Quote: (12-22-2013 09:30 PM)Timoteo Wrote:
I didn't miss that part. Yeah...but blacks worked for farmers, he worked for himself. He went on to college, and even played college sports. He had the luxury of quitting to shoot ducks. You think those men he worked shoulder-to-shoulder with had that opportunity? And the stuff about asking them about their lives and having lunch with them was filled in by you. Whether he worked with them or not, they weren't equal. Blacks were kept in a certain place.
I think they did have the same opportunity. Robertson was born in 46, and the civil rights act was passed in 64. So, he would have been 18 when it passed...a great age to see the before and after effects of it rather than speculate on that era as I and others my age do.
I think his statements were wrong though in terms of cause and effect though, besides civil rights, there was something else going on at the same time that likely had a larger effect than the law. The 50's through the 60's came with the mechanization of the cotton industry which brought along great declines in employment in the south for black sharecroppers.
So, lets put a black person in time with Robertson when he was 18 working a field. Economically things were pretty good and the horizon shows that the way is being paved, legally, for a black person to move up economically, they can maybe get a farm and won't have to be segregated and can stare at a hot white girl while they eat a sandwich at the good deli. (I would be pretty happy). After the law is passed, the cotton economy also happens to take a dump, along with the rest of the south. Even manufacturing in the south went tits up before the midwest (70s). So, now they can legally go to the good deli and stare at white girls but no one can afford to. That would suck and many people had to look beyond the south for work.
Let me mention again that this was likely around 1960 not the 18th century 'underground railroad'. There were cultural barriers but George Washington wasn't walking around whipping black people in 'grueling conditions' and making sure they were 'kept in their place'. This was the tail end of the 'Great Migration' where black people who had the means, left of their own free will for the mid west for manufacturing jobs. South Carolina had something like a 15% population decline in a decade because black people said 'fuck this shit' and moved away. They probably just got on a bus and went...they didn't have to escape from their shackles and wade through a river to avoid roving gangs of klansmen on horseback.
I didn't read the article or quotes so I don't know if he said 'black people were happier without civil rights' or if he said 'black people, where I grew up, were happier before the civil rights act then after'. If he said something like the latter, its probably true in Louisiana and its probably true for whites and blacks that were low wage earners through that era. If you needed a job, you could find one and you could at least get by, after that, the local economy hit the shitter and if you were left in Louisiana with Phil Robertson you watched your friends and family move away to detroit, milwaukee or chicago as your finances failed, you were laid off from the cotton farm and couldn't find a new job. I would be less happy too black or white but probably more if I was black as I was promised some sort of new era via civil rights but saw it taken away by economic progress.
But of course, this is 2013 and facebook and twitter'ers would rather lynch (I chose that word deliberately) a rich old christian white guy, with firsthand experience of the south and civil rights era, for his observations about people with different colored skin instead of thinking critically about it.
PS. I looked up the 'quote' and its
"Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues" the guy attributes the happiness to going following god. He didn't say shit about laws..thats been everyone else.