White Americans long for the 1950s, when they didn’t face so much discrimination

[WhatWouldJohnCrichtonDo?]

I think it was called "Manor House" and was set in the Edwardian era (just after Victorian). IIRC, the lady of the manor also had a grand time swishing around in big dresses and ignoring most of the servants. She especially surprised me, because IRL she was an ER doctor. The attitude of the "upstairs" re-enactors when some Anglo-Indian people visited was far too authentic for my taste. 

[hauntedoklahoma]

There's no such thing as the "good old days," and few people seem to realize it. There has always been murkiness and filth beneath the shining surface of nostalgia.

Living in a place overrun with Republicans really genuinely makes me hate the "good old days" phrase and mentality just as a kneejerk reaction. 

[AuLait]

I'm not surprised. Is there any era fetishized as much as the 1950's? 

 

[Rachel333]

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."

[Beb]

. . . Can I switch races? Or, at least, can I kick these assholes out of my racial group? Please?

Also, I'm pretty sure these people don't understand what the word, "Discrimination," actually means. Just a hunch though.

It's right up there with persecution of Christians in America. 

 

[louisa05]

I think this is partly because we do such a terrible job of teaching social history in this country. Our curricula is entirely political history and most schools don't even manage to teach about much past WW2. (And those are the schools where social sciences are not being so minimized that they barely exist). 

I have a friend who is a 44 year old single woman of Filipino descent. She romanticizes the fifties and wishes she could go back and live then. My attempts to explain to her that her life would not be remotely like it is now if she lived then fall on deaf ears. And being just a single woman in that period would be difficult enough (hard to get credit/loans, etc...) never mind being non-white.  

[Toothfairy]

White people can't stand not being a special snowflake.  They still have white privilege. White males still have their privileges.  Just look at freaking Congress. People claim persecution because they can no longer have their way.

[Jingerbread]

"American culture and "way of life" have mostly changed for the worse since 1950"

In a lot of ways, yes, but not all.  We're seeing a rise in poverty and a decline in the middle class.  Since the middle class was mostly white in the 50's, this can be seen as a decline in the standard of living for white people when it should be seen as a decline in the acceptable standard of living for Americans in general.  Instead of being angry that white people are going down, be mad that there are fewer ways of anyone to move up while there are so many hidden slides down.

In a few ways we've moved forward, but in some big ways, we are moving backward (presidential candidate wants to emulate Hitler and make Muslims register), and at the rate we're going, it won't be long before the 50's will be a progressive aim.

[sophie10130]

I'm not surprised. Is there any era fetishized as much as the 1950's? 

 

Not by white people. It was the perfect time for them. Before any pesky feminists and civil rights movements. The good old days when mothers made jello with carrots in it and vacuumed in heels and couldn't work and had to be ready and waiting for their husbands to come home.

The way I dress gravitates to the 50s styles of dresses and skirts and people always tell me "Oh, I bet you feel like you were born in the wrong era!"

And I just grin and bear it, but really I'm screaming internally.

[ShepherdontheRock]

During a class discussion in a pedagogy class I took, a couple of other female students and I were discussing the differences in how female teachers/students interact with male teachers/students, and we were discussing disadvantages we feel we face as women. Then our professor (white man) basically erased us by talking about applying for teaching jobs at other schools only to be told he didn't get the job because "Gee, we like you, but we need to hire a woman." and talked about it as if he were somehow the victim of great discrimination by being a white man. Meanwhile, the professors in our department are mostly male (by a very significant margin) and mostly white or at least white passing (by a very big margin.) In fact, at our school, most of the professors are white, even though only  little over 50% of our students are.

I don't know why his remarked surprised me though, since he has a history of making female students feel uncomfortable as well as doing mildly racist things.

Cognitive dissonance is truly an amazing phenomenon. I think while we've been taught "racism=bad" "sexism=bad" we weren't fully educated about the implications of our actions, and taught a curriculum that white-washes the full impact of racism/colonialism. Thus, why there are still people out there that openly display confederate flags and casually use the n-word yet get super butthurt if you tell them they're racist.

[Jingerbread]

I watch those videos of people being randomly shot by police and it's almost impossible to believe that they didn't do something awful just before the video started, because I've nevr even experienced anything even remotely close to that.

 

Note, almost, because fucking everyone is saying "yep, happens ALL the time", so even a person with only three living brain cells has to step back and realise that all the black people are saying it happens to them, the white people who've been in black friends cars are saying yep, happens to them, and all the Asian people are saying that when they get pulled over the cop asks them to fix their computer or prescribe something (srsly, there was an article about it. Will find.).  

Here, this might make good ammo for those conversations with elderly republican relatives tomorrow

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/01/programmer_privilege_as_an_asian_male_computer_science_major_everyone_gave.html

An uncle of mine wanted to be a cop.  Thank goddess he ended up going into the military first, where he got a dishonorable discharge and disqualified from being a cop.  He liked to talk about how he could lay the law down on "n*ggers," and how he'd have the power of the law on his side because he'd be a cop.  That was back in around 1987 or 1988, and I lived in a mostly Latino and black area without many people of my own race, and I didn't know about privilege or anything since, when you're a kid who's the minority race in your area, what happens in the adult world doesn't ping your radar when you're bullied for your race.  As far as I knew, at the age of 6 or 7, based on my observations, I was the minority.  And even I knew that what my uncle was wanting to do was wrong, and it terrified me.  I knew he wanted to target people because of their skin color, and it would probably go beyond the name-calling and occasional fights I was in.

I never, in all my life, took a cop shooting to mean that someone must have done wrong, because I had an uncle who managed to impress on me early in my life that bullies and racists will go into the police force, and use their police power to hurt people.

And now we're in 2015, and for years now, we've seen cops do deplorable things, and get away with it.  We've seen internal investigations where officers are asked to investigate their own friends (not surprisingly, this ends very well for the officer in question).  We've seen a police state where more jurisdictions are requiring body cams because of how out-of-hand brutality has become.  My only surprise in Laquan's case is that someone was arrested at all.  Hopefully that won't be the only justice seen.  His killer deserves to rot behind bars until dead.