But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
I might get flack for this but I don’t get the segregation thing because race is more trivial than AGAB. Usually people use AGAB to talk about health concerns. It seems race is a thing because we make it a problem.
I mean, race is a thing when it comes to likelihood of certain diseases and handfuls of medications affect some groups differently than others. There are legitimate differences in trends of bone structure/length/shaping. Like, even if you’re not outwardly presenting as being black, like if your family is Hispanic mixed but mostly Hispanic, sickle cell anemia is highly prevalent in the black community and you SHOULD know things like that if only for the doctor to better understand the results and tests
Race, or at least what regions your genetic makeup best adheres to, can be important for dietary changes, as there have been some (I haven’t looked at this in a decade) minor research in regard to whether eating foods similar to genetic ancestors might help that was inconclusive (I think. Mostly, if I remember, they just found some data to suggest people who have medditeranean ancestry benefit from adding fish to their diet, but so does everyone else for the most part).
Skin color matters for things like external medication absorption, varying levels of need for sunlight and vitamin d production. But other than that and the fringe elements above, yeah it’s mostly just a thing because we make it a thing, but we’ve made it a thing for so long it’s seemingly one of our ‘stickiest’ holdovers.
They have a point, Karl Marx explicitly mentioned race mixing in his later manifesto. He said, and I quote, “Mendel made some good arguments and there are far too many pink nipples around here.” Ridiculous race mixers and their varied nipple melanin.
Crazy to think that over 20 years before that, US army generals had to brief their troops that were stationed in the UK to be ready to meet black troops in the pubs
If you look at the Ruby Bridges pictures you'll see school aged kids who are still very much alive and vote like crazy. I pointed this out to my brother one day and he was totally caught off guard. And he's a pretty smart dude, it's just something that has been framed as "in the past" to us our whole lives by pretty much every institution. Propaganda works, very insidiously.
The civil rights museum in Memphis,TN is amazing. What made it impactful to me is very much that. Seeing the buses, diners, the hotel, all modern things made me realize these things basically just happened. Black Americans have had a long arduous road to just exist in the country they were forced to come to. And they’re always being gaslit, told it happened long ago, didn’t happen, it wasn’t that bad etc.
Folks like this really are goal oriented. Give them a goal, and a framework that will help them achieve it, and they will pursue it unquestionably. It must have been images like this that inspired Bukowski.
I think you got confused. I'm a stranger passing by who saw you ask the question and linked you to that other person's comment history.
I recommend deleting or rewriting cuz you just did that whole deal at a well-meaning stranger instead of a troll and it makes you look like a bag of butts.
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