely had cars at the time.
Lake Lanier in Georgia too, under that reservoir was Oscarville.
Same in St. Louis, but they went also went right through the “not the right color of white” Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods.
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I375 in Detroit
From the Wikipedia page
A newspaper account at the time suggested that Seneca Village would “not be forgotten”
Then later
The settlement was largely forgotten for more than a century after its demolition.
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
Nah, time travel and transrace!
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes. I learned most of my countries real history through reading books about this times
On the other hand: the US has a particular brutal and fucked up history that they ain’t teaching
On the one hand, every country has a fucked up history that they ain’t teaching in classes
I don’t think it is being intentionally obscured, it’s just too specific for elementary or high school education. There’s a chance a teacher could use it as spotlight type thing, but overall, that level of education is too broad.
The US does teach about screwing over indigenous people and slavery… well maybe not in red states. And now the current administration is whitewashing history.
Also, it sounds like those two things are the same hand. What’s your country?
Where I live they ran an interstate highway right through where the black business district was. Ripped through the middle of town. I hate that highway so much, they keep adding lanes too. Fucking racist twats and the effects reverberate to this day, no transit just more lanes because of handshake agreements between good ol’ boys in the 1960s.
“Nothing changes, even when it wants to” Hayes Carll
630?
People will see your comment and think “hey that sounds like my city”, but you could say this about basically every major city in the US.
This is part of what’s called redlining.
To offer a refinement, if I can, redlining is adjacent to this highway abuse, so, easy to join them; same racially driven bastardry, different technique.
Redlining was a real estate / financial tool that kept certain homes on a map from having access to resources. Sort of like financial gerrymandering. It’s kinda cool, in a privileged way, to see a city’s ghetto map and a redlined map overlaid; there is little difference.
Anyway, I couldn’t find a term for this neighborhood wrecking highway practice, but did find this article that goes into detail and links the book Dividing by Design.
The Roads That Tear Communities Apart https://share.google/6G6B8K9VNck1Cb0ZW
One more: I thought redlining also conveyed purposeful impediments to black home ownership, like in the refusal of mortgage applications.
- There were communities in suburbs built and federal funded that included racial exclusion provisions.
Ayo Magwood has pulled together a great amount of information about the topic. Recently, she seems to have shifted to economic inequality driving many of the issues that were once, like all the years before the last 5 or so, primarily racial.
Structural Racism — Uprooting Inequity https://share.google/1A6sgjkI0UOwpFxeO
75\85?
275
…six seven?
Sweet Auburn!
Or Tulsa, where the whites were like “go make your own black town!” So they did, and prospered while the whites stayed poor. So the whites just straight up raped, pillaged and burned the black town and got away with it
Worse part of The Tulsa Race Massacre is it took fucking tv show for it to become widely known. My wife and ex wife grew up here never heard of it. Not fucking once had it been taught in schools. Now the local media talks about it constantly. But only because it had been exposed by the HBO show Watchman. Fucking racist fucks all around.
Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.
To be fair if highschool history covered every act of overtime racism and suppression committed by the US government there would be no time to cover anything else.
So?
Where are you from?
https://www.latimes.com/projects/us-freeway-highway-expansion-black-latino-communities/
Still happening to this day. This is in Houston 5 years ago.
Austin wiped out the lower income families for lofts.
Channel 5 has a video about the Dodgers stadium in LA that was built to push latinos out.
Holy fuck I was not prepared for the sheer amount of similar events described in the comments. It’s is almost as if racist people are inferior human beings, unable to understand empathy. Hen and egg problem, I guess. But yeah, w.r.t. structural racism, a Zager & Evans verse comes to mind: “[…] or tear it down - and start again.”
It’s always been this way. Really dumb fucks ruin everything. And the meme of racism simply won’t die as long as there are dumb, gullible shitheads that gobble it up. Humanity exists on a bell curve, and the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. Racism is an easy meme and extremely virulent among religious. The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit. Humanity is so fucking disappointing. A bunch of stupid fucking apes with nukes.
[…] the smart enough people on the top end of the curve basically fight each other for the right to manipulate the idiots for their own selfishness. […] The actually smart people have better things to do and have no interest in all this stupid shit.
I was going to object to your first bit, but then you objected yourself. Did you notice the contradiction? :p
I would argue that the people trying to manipulate others are not “the smart ones” but a certain level of intellect is the tool you need to act out your psychopathic/sociopathic tendencies, which are actually what triggers the desire to manipulate others.
haha, you’re right. The nuance you add about certain level of intellect is a good addition and it was my intent to communicate that.
That said, most manipulators still look like borderline retarded from my perspective. And there are people way smarter than myself :)
To add to y’all’s reading list:
Dulles Airport (the big international airport that serves Washington DC and Northern Virginia) did the same: https://travelnoire.com/town-destroyed-international-airport
Also, maybe tangentially related, The Tulsa Race Massacre: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry?entry=TU013
And this one
Plus the interstate system specifically chose to go right through black neighborhoods if they could
This is what happened in Hartford CT. Fucking ugliest, shit city I’ve ever been to. They ruined the whole fucking city because, racism. I believe the highway was built sometime in the 50s/60s and it’s still a plague on the city.
This is currently happening, right now, in Knoxville, Tennessee and Nashville, Tennessee
And let us not forget the Vanport flood, which the Portland authorities downplayed for decades and used as an excuse to pave over a vibrant community to make a raceway and a golf course. They only recently admitted that there was ‘some’ loss of life.
i found it pretty interesting that the slur ‘redneck’ originally referred to striking labourers who participated in the battle of blair mountain. I’m incredibly cynical mind you, but it revealed to me why the term is culturally contested even to this day.
Um . . And also the farmer tan. Where the back of the neck gets red from the sun.
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
