White History Month

[minoanmiss]

Watch on YouTube

https://news.avclub.com/amber-ruffin-teaches-white-history-month-proponents-to-1846212383

I need to send this back in time to 16 Year Old Me. I knew it, I just couldn't properly phrase it. Not that my classmates would have listened to me anyway.

Comments

[sabotabby]

This is excellent.

[princessofgeeks]

Thanks for the link!!!

[musesfool]

That's an excellent link.

[dine]

that would be so helpful, to SO many people!

[acelightning]

Well, I keep telling anybody who will listen what my Puritan ancestors did as soon as they landed here - stole the food they knew the Passamoquoddy had hidden in their villages. When the PIlgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, they fell on their knees and prayed... and then they fell on the natives and preyed. But their descendants gave history the phrase No Irish Need Apply. Many people believed that Italians were "swarthy" because the ancient Romans mated with Africans. And then of course there was anti-Semitism. And when the "liberal Long Island Jews" I grew up among tried to impress upon me how oppressed the "colored people" were, and they needed to be "uplifted" by kind-hearted white folks, I pointed out that as a female I was also deprived of various rights.

There doesn't seem to be a way to educate prejudice out of the human spirit. But where is Irish-American History Month, or Jewish History Month, or even Italian-American History Month? (At least we do have Women's History Month - and I've heard people complain that we should have Men's History Month? So what do we teach kids in history class? George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, and assorted kings, presidents, generals, sea captains, millionaires, robber barons, industrialists, railroad tycoons, and philanthropists, most of them equipped with Y chromosomes.)

[gingicat]

Where on Long Island, out of curiosity? Husband’s cousins, who are 20 years older than us, were the only Jews in Massapequa.

[acelightning]

I grew up in Westbury, in the East Meadow school district. I got my BA in English from Hofstra University, and I got my first training in radio at the Hofstra FM radio station. (They hadn't set up a major program in broadcasting - they didn't get that done until after I graduated.)

The man who was my voice and piano teacher was a cantor in Reform temple in Massapequa. He was an operatic basso who had managed to get out of Austria in time. He was a charming, cosmopolitan man with a head of hair fuzzier than Browngirl's.

And since the suburbs of NYC in the 1950s were being heavily settled by people who bought Levitt houses with their GI mortgages, Massapequa (home of many Italian-Americans and Jews) became known as "Matz-a-Pizza" among us gentiles.

[teddywolf]

Nah, they weren’t the only Jews in the town. They were just the only ones I knew personally. A community can’t support a kosher deli without enough Jews, let alone a synagogue of whatever denomination.

Whenever I went to visit my aunt and uncle, we spent time with them, mostly in the home. They had a pool; they had TV; they got groceries and cooked. My Aunt A__ could put out quite the schmeer for bagels, but I was too young/ARFIDish to risk putting smoked whitefish on my plain bagel with butter. Dad was appreciative, though.

Funny thing, I just put in my aunt’s first and middle name on a quick Google search. She was the first hit despite being deceased. Google might know me too well.

I don’t know the concept of Levitt houses — an architectural style? — but I know that my aunt and uncle’s place looked very similar to the rest of the homes on the street. Not all of them had an in-ground pool in the backyard, though.

[gingicat]

Judith claims that the four of them were a unit because they didn’t know any other Jews.

[teddywolf]

Huh. The local Reform shul says they opened their doors in 1958... welp, I can ask them about it sometime.

An Architectural Style?

[annonynous.livejournal.com]

Calling it a style is being generous. I'm thinking of Levittown, which is in Hempstead on Long Island (the New York State one). Thing of cookie-cutter homes, one after the other, all basically the same with maybe some minor color variation. There are several Levittowns in the U.S.

Ann O.

[cellio]

Oh that's very well done! Thank you for sharing it.

[lynnenne]

That is freaking awesome.

[hitchhiker]

that's brilliant!

[amaebi]

That is excellent. Thank you.

yes PLEASE

[dialecticdreamer]

As someone whose first exposure to the history of the Civil War -in my elementary school classroom- was phrased as "the War of Northern Aggression," (This was in the seventies, at LEAST a hundred years too late for that to be at all appropriate!) I want ALL the specialized history. I want to see the complexities, the trends, the nasty side of human nature LOSING as that nastiness becomes increasingly unacceptable.