What were the St. Louis Zoo folks thinking?
Lewis DiuguidThe St. Louis Zoo folks took the appropriate action by pulling down a Halloween display of about 10 ghosts with black faces.
But people need to ask: “What were they thinking in putting those things up in the first place?”
Didn’t they know that would be offensive? Didn’t they realize that the “ghosts” hanging from trees would look like black people who had been lynched? Aren’t they aware of this country’s racist history — particularly in the 20th century — of lynching black people?
Don’t they care that a sizable portion of the city’s population is black?
Fortunately zoo officials did the right thing after people howled.
But why did it have to come to that in the first place?
Phil Cardarella
7 months agoActually, Lewis, this is probably a good sign/bad sign deal.
The good news is that most of our educated children and grandchildren have been raised in such a race-neutral environment that they really do not “get it”. When Obama was born, his mixed race parenthood was not only shocking to many Americans, but illegal in many states! Today, mixed-race couples raise eyebrows only at Bob Jones “University”.
One of the true accomplishments of our lifetimes is that for most college-age kids (and even most of those who never go to college), the color of a person’s skin is a descriptive charactistic no different from the color of his eyes.
The bad side of that is that those same folks who do not think in terms of race do not know or understand the historical context. Telling a modern white teen that his African-American friend could not have eaten at the same restaurant (or used the same drinking fountain or gone to the same school) as him is like telling him a story about building a log cabin.
The idea that his friend could have been dragged from his home, beaten and hung from a tree to choke to death by an angry mob just for looking “wrong” at a white female — the kind of thing that actually occurred in my lifetime? That is literally inconceivable to him.
Which is why History is not a luxury, but as vital to understanding good and evil as any religious one.
William R. Nelson
7 months agoKrykee doodle.
Frost warnings in Hades!
Me n Phil agree on something.
Well said, and praise the Lord.