Where if the black community becomes peacefully prosperous, it's too much for the numerous white inferiority-complex shitkickers to take, they boil and fester like an infection until one night they swarm like a biblical plague of locusts to burn and raze the black community to the ground.
Hollow and ignorant, lazy and angry white madness is synonymous with republican-voting states.
Most of my experience in Oklahoma was in Norman, a fantastic college town. When I would go outside of the Norman/Moore/OKC area to visit the families of my fellow students, it was surprising how much and how quickly things changed.
I mean, I know the dichotomy between rural and urban is everywhere in this nation, but it seemed more stark somehow.
My high school from a red state was like 99% white and also 99% conservative and had this attitude of racism is bad but also racism doesn't exist anymore then proceeds to make racist jokes and support racist politics (including students who were very academically focused), although it never evolved to anything as stupid as taking a group photo holding up a racial slur. There was a lot of stuff from there though that seemed normal at the time then after I left realized how fucked it was, and I know of other people who think the same thing.
although it never evolved to anything as stupid as taking a group photo holding up a racial slur
The fundamental difference between the Conservative Citizens Councils and the Klu Klux Klan was the veneer of political correctness the former utilized to make the violence they doled out via the police appear legitimate.
There was a lot of stuff from there though that seemed normal at the time then after I left realized how fucked it was, and I know of other people who think the same thing.
Lots of code words and turns of phrase, intended to alienate certain kinds of people and entitle others. Dog whistles are very popular in conservative communities.
We recently had a high school marching band get selected to perform at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans. After the students raised $15k to pay for the trip, the Superintendent shut it down on the grounds that "New Orleans isn't a safe place for teenagers". Why was our city safe but the majority African American city dangerous? Who can say?
The main problem at my high school was that people, both students and faculty, were constantly parroting shit they heard from Fox News (which is constantly promoting stuff under a racist agenda) and weren't in an environment that made them think about how their actions impact other people (which means the education system obviously failed at its job), so they would believe stuff like actual racism doesn't exist anymore and black people are oppressing white people and speech doesn't hurt anybody, and the extreme lack of diversity didn't help either. However, if you were to have a serious conversation with them most of them would say that racism is bad, so I think that if people actually had an understanding of the world beyond Fox News propaganda a lot of the edgy racist stuff would die off. With queerphobia there was the opposite problem, where people would bring up queer stuff in jokes to look edgy but in a serious context they would say that queerness is morally wrong.
I use to have this way to thinking but then we are encouraging people not to change. This is a group of kids maybe raised wrong maybe thinking it's okay to joke about so should this ruin the rest of their lives? Should they not be given the chance to do better and learn from this? It's not murder and nobody was harmed by it. Being offended isn't traumatizing.
At what point is the punishment fitting the crime in a case like this. We've learned posting this to social media already effects people long term so wouldn't just posting it here be enough since they may have also been reprimanded by their community.
That's fair i guess. I did some stupid shit as a kid but I'm also a completely different person than 40 years ago. Otoh i never did anything quite like this. Id hope their eyebrows burn off from the backlash and they learn at least.
I hope they all get the punishment they deserve for not only posting that, but thinking it was an ok thing to do in the first place.
That said, I have zero weight in the discussion, but I'd like to see such racially charged words, lose all their power. I understand why people from certain races have issues with such words, though I kind of see it as giving the racists some measure of control over you and your emotional state. IMO, that gives them power that they do not deserve to have and they can, will, and do, use it against the people who take issue with it.
Like I said, I have no weight in the discussion at all, and even if the power of such words is stripped from them, I still don't think it's okay to return such words to people's common vernacular. These words should be all but stricken from record and forgotten. The only record that should exist is in history books saying that it existed and that it should never be used, and why.
It's not a good chapter in anyone's books that humans were owned by other humans, regardless of race, but race seems to be permanently tied to owning people. Non-African slaves existed, and still exist, but it's not what people think of when someone says "slavery". Regardless, it shouldn't happen, but it did.
Fact is, reparations are long overdue.
The reality that people like the kids in the picture are basically being groomed to be the next generation of asshole racist motherfuckers we're fighting so hard to keep away from any position of power, is sickening. Fuck everyone involved in the production of this photo.
I'm not a POC, and bluntly, I don't see why anyone treats anyone any differently because they have more, or less melanin. What a stupid thing to judge someone on.