It's not perfect, but Austin, TX did an almost okay-ish job protecting Blackland. It's not great, but it's a symbol of what the tiniest amount of progress can look like.
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.
No, Olmsted was a landscape architect (also did Biltmore in NC). The state or city parks commissioner who did it. Can’t remember his name. He also explicitly didn’t leave room for future light rail expansion when they build the LIE, or some other expressway. Been awhile since I lostened to that one.
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.
They did update the standards to include it, and it is more common now for people to know about it now. There was a high school robotics team I remember that might have done something to help with some search for the mass graves, and I know a local university has done field trips to Greenwood.
Viola Fletcher passed away a few months ago. Never got any form of reparations.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once i learned about what they did I can't forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn't stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
I watched the Watchmen TV series a couple years back (at age 40) and during the Tulsa massacre scene I was like "oh this takes place in an alternate history where the KKK won"
Then next year in college I took a course in American History... oof.
I'm not American, but I also learned about it watching the Watchmen series, then Wikipedia. Wasn't that surprised, though. The only time I went to the USA some kids threw a heavy rock through our camping tent window while we, Mexican kids, were away. It didn't strike me like some kids mischief even at that time.
There is an unfortunate anti-homeless sentiment in some parts of the US, where people will wreck camping tents on sight regardless of the occupants' skin color. I'm sorry you had to deal with such hateful behavior.
It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be "improved" by stuff like this. Like, "hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!"
I'd like to point out that even when this isn't true, the "major public improvement" tends to border one, close enough that it gets cut off from the surroundings and goes into financial ruin causing others to look at the neighborhood a few years later and THEN decide its property that needs to be "improved" (gentrified)... To the point that the original inhabitants are priced out of their own family homes.
One of those "whew, they dodged a bullet.. Of wait, they didn't" times that happens quite a lot.
Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).
Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.
Wtf is Latinx? Do you mean Latinos, as is the preferred term of the Latino community and not some BS made up word by white people with a savior complex?
The term being a creation of white people is a common but mistaken belief. Latinx is a gender neutral version of Latino/Latina created by English-speaking queer Latinx people in the early 2000s who hated that the inherent gender binary in the Spanish language couldn't properly represent Latinx people who didn't identify as Latinos or Latinas. It's since become an inclusive catch-all term for the entire community, regardless of gender identity.
Also, I don't know if you're intending it to come off that way, but your reaction to the term is a very common one among homophobic Latinos.
Except tacking an x on to the end is not a common Spanish pronunciation and completely discounts how jarring that is to use in speech. The whole thing also stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of gendered language, Latino can already be used to refer to male/female/nonbinary, just as the word for person (persona) can refer to any gender despite ending in the feminine form of -a.
It comes across as "Wow, so maybe you weren't aware, but your language which is fundamental to your entire culture is like... Really problematic??? I heard it uses gendered words and that's just like really micro-aggressive and could be offensive to people. Here, let us fix your language for you. What? No I don't know any Spanish and don't plan on learning."
But even those who identify as different genders or none prefer latino/latina, ask them, the lbgtqs would always be the ones saying they don't like that term in college here in california at least.
The way the language works and how feminine and masculine phrases/terms are different based on who says them is the identfier, they use neutral, masculine, or feminine language.
In recent years they've done an archeology mission to find the Clotilda.
was formed by a group of 32 West Africans, who in 1860 were bought and transported against their will in the last known illegal shipment of slaves to the United States.
So as I remember the story--and perhaps the references in the article will be more accurate, bur a slaver made a bet with somebody that he could still traffick slaves after it became illegal. He arrived in Mobile, AL with slaves on his boat and went to collect on his bet. He left the crew with instructions to burn the ship and everyone on board (i.e. get rid of the evidence) if he did not return. And that's what they did. The people who founded Africatown escaped the fire.
The Wiki article says similar, but that the slaves were removed before scuttling the ship. Good if true, I guess. My memory isn't great.
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
I would assume most of the time "black" is used in this context same as "white", as in to refer to a skin colour, not to a culture.
And can't people just refer in general to culture of white people collectively and unspecifically, that would also be written as capitalized "White" but would also be strange imo
Then that assumption is outdated, which is fine as long as, now knowing that, it is appropriately adjusted.
You can sorta refer to white people in that way but it doesn’t really have the same effect because of things like power dynamics and the fact that we are able to know where we’re from quite easily. For Black people it’s a cultural identity they needed to build nearly from the ground up, for white people it really is just a way to talk about a group of people based on their skin colour and generalized stereotypes. No one is White because they have connections to their more specific history, but many people are Black precisely because they don’t.
I get making a separation between reference to skin colour or "race" and culture, but I just feel like it should be consistent. Out of curiosity I checked how Wikipedia handled it and it doesn't seem like there's one rule
Ethno-racial "color labels" may be given capitalized (Black and White) or lowercase (black and white); mixed use (Black, but white) is also acceptable if editors at a particular article find it appropriate.
A June–December 2020 proposal to capitalize "Black" (only) concluded against that idea, and also considered "Black and White", and "black and white", with no consensus to implement a rule requiring either or against mixed use where editors at a particular article believe it's appropriate. The status quo practice had been that either style was permissible, and this proposal did not overturn that.
I wonder if it would be acceptable to do "White but black", I feel like that would seem outright sketchy in a way the opposite doesn't
White but black would just be choosing to capitalize White for all the reasons it’s less deserving of it yet admitting those things can be valid so yea, 100% sketchy.
I’m not against “Black and White” and “black” is still a valid thing(some guy from Zimbabwe moving elsewhere can be African-American or African-Canadian, for example) but I’m also pretty ok with “Black and white” as well, especially in places where even white immigrants are treated so differently to citizens of colour. Look at how Musk is, on paper, a prime example of an immigrant who really ought to be deported from the US but is, despite being 100% African, treated with all the privilege his skin colour affords him there.
A bit of all of it, but yes that most certainly helps. He’s a good public example, but also look at the fact that ICE is not going after anyone who looks like some flavour of white unless that person specifically gets in their way, and neither of the two recent murders had anything to do with immigration.
I think their focus is America. America's racial problems are quite unique to America, because slaves were just part of normal life in the US up until slavery was abolished. It was part of the fabric of society in ways that it just wasn't elsewhere. Even in the UK, where many black people can trace their family trees to slaves in the West Indies, there were never slaves actually held on the island of Great Britain.
Things like segregated school systems are still very much in living memory in the US. So there are unique issues in America that Americans must heal from before they can really consider such problems in the past.
White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society
Calling them "white people" does lump them together. There's a fascinating history about how different ethnic groups got absorbed and assimilated into whiteness. You aren't supposed to look into your family's roots in Europe. That's woke nonsense! Just shut up, drink your beer, grill your steaks, watch football. You're white now.
BTW, I have heard people referred to as European-American. If your ancestors came from, say, Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, you could call yourself an Irish-English-Spanish-Italian-American, but European-American is much easier to say.
Improvement? Idk, but it's certainly more equitable.
Look at this administration being all progressive and shit. They must have thought, hey, look, we shouldn't just be horrible to brown people, that's not a fair or just society.
Should have seen my face when re-watching The Pitt, getting to the part of the pacemaker/first paramedics arc. Opening wikipedia and being blown away by what I learnt.
But no, let's keep the fact that "black people invented peanut butter" as the cool fact. Not "black people helped standardise first aid"...
Well, add that to my watch list. But The Pitt is a modern medical drama in the ER. 15 episodes covering a 15 hour shift, edited to close to real time. Season 2 is steaming now
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
Probably Europe too. It just played out over a longer time, which made it less pronounced, and more forgotten.
The more recent the theft the more it features in our indignation. Palestine > Americas > Europe.
This doesn't mean by the way that what happened in the Americas or Palestine is any less bad. Colonizers are eager to say: "look it happened before, look it happens elsewhere." But fuck them.
In fact it makes their crimes worse. Every time lessons are not learned the responsibility increases.
It only strengthens the case for the universal fight to redistribute what has been stolen.
Thieves, murderers and rapists. Absolute scum of the earth. They must be fully ostracized.
"My country's history is one of manufactured suffering. I was a boy when the Tudors burned any food the rebels under O'Neal might think to eat. We starved, everyone starved. Mouths on the dead stained green from chewing nettles. You get resourceful in a famine. My parents died early. Left me and my sister catching rats. The rats ran out quick. Fed my sister on my blood. It kept her alive an extra...two weeks. I didn't sleep for three days to protect her body from the starving till the ground thawed. I cut out her kidneys and buried her. Fat cap on them like a pea. I haven't eaten a single meal since, my mind didn't go to that bite. It was the last thing I ever did because I had to. I control my life now. Every bite."
-Abijah Fowler in Blue Eye Samurai
Also, later in the show:
That first line has stuck with me though since I first heard it. "My country's history is one of manufactured suffering." That could be about any country in the world, and it would still ring true in some form or another. The worst monsters to ever walk this planet have all been human.
The difference with the "over a longer time" thing is that no one would expect people in like 500 CE to have similar values to us, meanwhile countries like 19th century-onwards USA explicitly pride themselves on equality, including between races (after 1866, anyway).
Well, I am sure there must be some really remote desolate land somewhere that no one had claimed. And of course the native Americans didn't believe in owning land, so it is a bit fuzzy "technically". But we all know what happened...
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?
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
This isn't just this administration, not even close. My family is from Tulsa, had never even heard of the atrocities that have been done to the black communities there.
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.
It's not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite a complex one.
I suppose the real meat of the question is it morally wrong to derive pleasure from something where suffering is involved. You didn't personally make the decision to harm people, so you have no responsibility there. You also did not consent to existing as a person, which means you largely have no say about where you find yourself as a human being, the circumstances of which led you to that park.
But conversely you're now burdened with the knowledge, which understandably changes your outlook. By way of utilising the park, you're implicitly condoning it's creation, therefore the suffering. Before you were blameless, now it's a little muddier. You still wouldn't have condoned the actions taken though, which does count for something.
If we're taking "allowed" as a social context, some may find it distasteful. It largely depends on who you talk to. I don't think it should affect your own reasoning much though.
Ultimately what we're left with is a physical space that has a somewhat difficult history. As it stands, no action you do can alter that fact, it will always be that thing, unfortunate as it may be.
Considering all that, on the range of all possible human activity, I think the enjoyment of a park is fairly reasonable behaviour. I don't think you can unlearn the context though, so whether or not you can enjoy it largely depends on your own internal moral workings. In the end, I would recommend going with what your heart, gut, and mind tell you.
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).
Maybe gentrification? When I googled this, the definitions were all about "revitalizing run down areas", which is, I think, exactly how it's framed when these things happen. But I really thought the word had a well defined negative connotation.
Anyway, had a conversation with a realtor once who was telling me she could get me a good deal on an apartment in a neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were looking for students because students draw internet cafes and then rich people come for the vibes. Jokes on her, Im poor.
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.
Of course they don't teach it in the US. Well, they don't teach it in my country, either, but at least I learned about it long ago. Even if it is not my history.
Sweet Auburn, including the "richest Negro street in the world" at the time, was bisected to build the Downtown Connector.
Lightning was bulldozed to build the Georgia World Congress Center and the Georgia Dome.
Buttermilk Bottom was bulldozed to build the Civic Center.
(To be fair, Atlanta also razed at least one white neighborhood, too. Copenhill was destroyed to make room for the I-485/GA 400 interchange, which was never built due to the Freeway Revolts and eventually became Freedom Parkway and the Carter Center instead.)
And that I never heard a peep of this in any high school or college history class?
I mean... Unless you were taking some sort of graduate-level course focusing on events like this, why would you? It's a really interesting story, but it was a village of 225 people in a city of about one million that lasted 30 years, and its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. Seizures of predominantly black neighborhoods for public works projects are a dime a dozen in US history, and there are a million other topics to choose from like the Tulsa race massacre if you want noteworthy material about black oppression in the US for a high school or undergraduate level course. At best this would be an incidental two-sentence mention as a piece of trivia from a particularly knowledgeable teacher.
"Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject. More at 11."
You know this person already agrees with you right? Insulting their knowledge doesn't do much to make them want to know more.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past. Not that it's the only place in the US with such a history, just one of the most popular. So one would imagine that with such popularity, it's dark history would be familiar instead of buried like it is elsewhere in the country.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what's underneath.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past.
"such a dark past" is a pretty wild exaggeration of a total of about 1600 evictions for its construction. Central Park's early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history. It's dark-ish, but dark enough to stand out from the US' past otherwise? Not even close. Central Park isn't such a huge topic that you'd expect, in a high school or undergraduate-level gen-ed course, to learn what constitutes a paragraph in its fairly extensive Wikipedia article.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what’s underneath.
Anyone can. It's right there. It's mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead of the Wikipedia article. Anyone even slightly interested in Central Park's history will find this. Not teaching this in an undergruate-level gen-ed isn't buried history; it just means it's not significant enough for the general public to care.
Insulting their knowledge doesn’t do much to make them want to know more.
Anyone who would expect this to be part of the curriculum of the courses the OP is describing is completely delusional. I don't really care what pointing that out makes them want to do or not.
Central Park's early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history.
According to your first response, you think you're an idiot for believing that:
"Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject.
You also now say there were 1600 evictions in central park, implying I'm downplaying that number by simplifying it as "dark," when you yourself already downplayed that number far far more than I did as:
a village of 225 people.... its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. 225 lived there.
So should I not care that only 225 people lived there, or be offended that I described that as "dark?"
You want to explain the math of how 1600 evictions can come from those 225 people?
You've literally done nothing but disagree with everyone who talks to you, including yourself. You're not making a point, you're punching down to seem better than others.
By ALL means, respond with more insults to prove me right.
You want to explain the math of how 1600 evictions can come from those 225 people?
Hahahaha. I knew you were going to ask this after I wrote it, and now I'm so glad I didn't clarify*, because it demonstrates you don't actually give enough of a shit to learn about this subject that you're vapidly pretending to champion.
225 people lived in Seneca Village. Seneca Village, obviously, was not the only site seized for the park. The other evictions came from the places you didn't bother to read about, you smarmy fucking oaf.
* This wasn't baiting a trap. I just didn't think until after writing it that anyone would be this profoundly stupid. Whoops.
So you're glad you didn't clarify your opinion because it let you insult others that asked?
In general people understand opinions better when they're clearly stated. Deprioritizing that in favor of an opportunity to insult others makes you a bully.
Something I pegged you as immediately. Followed by you using every paragraph of your last response to prove me right. Hilarioulsy you did that, btw, starting with:
didn't think until after writing it that anyone would be this profoundly stupid. Whoops.
Speaking of stupid, I laid a trap saying you would act this way. I even labeled it as a trap. And you still fell into it:
My last sentence:
By ALL means, respond with more insults to prove me right.
You, a hypocritical clown that can't read:
you didn't bother to read... you smarmy fucking oaf.
No. I just can't read what your opinion is. And neither can anyone else. Probably because you admittedly left it unclear to create an opportunity to honk your clown nose.
you're vapidly pretending to champion.
That's you, the opposite of a champion, a bully.
I've never had a pathetically insecure clown bite so hard on such obvious bait. As intelligent as you think you are, no one will ever give a shit as long as you are a far bigger bully. Behaviour you've spent this entire conversation prioritizing over anything intelligent. I can easily learn what you've failed to tell me. I doubt you can act civil even after weeks of practice.
I'm sorry, did you have any more empty, performative platitudes you wanted to make yourself feel better by pretending you believed in, or are we still stuck in denial over the first one – the one where your deep care for remembering history ends somewhere before reading a couple paragraphs on Wikipedia?
Like I said: it's relative. It's clearly awful and racially motivated. But to treat it as such a notably dark past that it's elevated to something worth studying in high school or even an undergrad gen-ed course alongside the rest of US history is absurd. You would have to know astonishingly little about US history (and/or learning) to think this somehow slots into a general curriculum about it.
I feel vindicated by the fact that places like Lemmy and Reddit are bubbles of people who I often agree with broadly on social and economic issues but who are often majorly disconnected from obvious reality when it comes to smaller pet issues.
I'm sorry that Seneca Village and the other eminent domain seizures for Central Park being bad but a footnote within a footnote in the course of US history is racist to you.
Somehow yeah
And Los Angeles building the Santa Monica Freeway.
And St. Paul, MN for interstate 94.
St. Louis arch
The Dunsmuir Viaduct in Vancouver, BC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogan%27s_Alley,_Vancouver
Halifax, Nova Scotia. Demolished a black community for a bridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africville
Ok, that's it! I'm never enjoying architecture, engineering, landscaping, or roadways in North America again!
Joking aside, it IS really fucked up that all of that was allowed to not just be done, but then forgotten!
It's not perfect, but Austin, TX did an almost okay-ish job protecting Blackland. It's not great, but it's a symbol of what the tiniest amount of progress can look like.
Brooklyn neighborhood in Charlotte, NC, which is now mostly just parking lots
Nashville's i65 on the North West
I-10 in New Orleans
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.
There’s a really good Behind the Bastards about the guy who made those decisions. Can’t remember his name.
Robert Moses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Law_Olmsted
This dude?
Btw just discovered behind the bastards by delving into L Rom Hubbard. Hilarious.
No, Olmsted was a landscape architect (also did Biltmore in NC). The state or city parks commissioner who did it. Can’t remember his name. He also explicitly didn’t leave room for future light rail expansion when they build the LIE, or some other expressway. Been awhile since I lostened to that one.
99 Percent Invisible also did a great mini series about the book The Power Broker, which is about the life of Robert Moses.
Lake Lanier in Georgia too, under that reservoir was Oscarville.
I375 in Detroit
Same in St. Louis, but they went also went right through the "not the right color of white" Italian and other immigrant neighborhoods.
From the Wikipedia page
Then later
Also just kinda interesting that one of the residents was named Edward Snowden.
Nah, time travel and transrace!
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.
Really? Even I as a random European know about it. I have never heard of the show though.
People outside the US know...kinda like how we're the ones that know about a lot of atrocities the US committed
Funny about that.
Graduated from an Oklahoma high school, and it was never discussed.
Exactly when I saw that episode turn to my wife asked if true. She said same thing never heard about it.
They did update the standards to include it, and it is more common now for people to know about it now. There was a high school robotics team I remember that might have done something to help with some search for the mass graves, and I know a local university has done field trips to Greenwood.
Viola Fletcher passed away a few months ago. Never got any form of reparations.
Yeah they are doing search have been for few years now.
Not just the local whites, the government bombed and shot them.
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.
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?
So there would be no time for Americans to learn about other countries and the advantages of the metric system. Oh.. wait... never mind.
Where are you from?
Oh look he needs help setting up his ad hominem attack.
Afraid to answer the question when it’s not an ad hominem. Go ahead and attack me. I don’t mind cowards.
Like covering the revolutionary war several times? How could we forgo that?!
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
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.
Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?
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.
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
Sweet Auburn!
...six seven?
630?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowaliga,_Alabama
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.
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.
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 :)
The Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis was also a black community that got bulldozed. Unsurprisingly common
Now look up the Tulsa Massacre
Once i learned about what they did I can't forget it and will always bring up to people when relevant. Fucking insane what they burned it to the ground because they couldn't stand successful black people. And not one person ever faced justice for this.
I have family in Tulsa that had never heard of that until I brought it up when I learned about it a few years ago. Crazy shit man.
I didn't learn about the Tulsa Massacre until the first Trump term. I'm over 50 years old.
I watched the Watchmen TV series a couple years back (at age 40) and during the Tulsa massacre scene I was like "oh this takes place in an alternate history where the KKK won"
Then next year in college I took a course in American History... oof.
I'm not American, but I also learned about it watching the Watchmen series, then Wikipedia. Wasn't that surprised, though. The only time I went to the USA some kids threw a heavy rock through our camping tent window while we, Mexican kids, were away. It didn't strike me like some kids mischief even at that time.
There is an unfortunate anti-homeless sentiment in some parts of the US, where people will wreck camping tents on sight regardless of the occupants' skin color. I'm sorry you had to deal with such hateful behavior.
It was at some Boy Scouts of America event.
Oh yeah, probably racism then. They have a history of it.
There were also a number of similar incidents elsewhere.
Or rosewood Florida, two years later. (1923 rosewood massacre)
It's very similar to how a lot of Americans didn't know about the Tulsa Race Massacre until it was in The Watchmen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
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
WTF
It is common to the point where you can look at pretty much any major public improvement or monument in an American city and odds are pretty good that some black folks lived there before it got built. That is ALWAYS the property that needs to be "improved" by stuff like this. Like, "hey we turned this shitty black neighborhood into a big arch or a field of flowers, what an improvement!"
I'd like to point out that even when this isn't true, the "major public improvement" tends to border one, close enough that it gets cut off from the surroundings and goes into financial ruin causing others to look at the neighborhood a few years later and THEN decide its property that needs to be "improved" (gentrified)... To the point that the original inhabitants are priced out of their own family homes.
One of those "whew, they dodged a bullet.. Of wait, they didn't" times that happens quite a lot.
Per the Wikipedia article, fewer than 20% of the Seneca Village residents owned the land they lived on - most was owned by local landlords who were paid pretty exorbitant amounts for their land in the final settlements (the final cost of the land was more than the US would later pay for the entirety of Alaska, and the Wikipedia article also notes one landowner who made more than 10x on his initial investment).
Also worth noting that of the ~1600 total residents displaced for the construction of Central Park, ~225 were from Seneca Village and large numbers of those displaced were also Irish and German.
I think blocking people from owning their land is part of what enables this.
And for Latinx people in LA it is being evicted from their homes to make Dodger Stadium
Wtf is Latinx? Do you mean Latinos, as is the preferred term of the Latino community and not some BS made up word by white people with a savior complex?
The term being a creation of white people is a common but mistaken belief. Latinx is a gender neutral version of Latino/Latina created by English-speaking queer Latinx people in the early 2000s who hated that the inherent gender binary in the Spanish language couldn't properly represent Latinx people who didn't identify as Latinos or Latinas. It's since become an inclusive catch-all term for the entire community, regardless of gender identity.
Also, I don't know if you're intending it to come off that way, but your reaction to the term is a very common one among homophobic Latinos.
The attitude is also a very common one among the non homophobic Latinos.
Except tacking an x on to the end is not a common Spanish pronunciation and completely discounts how jarring that is to use in speech. The whole thing also stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of gendered language, Latino can already be used to refer to male/female/nonbinary, just as the word for person (persona) can refer to any gender despite ending in the feminine form of -a.
It comes across as "Wow, so maybe you weren't aware, but your language which is fundamental to your entire culture is like... Really problematic??? I heard it uses gendered words and that's just like really micro-aggressive and could be offensive to people. Here, let us fix your language for you. What? No I don't know any Spanish and don't plan on learning."
But even those who identify as different genders or none prefer latino/latina, ask them, the lbgtqs would always be the ones saying they don't like that term in college here in california at least.
They would always chime in and interrupt the professors, I remember being confused.
The way the language works and how feminine and masculine phrases/terms are different based on who says them is the identfier, they use neutral, masculine, or feminine language.
They might have meant "Latino" based on their user name. I dunno. /s
I've only heard latinos get upset about latinx in california, they'll argue with the professors everytime
Africatown Mobile, Alabama
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africatown
In recent years they've done an archeology mission to find the Clotilda.
So as I remember the story--and perhaps the references in the article will be more accurate, bur a slaver made a bet with somebody that he could still traffick slaves after it became illegal. He arrived in Mobile, AL with slaves on his boat and went to collect on his bet. He left the crew with instructions to burn the ship and everyone on board (i.e. get rid of the evidence) if he did not return. And that's what they did. The people who founded Africatown escaped the fire.
The Wiki article says similar, but that the slaves were removed before scuttling the ship. Good if true, I guess. My memory isn't great.
Edit: typos
Writing races/skin colour with a capitalized letter seems strange when it doesn't include a continent name
Black, with a capital, is a culture. It’s fairly old news at this point, but the point is that it’s because of the shared experience and lack of ancestral knowledge of those people becaus of things like the slave trade and ongoing, systemic racism. They don’t get to say “African” because they were completely cut off from that culture, which is already such a wrong thing to say because “Africa” is not a single place nor a single culture, nor even only a dozen places with a few dozen cultures(it’s a helluva lot more). Besides, after developing their own strong cultures, Haitian or Jamaican immigrants are far more from there than from anywhere in Africa.
“White” is not a culture. White people will very often tell you where their family is from, to the city, without even being asked and if you don’t know you can even just look at the last name they were able to keep when their ancestors arrived in North America. White people have the privilege to not be lumped together in our society and being referred to by their country in Europe far more often than by simply “European” while Black people will just get a useless “African” tacked in front of their country of residence’s name.
I would assume most of the time "black" is used in this context same as "white", as in to refer to a skin colour, not to a culture.
And can't people just refer in general to culture of white people collectively and unspecifically, that would also be written as capitalized "White" but would also be strange imo
Then that assumption is outdated, which is fine as long as, now knowing that, it is appropriately adjusted.
You can sorta refer to white people in that way but it doesn’t really have the same effect because of things like power dynamics and the fact that we are able to know where we’re from quite easily. For Black people it’s a cultural identity they needed to build nearly from the ground up, for white people it really is just a way to talk about a group of people based on their skin colour and generalized stereotypes. No one is White because they have connections to their more specific history, but many people are Black precisely because they don’t.
I get making a separation between reference to skin colour or "race" and culture, but I just feel like it should be consistent. Out of curiosity I checked how Wikipedia handled it and it doesn't seem like there's one rule
I wonder if it would be acceptable to do "White but black", I feel like that would seem outright sketchy in a way the opposite doesn't
White but black would just be choosing to capitalize White for all the reasons it’s less deserving of it yet admitting those things can be valid so yea, 100% sketchy.
I’m not against “Black and White” and “black” is still a valid thing(some guy from Zimbabwe moving elsewhere can be African-American or African-Canadian, for example) but I’m also pretty ok with “Black and white” as well, especially in places where even white immigrants are treated so differently to citizens of colour. Look at how Musk is, on paper, a prime example of an immigrant who really ought to be deported from the US but is, despite being 100% African, treated with all the privilege his skin colour affords him there.
I think his privilege is more his immense wealth than his skin colour
A bit of all of it, but yes that most certainly helps. He’s a good public example, but also look at the fact that ICE is not going after anyone who looks like some flavour of white unless that person specifically gets in their way, and neither of the two recent murders had anything to do with immigration.
I think their focus is America. America's racial problems are quite unique to America, because slaves were just part of normal life in the US up until slavery was abolished. It was part of the fabric of society in ways that it just wasn't elsewhere. Even in the UK, where many black people can trace their family trees to slaves in the West Indies, there were never slaves actually held on the island of Great Britain.
Things like segregated school systems are still very much in living memory in the US. So there are unique issues in America that Americans must heal from before they can really consider such problems in the past.
Someone did explain it to me further. But I still... Well I'm not American. I just feel like, better would be to be consistent
Calling them "white people" does lump them together. There's a fascinating history about how different ethnic groups got absorbed and assimilated into whiteness. You aren't supposed to look into your family's roots in Europe. That's woke nonsense! Just shut up, drink your beer, grill your steaks, watch football. You're white now.
BTW, I have heard people referred to as European-American. If your ancestors came from, say, Ireland, England, Spain, and Italy, you could call yourself an Irish-English-Spanish-Italian-American, but European-American is much easier to say.
It's also interesting when the New York Times writes an uppercase Black but a lowercase white in the same article.
because Black refers to a specific cultural group while white doesn't (that'd be Irish-American or whatever)
Jeez. I'm sure it is something where their heart is in the right place but just comes off as sketchy to me
The USA has always been hostile to non-white people.
Shit, they were hostile to the wrong kind of white people for most of the time as well...
Body Count - No Lives Matter is a good song that shows poor white people were just the last step.
once they outlive their usefulness, they just become unsightly reminders.
But they've fixed the issue of discrimination by now being hostile to everyone.
Improvement? Idk, but it's certainly more equitable.
Look at this administration being all progressive and shit. They must have thought, hey, look, we shouldn't just be horrible to brown people, that's not a fair or just society.
Should have seen my face when re-watching The Pitt, getting to the part of the pacemaker/first paramedics arc. Opening wikipedia and being blown away by what I learnt.
But no, let's keep the fact that "black people invented peanut butter" as the cool fact. Not "black people helped standardise first aid"...
Do you mean The Knick?
Well, add that to my watch list. But The Pitt is a modern medical drama in the ER. 15 episodes covering a 15 hour shift, edited to close to real time. Season 2 is steaming now
Sorry yeah, I thought you might be talking about the knick because the Pitt is so recent and you're doing a rewatch
Just about everywhere in the US was taken from someone. And almost always a marginalized individual. All the way back to the native americans. It how human be human apparently.
Probably Europe too. It just played out over a longer time, which made it less pronounced, and more forgotten.
The more recent the theft the more it features in our indignation. Palestine > Americas > Europe.
This doesn't mean by the way that what happened in the Americas or Palestine is any less bad. Colonizers are eager to say: "look it happened before, look it happens elsewhere." But fuck them.
In fact it makes their crimes worse. Every time lessons are not learned the responsibility increases.
It only strengthens the case for the universal fight to redistribute what has been stolen.
Thieves, murderers and rapists. Absolute scum of the earth. They must be fully ostracized.
"My country's history is one of manufactured suffering. I was a boy when the Tudors burned any food the rebels under O'Neal might think to eat. We starved, everyone starved. Mouths on the dead stained green from chewing nettles. You get resourceful in a famine. My parents died early. Left me and my sister catching rats. The rats ran out quick. Fed my sister on my blood. It kept her alive an extra...two weeks. I didn't sleep for three days to protect her body from the starving till the ground thawed. I cut out her kidneys and buried her. Fat cap on them like a pea. I haven't eaten a single meal since, my mind didn't go to that bite. It was the last thing I ever did because I had to. I control my life now. Every bite."
-Abijah Fowler in Blue Eye Samurai
Also, later in the show:
That first line has stuck with me though since I first heard it. "My country's history is one of manufactured suffering." That could be about any country in the world, and it would still ring true in some form or another. The worst monsters to ever walk this planet have all been human.
The difference with the "over a longer time" thing is that no one would expect people in like 500 CE to have similar values to us, meanwhile countries like 19th century-onwards USA explicitly pride themselves on equality, including between races (after 1866, anyway).
It may rightly be how those humans were. We can be different.
Not "just about" everywhere in America, literally the whole country was taken from someone.
Well, I am sure there must be some really remote desolate land somewhere that no one had claimed. And of course the native Americans didn't believe in owning land, so it is a bit fuzzy "technically". But we all know what happened...
When do we think we can say we knew better?
I'll let you know if we ever get there.
i think it's worse than that. we always knew better, and we chose to do it anyway.
Portland, Oregon did this with a hospital too
https://www.opb.org/article/2020/12/16/portland-oregon-affordable-housing-reparations/
Sometimes we demolish black neighborhoods and then don't even build anything useful
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
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?
Reminds me of Watchmen teaching a lot of Oklahomans about their black wall street.
People are erased all the time, our job is to make sure they were at least documented and were. The current administration is trying to erase recent and distant history. Hoard the data. Keep the dates. Write it down on paper, but still, we are watching the library burn in front of us.
This isn't just this administration, not even close. My family is from Tulsa, had never even heard of the atrocities that have been done to the black communities there.
Chances are, if your town has a resivoir or dam, it was built in such a way to flood out or fuck over a thriving black community.
And if not, it was a Native American community
I grew up a block away from Seneca village and only found out about it as an adult when they put up signage in the park telling its story.
Fucken Robert Moses.
Think about what New York would be like without him. Racist scum. If anyone was ever a good candidate for assassination it would be him.
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=75562
Happened a lot. This was in Burlington vt.
Moreover, this was never mentioned in FRIENDS. That TV show full of certain ppl where central park was like a gag in the show somehow. Lame
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.
There's a town near me that was a black settlement from that period. Now it's white suburbia.
Yes. Or you couldn't enjoy the majority of the US, which was taken from indigenous people.
It's not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite a complex one.
I suppose the real meat of the question is it morally wrong to derive pleasure from something where suffering is involved. You didn't personally make the decision to harm people, so you have no responsibility there. You also did not consent to existing as a person, which means you largely have no say about where you find yourself as a human being, the circumstances of which led you to that park.
But conversely you're now burdened with the knowledge, which understandably changes your outlook. By way of utilising the park, you're implicitly condoning it's creation, therefore the suffering. Before you were blameless, now it's a little muddier. You still wouldn't have condoned the actions taken though, which does count for something.
If we're taking "allowed" as a social context, some may find it distasteful. It largely depends on who you talk to. I don't think it should affect your own reasoning much though.
Ultimately what we're left with is a physical space that has a somewhat difficult history. As it stands, no action you do can alter that fact, it will always be that thing, unfortunate as it may be.
Considering all that, on the range of all possible human activity, I think the enjoyment of a park is fairly reasonable behaviour. I don't think you can unlearn the context though, so whether or not you can enjoy it largely depends on your own internal moral workings. In the end, I would recommend going with what your heart, gut, and mind tell you.
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).
Just wait until they finally teach you the truth. It was about the ideologies of slavery they didnt give a shit about the victims of slavery.
Is there a word for this?
Also considering all the examples off the tops of peoples heads here in the comments, there should be a wiki.
Maybe gentrification? When I googled this, the definitions were all about "revitalizing run down areas", which is, I think, exactly how it's framed when these things happen. But I really thought the word had a well defined negative connotation.
Anyway, had a conversation with a realtor once who was telling me she could get me a good deal on an apartment in a neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were looking for students because students draw internet cafes and then rich people come for the vibes. Jokes on her, Im poor.
"Urban renewal"
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.
rednecks were unionists
Um . . And also the farmer tan. Where the back of the neck gets red from the sun.
Of course they don't teach it in the US. Well, they don't teach it in my country, either, but at least I learned about it long ago. Even if it is not my history.
often wonder how streets, towns, counties were named/renamed. was there a contest along the way
Interesting to think of an archaeological dig for something after the country began.
In Atlanta, this happened in several places:
(To be fair, Atlanta also razed at least one white neighborhood, too. Copenhill was destroyed to make room for the I-485/GA 400 interchange, which was never built due to the Freeway Revolts and eventually became Freedom Parkway and the Carter Center instead.)
Channel 5 has a video about the Dodgers stadium in LA that was built to push latinos out.
I mean... Unless you were taking some sort of graduate-level course focusing on events like this, why would you? It's a really interesting story, but it was a village of 225 people in a city of about one million that lasted 30 years, and its existence had minimal impact on history going forward. Seizures of predominantly black neighborhoods for public works projects are a dime a dozen in US history, and there are a million other topics to choose from like the Tulsa race massacre if you want noteworthy material about black oppression in the US for a high school or undergraduate level course. At best this would be an incidental two-sentence mention as a piece of trivia from a particularly knowledgeable teacher.
"Local person discovers undergraduate gen-ed courses not designed to teach you literally everything about a subject. More at 11."
You know this person already agrees with you right? Insulting their knowledge doesn't do much to make them want to know more.
In particular because the point they are making is about the notariety and popularity of central park having such a dark past. Not that it's the only place in the US with such a history, just one of the most popular. So one would imagine that with such popularity, it's dark history would be familiar instead of buried like it is elsewhere in the country.
TL:DR: The point is that history can remain buried no matter how popular what buried it becomes. You would think more people would notice what's underneath.
"such a dark past" is a pretty wild exaggeration of a total of about 1600 evictions for its construction. Central Park's early history is shocking to nobody who has, as in the post, a high school or undergraduate-level understanding of US history. It's dark-ish, but dark enough to stand out from the US' past otherwise? Not even close. Central Park isn't such a huge topic that you'd expect, in a high school or undergraduate-level gen-ed course, to learn what constitutes a paragraph in its fairly extensive Wikipedia article.
Anyone can. It's right there. It's mentioned in the second paragraph of the lead of the Wikipedia article. Anyone even slightly interested in Central Park's history will find this. Not teaching this in an undergruate-level gen-ed isn't buried history; it just means it's not significant enough for the general public to care.
Anyone who would expect this to be part of the curriculum of the courses the OP is describing is completely delusional. I don't really care what pointing that out makes them want to do or not.
According to your first response, you think you're an idiot for believing that:
You also now say there were 1600 evictions in central park, implying I'm downplaying that number by simplifying it as "dark," when you yourself already downplayed that number far far more than I did as:
So should I not care that only 225 people lived there, or be offended that I described that as "dark?"
You want to explain the math of how 1600 evictions can come from those 225 people?
You've literally done nothing but disagree with everyone who talks to you, including yourself. You're not making a point, you're punching down to seem better than others.
By ALL means, respond with more insults to prove me right.
Hahahaha. I knew you were going to ask this after I wrote it, and now I'm so glad I didn't clarify*, because it demonstrates you don't actually give enough of a shit to learn about this subject that you're vapidly pretending to champion.
225 people lived in Seneca Village. Seneca Village, obviously, was not the only site seized for the park. The other evictions came from the places you didn't bother to read about, you smarmy fucking oaf.
* This wasn't baiting a trap. I just didn't think until after writing it that anyone would be this profoundly stupid. Whoops.
So you're glad you didn't clarify your opinion because it let you insult others that asked?
In general people understand opinions better when they're clearly stated. Deprioritizing that in favor of an opportunity to insult others makes you a bully.
Something I pegged you as immediately. Followed by you using every paragraph of your last response to prove me right. Hilarioulsy you did that, btw, starting with:
Speaking of stupid, I laid a trap saying you would act this way. I even labeled it as a trap. And you still fell into it:
My last sentence:
You, a hypocritical clown that can't read:
No. I just can't read what your opinion is. And neither can anyone else. Probably because you admittedly left it unclear to create an opportunity to honk your clown nose.
That's you, the opposite of a champion, a bully.
I've never had a pathetically insecure clown bite so hard on such obvious bait. As intelligent as you think you are, no one will ever give a shit as long as you are a far bigger bully. Behaviour you've spent this entire conversation prioritizing over anything intelligent. I can easily learn what you've failed to tell me. I doubt you can act civil even after weeks of practice.
Go on and prove me right even more, clown.
I'm sorry, did you have any more empty, performative platitudes you wanted to make yourself feel better by pretending you believed in, or are we still stuck in denial over the first one – the one where your deep care for remembering history ends somewhere before reading a couple paragraphs on Wikipedia?
Just that you willingly bought another ticket I sold to the clown show you're now performing an encore for.
You're 0/3 in speaking clearly over acting like an insecure clown. Go ahead and make it 0/4 to prove you lack the skills to speak like an adult.
Like I said: it's relative. It's clearly awful and racially motivated. But to treat it as such a notably dark past that it's elevated to something worth studying in high school or even an undergrad gen-ed course alongside the rest of US history is absurd. You would have to know astonishingly little about US history (and/or learning) to think this somehow slots into a general curriculum about it.
I feel vindicated by the fact that places like Lemmy and Reddit are bubbles of people who I often agree with broadly on social and economic issues but who are often majorly disconnected from obvious reality when it comes to smaller pet issues.
I'm sorry that Seneca Village and the other eminent domain seizures for Central Park being bad but a footnote within a footnote in the course of US history is racist to you.