“Sit In The Back of The Bus, I want this Seat”
I grew up in the city of Chicago in the fifties and sixties. When I was going into the military, I saw the west side of Chicago burning as I returned my then girl friend back to her home. It is still hard to believe this type of discrimination would happen today as it happened then . . . and it is. Yet it is even harder to believe a lone white man would demand a seat from a black woman and tell her to move to the back of the bus in New York City. The African Americans kept their cool even with an obviously crazy old white man making racists demands on them.
which begin after the man asked her to move:
BLACK PASSENGER: Why?
WHITE PASSENGER: “Because the back of the bus is over there… I mean the black of the bus is over there.”
BLACK PASSENGER: “Excuse you?”
WHITE PASSENGER: “Yes, I want that seat.”
BLACK PASSENGER: “Why do I have to go to the back of the bus?”
WHITE PASSENGER: “I want that seat.”
BLACK PASENGER: “No, I’m not getting up cause you’re being… no… you’re being racist.”
His comment after everyone on the bus objects to his demands??? “This is why we need Donald Sterling.”
Many of us had witnessed what we thought to be the death of this type of overt and bold display of racism decades ago. You have to wonder whether recent societal views towards discrimination have created an environment for the reemergence of this type of public display. This person does not appear to be a skinhead or a KKK member and appears to be just an average male on a bus.
With a court that looks at discrimination as something which is in the past and laws are no longer needed; with a large segment of our political leaders and a greater portion of the population claiming they have the right to discriminate in day to day business or otherwise activities on race, sexual orientation, or gender; with an economy skewing productivity gains away from the majority of the population; We are heading to another point where there will be another city and economy burnt. We are squeezing the low income and minority population as never before and sneering at them with our Donald Sterling threats.
HT: FirebrandProgressive and Crooks and Liars
Run
i “grew up” in Chicago too. But I got out in 1952.
I think you missed the point of the events you described. The people in the bus told the crazy old man, “no.” This is not racism gone wild. This is a crazy old man being put in his place by a bus full of people.
There may still be racists out there. Maybe a lot of them. But this is not the bad old days. Maybe the bad old days are coming back, but I don’t think we need to take one crazy old man and say “we” are sneering at “them” with our threats.
Doesn’t mean the supreme court is good guys.
coberly:
If you read it again, you will see I referred to a crazy old white man (a fellow old guy); but, you are missing my point that anyone would even try this openly today. Covertly it is occurring in the decisions being made economically and judicially at the Roberts court. Detroit is still the biggest example of blatant court approved segregation. Michigan with its university guidelines is another example. we have state sponsored racism and people now feel free to practice it themselves openly with minorities, sexual orientation, and gender. This is just a start. In the past, no one in their right mind (and I do not mean crazy) woud have done this.
run
exactly. maybe. in the past someone would have gotten lynched. either the crazy white guy by the angry blacks. or the uppity black woman by the crazy white guys with the full backing of their sovereign state.
it can come back. but we don’t help by over reacting to a crazy old white guy as if he were the sign of the times.
let me tell you why i don’t think “racism” will come back in its old ugly form: the slave owners have found out that white is as good as black and it’s cheaper to rent than to own.
You can’t make this up: my mother and I (a couple of months short of being a “legal person” according to Roe v. Wade) beat Rosa Parks by twelve years in South Carolina in 1944. My mother just like riding the back of the bus — and got funny looks; but we weren’t blazing any trail (it’s not separate but equal if one side is making the separation).
More up-to-date: after I explained the great wage depression in the American labor market to my more articulate brother he came up with: “Martin Luther King got his people on the up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everybody.”
Been reading about freshwater versus saltwater economic theories lately. The only theory necessary to be understood is the one James Riddle Hoffa understood when he achieved the National Master Agreement for his Teamsters (a.k.a., centralized bargaining).
You just have to fairly balance the bargaining (and political) power between labor and ownership (just like you have to between human beings in any relationship) — and all the other bad things (Republican made bad things) would never have come to fruition.
To bad US president Obama doesn’t know (or care?) as much as Teamster president Hoffa did.
There used to be an ad in every in flight magazine ever by a company called Karass that offered a negotiating seminar. Their motto was, “You don’t get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.” Hoffa was right, and he ran the second most powerful union in the world back then, after the Soviet Union.
I grew up near Chicago too, and my father taught me to appreciate people of all color.
I lived in Hawaii for many years with people from everywhere.
Then I lived in Chile where very few black people live. I be-friended a black man there who was a stow-away on a ship from Nigeria. He was pushed down by everyone, mostly the poor in the streets. He had nothing living by handouts from restaurants.
I have seen racism everywhere. I have also seen people healed of racism everywhere.
It’s Evolution…
May I ask where the driver is in all this?
Denis
i didn’t beat you or Rosa, but I desegregated a bus station in 1960 just by sitting in the colored section. People could no longer tell which was the colored section so they began sitting anywhere. All without noise. Don’t know how long it lasted.
At least this man and Sterling have one thing is common — they are old. Hopefully as they die, their ideas will die with them. I would be more concerned If they were young men…although I do realize that we have young white racists too. Hopefully fewer of them.
African American can be considered racist too. European American?
How about just saying Black. Sounds like a suck up utterance from a duplicitous politician. They’ve long used the term “African American” which should immediately make its use suspect.
Scat:
A few guidelines from those who “may” know more than this old city dweller.
“A style guide from the National Association of Black Journalists says, ‘In news copy, aim to use black as an adjective, not a noun. Also, when describing a group, use black people instead of just blacks. In headlines, blacks, however, is acceptable.’
At the [New York] Times, “We don’t have a guideline one way or the other on noun versus adjective,” spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told Journal-isms…. At the Associated Press, “The AP Stylebook entries on ‘African-American’ and ‘black’ permit noun usages of black,” spokesman Jack Stokes said. “The individual’s preference is always a factor.”
However, at The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, style books prefer that ‘black’ remain an adjective… The Post guide says, ‘African American, when appropriate, is preferable to black in the noun form: An African American and African Americans read much better than A black and blacks.'” An ‘African American’ or ‘a ‘black’?
Excessive concern about this one old man. The New York I grew up in (Woody Allan’s New York) — was very color blind. When I moved to my brother’s half black housing in Yonkers (middle class, balconies overlooking the Hudson, swimming pool), I didn’t notice it was half black for a year for the probable (New York) reason that they did not notice me (didn’t think about it for more than a quarter of a second when I did notice).
Chicago was very racist when I showed up in 1980 — not going into the painful details; long time ago — nothing like that now (except maybe for the Obamacrat mayor).
The real American problem is money not race. 100,000 out of (something like) 200,000 gang age, minority males are not in street gangs because they cannot get themselves hired but because American born would-be employees wont work for the kind of wages that keep five unrelated Mexicans barely indoors in one apartment.
It’s the Great Wage Depression — you should be worried about — progressives!
The recent Supreme Court regressive ruling against affirmative action and the regressive attempts all over the U.S. to restrict voting (aimed primarily at minorities who will eventually become majorities) are not simply obvious, racist attempts to “put minorities in their place” (meaning the back of the bus again), but are also part of the strategy by the Plundering Class Elite to pit the rest of us against each other while they laugh all the way to their Cayman Island & Swiss bank accounts. This is just another tactic in the eternal class war here.
It’s all about the Plundering Class Elite — not race itself — just another Republican tear down democracy ploy, aimed at 99% of us.
I have to wonder–what has this guy been doing up to now? He’s old, and presumably didn’t come by these attitudes recently. Has he, up to now, just always been able to get his seat on the bus, or has he been letting his resentments build up over the years quietly, until they just boiled over? Maybe he thinks, I have to show solidarity with poor oppressed Donald Sterling? Are racists being more out and vocal now, or is it just that mass interconnectedness means we all get to see every incident?
Several years ago, there was an exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American History about the African American diaspora called “From Fields to Factory.” There was a part of the exhibit where you HAD go through either a “white” or “coloured” doorway. It was interesting to see people’s reactions.
Thomas
driving the bus, hopefully.
but here is a story i heard… mostly for Jerry Critter (who is a good guy but seems to think racism is an age thing).
“the folks on the bus were fightin’ and feudin’ about ‘oo should sit in the back of the bus. so the bus driver stopped the bus and said ‘everybody out!’ and when they were all out he said to them…’ we are not going to have this argy bargy on my bus. from now on no one here is black and no one here is white. you are all green. now get back on the bus. dark green in back. light green in front.'”
racism is always with us. always will be. takes some effort to keep it under control. magnifying every incident into some kind of “we are all racists,” or “they are all racists” does not help.
I think there is an age element to racism. The most non-racist people I have ever seen are small children. If you could accurately measure racism or racial attitudes, that racism is slanted towards the older.
Jerry
way back in the old days i studied psychology and we “learned” racism and some other behaviors do not emerge until a certain age.
but the age is far younger than “old age.”
the only people i know who are not racists (after a certain age) are jazz musicians.
and maybe hawaiians… when you live with people of a different “color” and find out they don’t eat your children a lot of racism disappears, but hate and fear of “the other” is practically a given among all humans, animals, and plants.
the old man in question may have been suffering a little bit of dementia where it was harder for him to remember “new” social norms than “old”.
it is very silly of us to promote one sad old man to “an example of racial injustice still pervasive in “us””
though it can easily come back if pushed.
and hopefully to head this off:
i know there are real racists out there… real nasty racists. and i know many people who think they are not racists, but neither are they very nice to “the other” even when “the other” is someone they can get away with calling a racist.
we… your generation maybe even more than mine… were “taught” that racism was bad. we absorbed that about as well as we absorbed everything else we learned in school… superficially.
This ‘event’ looks to be 100% staged. One of those ‘what would YOU do’ sort of scams.
Mike:
Lets wait and see if what is being proposed is a cruel hoax. In one way, I hope you are correct.
The video is apparently staged by a woman who has made a small name for herself with such staged videos. See here: http://itscjolie.com/actress-youtube-videos-authentic/. Stop the video at 3:51 and it clearly states: For more info about this video follow me on Facebook: (her name goes here.)
I simply didn’t want to put up her name and give her one more place to have it noted. She’s a con though up front about the con.
I’m a life long New Yorker, having lived in three of the five boros (Staten Island and the Bronx not being worth living in), No, NYC is not a color blind place, but even the racists have good sense enough to practice their bigotry when they are safe at home, in their own neighborhoods. The first give away is that the people on the bus are all black except for the “crazy” old white guy. And crazy one would have to be to behave as the video portrays him to be.
Jack:
I would hope so. Lets see if an admission comes out. I will retract it at that point.