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Re: Dressing in Blackface and as Ku Klux Klan

By: Cactus Flower in ALEA | Recommend this post (0)
Sat, 02 Feb 19 5:47 PM | 77 view(s)
Boardmark this board | The Trust Matrix 		Msg. 28695 of 54959
(This msg. is a reply to 28692 by clo)
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I get the general concept of what you are saying. There are lines I wouldn't ever have crossed.

I guess I find some offence complaints generally unconvincing. Bad things have been done to nearly every identifiable group and many individuals. I tend to respect the folks who complain less and get on with things.

Twenty-five is late but folks mature at different speeds. People of 50 barely resemble their 25 year-old selves. Don't ask me to defend the fact I was a libertarian aged 25. I am not now.

When I think about my life, the big divide between youthful exuberance and adulthood was having a child.

Never did blackface or KKK, but I daresay I might have back when I was a few years younger than 25. Not because I had bad thoughts about black people but because I wouldn't have imagined anyone would have been offended by it.

Anyone I knew would have known it didn't mean I was sending a message about my racial beliefs. As far as I know, I have no particular racial animus, although I think racism is likely a feature of evolutionary triballism: we are naturally fearful of people unlike ourselves; so we have to do our best to limit the strength of this natural instinct in cosmopolitan societies; but we will never be entirely successful. I can support Obama, but I may still fear a black man following me in a dark alleyway, like Jesse Jackson once admitted he realised he did.

If I had worn an outfit of the type the governor wore, I can say with certainty what my message was: I would have wanted to protest people who claimed to take offence while seeking to limit my freedoms. Not the message the offence police would have imagined I was making. I would have been aiming my message at them, not the folks whose skin happens to contain more melatonin ... I would have wanted them to quit taking offence at this sort of thing ... to worry about things like the proper treatment of children on the border, murders, traitors and the protection of the rule of law instead.

Clothing choices are not things which I get exercised about. Least of all, choices made decades ago for reasons I have no idea about.

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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: Dressing in Blackface and as Ku Klux Klan
By: clo in ALEA
Sat, 02 Feb 19 4:45 PM 		Msg. 28692 of 54959

Hi Cactus Flower,

He was TWENTY FIVE, in this country you can be held criminally accountable in some states at 16 or 17.

Jessie Jackson was running for POTUS, race was front & center.

Had he been the person to address this, stating his stupidity & asking for forgiveness, that would be different.

Its amazing no one unearthed this during the campaign.

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