
America’s Worst Racial Massacre - cjohnson318
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/opinion/elaine-massacre-1919-arkansas.html
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deogeo
> America cannot address the inequality, poverty, inadequate education, the
> racially biased criminal justice system, and the limited life chances of
> black people that define contemporary society until the nation confronts and
> acknowledges this history. The obligations of the past weigh heavily upon
> the present.

Hardly a day goes by without me hearing of some injustice perpetrated against
African-Americans, and a whole lot of US movies and videogames include these
themes. Just how much more acknowledged can this history get?

~~~
agitator
As much as the market demands?

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If you don't want to consume the
media you don't have to. There are plenty of other genres out there.

I'm not trying to stir anything up, but just to throw this out there, the only
people you really hear in Germany saying "Hey can we stop talking about what
happened to the Jews, haven't they got enough attention?" are the Nazis.

I think there is a fundamental lack of acknowledgement of the scale and horror
of core aspects of American history. This was a sustained holocaust. Yes it's
in the past, but personally, I want to learn more about it. I feel that what
they taught me in school was a vague, candy coated account that didn't get at
the core of why this was wrong. As I got older and learned more on my own, I
realized how much of a failure our schooling was in this aspect.

I also feel optimistic that now and going forward, as more African-American
people come into wealth and leadership, we will finally see more programs and
content that bring issues and information to light that was previously
suppressed because of the lack of empathy of white leadership.

~~~
deogeo
> I'm not sure what you are getting at here.

I think I was very clear - the article's phrasing of "until the nation
confronts and acknowledges this history" would have to be re-written as "until
the nation examines this history in even greater detail". As it stands, it is
at best _highly_ misleading.

And I never said to stop talking about it - but you cannot simultaneously
saturate the media with it, and claim it is unacknowledged. Do I really
deserve to be compared to Nazis for noticing this?

For contrast, living in the EU, I hear far more about US slavery and the civil
rights movement, than the Holodomor, with an estimated 4 million dead, that
was much more recent and practically next-door. That held true _even when
Russia invaded Ukraine to take Crimea._ To relate this to your Nazi
comparison, imagine if Germany invaded Israel, and somehow the Holocaust
wouldn't get mentioned.

Let me put it this way - which historical atrocities get more coverage than US
mistreatment of blacks? How short would that list have to get, before you
would take issue with "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this
history"?

~~~
cjohnson318
The article's phrasing of "until the nation confronts and acknowledges this
history" is accurate.

I grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Practically no one knows about these
massacres. People think the sum total of racial violence after the war is what
they've seen in the media: some civil rights protests, and a couple of
lynchings by the KKK.

Acknowledging a thing, and then rejecting its significance is called lip-
service. In America, we give a lot of lip-service to history, but we don't
really accept it, or confront it.

